COMMITTEE ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION FEATURE

Sociologist Christian Smith of Notre Dame University, who, in his work on teenage spirituality twenty years ago, gave us the phrase “moralistic, therapeutic deism,” now tells us that traditional religion is obsolete for most. Teenagers in 2005, according to Smith, believed in a Christianity that was good for being ethical and finding healing but kept God at a distance, including the Christ who became incarnate to save his people from their sins. Now, Smith tells us, after some years of gathering and reflecting upon further data, many factors combined, beginning in the post-Cold War world (in the early 1990s), to create a series of “Perfect Storms Converging” (the title of the second of three sections) that has landed us in the trouble in which we find ourselves: Christianity and other traditional faiths are now regarded as passé, past their expiration date, useless to help us in any meaningful way.

Many poll respondents, especially post-boomers (Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z), no longer identify with any religion. This does not mean that they necessarily identify as “secular,” however, despite the “secularism thesis” that predicted anti-supernaturalism would come to prevail in the modern world. Increasingly, respondents to Smith’s surveys answer neither as religious nor secular, but as a third category that calls itself “spiritual, but not religious.” This third category is not satisfied with the naturalism of a secularized science but seeks some higher source to give meaning to our existence and is part of what Smith sees as the cultural “re-enchantment” of the world (about which Smith is writing his next book).

That the world needs cultural re-enchantment means that the vicious secularization of the new atheism, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, which portrayed all religions as toxic, has not worked. But that also does not mean that the church has benefited. Whatever sort of answers religion provided previously, perhaps particularly in times of crisis, it no longer does, at least to the satisfaction of many of the post-boomer generations. This is why post-boomers, though deeply troubled in many respects, arguably more than ever, no longer find the answers that religion typically affords to have the purchase that they once did, and religion has become, for them, obsolete.

How Did We Get Here?

What are the factors that go into making the perfect storms that have led to widespread disaffection with religion? Smith’s first section is “Setting the Stage,” in which he sets forth the actual problem, not only decreased religious observance, especially church attendance, but also increased religious irrelevance. Fewer profess belief in God (29–30), falling from about 75 percent of boomers in 1988 to only about one-third of millennials in 2021. Many of those now identify as “not religious” (31)—43.4 percent in 2021 of those ages 18–29. About a quarter of all adults now identify as “spiritual but not religious” (31).

Smith discusses long-term social trends (chapter 4) and the developing religious environment (chapter 5) that led up to the 1990s and the end of the Cold War: Perhaps having a common national atheistic foe or two—communists in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere—especially served to foster at least a civic theism. The rise of popular postmodernism, intensifying expressive individualism, triumphant mass consumerism, and many other factors contributed to this series of perfect storms, all made accessible to everyone without leaving home, via the digital revolution. This is just a bit of what Smith covers in chapters 6–7.

Is he equally right about it all? Perhaps not, but he tries to rope in as many things that led to the beginning of the end in the ’90s, assuring obsolescence and its concomitants in the 2000s. The broader problem appears to be that no one is joining anything, not just churches, but civic organizations, unions, etc. Fewer leave their homes, in fact, for any interpersonal interaction, heightened by COVID isolation. Religion contributed to its own demise with its various scandals of recent decades, all made so much more accessible by mass media (chapter 8). The social media revolution has allowed all sorts of marginalized folks to link up and not feel so marginalized, sometimes innocuously and many times disastrously, especially in creating bubbles outside of which you need not interact with any group but your own little weird one. This populist zeitgeist, which chapter 9 and the rest of the book so well explore, is disastrous for the institutional church and for all organized religion.

Insights for The OPC

What are the lessons to be learned here for us in the church? In the OPC? Smith, as a sociologist, is rightly quite reticent to prescribe. One of his observations, though, seems especially telling. Millennials and more recent generations report a high level of depression and hopelessness. Historically, such has been ripe pickings for the church, as it preaches a message redolent with hope: Christ Jesus has come to save sinners, even the chief of them. Why are millennials and their younger fellows not resonating with the message of the church? They find their situation too bad for an evangelical church that they perceive as too “upbeat” to offer real solutions to those with such deep needs. Enter our churches. If anyone understands how desperate we are and what a Savior we have, who alone can lift us out of the pit and the miry clay, it is we in the Reformed and Presbyterian churches.

Though he finds it unlikely, Smith wonders what would happen “if American traditional religions turned their difficult predicament into an opportunity for self-critical soul-searching.” He suggests a “brutally honest ‘Come to Jesus’ (if I may) confrontation” that might bring about a costly transformation that would be risky, induce loss, and may fail. “Perhaps a season has come for traditional religion’s remaining seeds to fall into the ground and appear to die so that some much more fruitful life might be born” (372–373). I would say that the solution is not more woke progressivism on the left or Christian nationalism on the right (Smith agrees); rather, Christianity must be maximally true to its best impulses and rediscover that salvation is of the Lord, not of moralistic therapeutic deism or its knockoffs.

The author is an OP pastor and president of Mid-America Reformed Seminary.