Book review: Why Religion Went Obsolete

The purpose of this review is to extract a few nuggets and narrative strands from the massive surrounding overburden of numeric ore that an academic sociologist feels required to accrete.

Genre matters. In the introductory chapter, the author declares his hefty tome to be “a work of historical cultural sociology.”

The bold title and the bulk of the prose mostly obscures the good news that leaps forth in the book’s conclusion:

Another striking point emerges in a chapter that assembles 34 distillations of perception and attitude that outline the “contours of the Millennial zeitgeist.” At the outset of his study, Smith exhibits the quantifiable sharp divergence of Millennials (born 1981 – 1996) and Gen Z (born 1997 – 2012) from the preceding generations.

A contradiction emerges out of the affective and individualistic tendencies of the “spirituality” and “occulture” that epitomize Smith’s perception of a “re-enchantment of American culture.” (330)

Post-Boomers surprised the investigator with expressions of their desires “to belong to real communities.” (315) Perhaps traditional American churches have gone into demonstrable decline in the measure that their communities have become unreal?

At the heart of the book, two chapters propose that the two decades surrounding the turn of the millennium are, in turn, the “beginning of the end” and “obsolescence assured.”

At the front of each of these two decades stand signal events. The 1990s started with the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Godless communism collapsed, and the United States thus lost the antithesis that defined national identity for about two generations. Then, “ascendant neoliberal capitalism” began to roam the globe.

The 2000s started with 9/11. That direct attack on the United States led to a perceptual yoking of “religion” with violence, a conjunction that, in the longer term, blew back on American religion itself.

In a separate section, Smith gives an account of the impacts of The Digital Revolution (138 – 149). The judiciousness and proportion of this treatment obscures the import of this particular arena – because digitality probably constitutes the single overwhelming technological factor in the shift that Smith studies. As dwellers within it, we scarcely can see it.

A primary manifestation of the digital shift is the supplanting of “centralized, top-down administration” by “network structures [that] transform people’s cultural expectations of relations, work process and behaviour.”

In consequence, “experiences and expectations shaped by network models and practices” – this is especially true for Millennials and Gen Z – make “traditional religion” seem “archaic, clunky, overbearing, weird and frustrating.” The network model associated with newly emergent spiritual communities tends to operate without possession of particular physical space. (148 – 149)

Smith closes the introduction to his book with “Last Thoughts” that turn to his hope “to speak to religious audiences.” There Smith identifies “two common but problematic tendencies . . . among Christians”:

“Theological idealism” is “the usually invisible assumption – perhaps particularly common among religious intellectuals, educators, authors and some clergy – that if only people could get their doctrinal and ethical ideas right, then they could” . . . etc, etc.

“Program idealism” is “more common among pastors and other ministry people with boots on the ground: if only they could implement the right programs, then they could” . . . etc, etc.

Smith deems both of these outlooks “sociologically naive.”