Christian Smith’s latest engagement with historical sociology of religion is a refreshingly accessible, comprehensive, and compassionate mixture of statistics, historical interpretation, and wholesome citizenship. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America is a model of readable social science, welcoming to nonacademics of virtually all measures of sociological training and spiritual orientations, while also attentive to questions of interest to scholars.

“Traditional” religion in this book means the major, classical confessions: “religious groups that have existed for multiple generations” with “established practices, doctrines, organizational structures, and cultures” (p. 2). Smith lists “mainline Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Black Protestantism, white evangelical Protestantism, most Pentecostal charismatic churches, Eastern Orthodox churches, Judaism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” and smaller groups akin to any of these (p. 3).

What Smith says about the destiny of traditional religion in the United States is less fresh than it first appears. His most convincing evidence of decline is found in the many surveys and studies he conscientiously cites, including those of the Pew Research Foundation and of a host of individual scholars, including Ryan Burge, Mark Chaves, and David Voas. Here we encounter the widely discussed increase of the “nones”—those reporting no religious affiliation—along with well-documented declines in denominational membership, church attendance, and religious belief.

To his fair-minded mobilization of existing data and analyses, Smith adds two elements unique to this book. One is a survey he conducted of more than 2,000 Americans, accompanied by intensive follow-up interviews with 209 individuals and with several focus groups. A second distinctive element is Smith’s remarkably far-reaching interpretation of political and economic events of the last century. He addresses the possible religious impact of the Cold War and its end, the Reagan Revolution, the coming of the internet, a succession of sexual revolutions, the attack of 9/11, and a host of other happenings.

Building upon these two new contributions, Smith argues that Americans of the 1990s and 2000s were caught up in a distinctive “Zeitgeist” inimical to churchly “vibes.” This “macro-cultural mood” is, in Smith’s precise terms (p. 336), immanent, individualistic, anti-institutional, presentist, relativist, distrustful, subjectivist, anti-authority, fluid, multicultural, minimalist, transgressive, pornographic, jaded, consumerist, entertained, and re-enchanted. These are the vibes. Smith constructs this Zeitgeist—which he alleges “shaped many individual Gen Xers and nearly all Millennials” (p. 337)—on the basis of imposingly detailed accounts of popular culture icons, including entertainers and sports heroes, as well as fashion trends. Secularization, in this view, may have been taking place indirectly for several decades in the United States, but the early 1990s is when it really happens, when the relevant vibes are vibrating.

Impressive as Smith’s reconstruction of the Zeitgeist may be as a contribution to American cultural studies, its role in the dynamics of religion’s obsolescence is less substantial than he claims. It is less a cause of anything than the marker of the historical moment when long-term trends were widely registered. Smith comes close to admitting this at several points, acknowledging that by the early 90s, enough people had left the churches to diminish the stigma of nonaffiliation, creating a “tipping point” after which increasing numbers of Americans felt comfortable admitting that they no longer went to church. The deeper sources of secularization are more decisively located in pre-1990s history. His exaggeration of the attention-grabbing “it all started in 1991” claim (pp. 122–123, p. 128) unfortunately directs readers to the weakest dimension of this ambitious book.

When it comes to assessing long-term trends, a striking feature of Why Religion Went Obsolete is its almost total avoidance of the history of modern Europe. Studies of the decline of Christianity are the chief foundation for “secularization theory,” which Smith mentions only in tones that are alternately dismissive and patronizing. Yet much of this overwhelmingly Americo-centric book fits quite comfortably into the work of classic secularization theorists. Just because some of these secularization theory scholars made claims that were too sweeping and offered unwise predictions does not mean that they were wrong in their basic conclusions.

Two examples are especially important.

One is the effect of expanded social contacts on inherited practices and attitudes. Movements of individuals and groups have long been understood to diminish the authority of natal communities and their churches. Demographic diversification confronts people with alternative ways of thinking and acting. Indeed, one of Smith’s most persistently enunciated findings is that traditional religion loses its hold when Americans move from their starting points, finding themselves in a new company that is often not only different but diverse. This challenge has been especially present since the 1960s, when increasing numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America populated the cities to which the traditionally religious most often moved.

Expanded literacy and knowledge about the world is a second mechanism that secularization theorists often identify as a challenge to traditional religion. “Higher Education for the Masses” is the first of Smith’s several discussions of salient “Long Term Social Trends.” He notes that few Americans went to college before World War II, that 40% had college degrees by 2020, and that people “tended to leave college less religious” than when they entered (p. 74). He fails to cite the studies establishing that a liberal-arts education diminishes traditional religion more decisively than professional-vocational training.

Yet Smith cautions against making too much of education’s role, treating its expansion after World War II as mostly a “precondition” for secularizing trends (pp. 73–75). He does discuss a 2014 Pew survey finding that the loss of belief was far and away the primary reason “nones” gave when asked why they had left churches (40% said that, followed by “negative feelings about and critiques of religion” at 18%). But I believe this is the only point at which Smith tries to explain away the results of a reputable survey. Smith’s own interviews showed much less interest in beliefs, and “we know,” Smith emphasizes, “that only a minority of American religious ‘nones’ are declared atheists” (p. 350). The latter is true, of course, but that does not mean that religion’s notorious loss of epistemic plausibility was not a major factor in leading people to pull away from churches.

Even the people Smith interviewed said that science got more things right about the world than religion did, a fact that Smith found “a fascinating sociological puzzle,” given the falsity of crude talk about the “warfare of science and religion” (p. 123). But Smith’s own work shows commandingly that most Americans in our own time look upon religion morally, not cognitively. Science has “won” not by destroying religion’s capacity to support morally upright behavior—although religion’s failure to do even that is a major reason for its decline, as Smith shows effectively—but rather by delivering the empirical goods on how the world works. The “beliefs” that the religiously nonaffiliated Americans are rejecting are truth claims that do not meet modern standards of plausibility. There need be no mystery about this.

Why Religion Went Obsolete would be a stronger contribution had Smith been willing to assign weights to the causal forces he identifies. In one summary of the forces that converge to diminish traditional religion in the United States (pp. 125–126), he identifies

Why Religion Went Obsolete is an excellent, refreshingly up-to-date starting point for inquiries about secularization. One can wish for better answers from so experienced a scholar, but Smith gives us plenty to work with.