Religious Vibe Shift or Obsolescence? Christian Smith and Michael Horton

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Christian Smith

   If we're talking about the pop version of pop appropriation of karma, I think what it buys you is it leaves some kind of justice in the world, like bad people will get theirs. And it gives you a motivation to still try to be a good person. But you don't have to deal with a personal God. Like karma is like this kind of force or this ethereal dynamic. You don't have to deal with a personal God. There's not a personal responsibility or accountability. And so you can do away with the whole traditional Christian infrastructure of doctrine and still hold on to some sense of cosmic right and wrong.

2. 00:40

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions.

3. 01:04

   Michael Horton

   We have the pleasure of talking to Christian Smith. He's the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. He's written a lot of books, and you may be familiar with his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, published by Oxford in 2005. And his latest is Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, also Oxford, 2025. So it's brand new and looking forward very much to talking to you, Christian. We've talked before and glad to have you back on the program.

4. 01:48

   Christian Smith

   Yeah, thanks for having me. I look forward to talking.

5. 01:51

   Michael Horton

   You know, it's been 20 years since you coined the term “moralistic therapeutic deism” to describe America's spiritual and religious beliefs and inclinations. 20 years later, would you still say that MTD is sort of a default setting in our culture?

6. 02:09

   Christian Smith

   Broadly speaking, I would say that. I think MTD is compatible with the story that I'm telling in this latest book. When I described MTD, that I said was the sort of the default functional de facto religion of American teenagers. So at the time we were studying 13 to 17-year-olds, and then we followed them for 10 years and MTD stuck with them. It was pretty simplistic, a version of reality or of an account of reality when they were teenagers. As those millennials grew older and life became more complicated and not everything worked out the way they thought, MTD got itself more complicated and some kind of dropped it and some revised it. But in terms of the basic idea that religion—that there's a God out there, religion is supposed to help you in this world, especially to feel better, to do better, and God doesn't mess with you too much otherwise. Yeah, that's pretty much the background operating set of assumptions of most Americans, I would say, even today. So even as those millennials have gotten older, again, it's become more complicated and some have become secularists and some have become pagans. But that's sort of the default understanding of religion.

7. 03:28

   Michael Horton

   Even in churches?

8. 03:29

   Christian Smith

   Yeah, this is not just the not religious or the marginally religious. Very many regular churchgoers of various traditions still have this kind of general attitude.

9. 03:42

   Michael Horton

   In the book, you rehabilitate the idea of a zeitgeist, a spirit of the age. First, you say that “The pivotal years marking the launch of the new zeitgeist that remade religion was 1991.”

10. 03:54

    Christian Smith

    Yeah.

11. 03:55

    Michael Horton

    “And the year the momentous changes were completed, that's less clear, but I will say 2009.”

12. 04:02

    Christian Smith

    Yeah. First of all, zeitgeist. I want in this book to shift focus away from just organizational metrics to the culture. Organizational metrics are what most sociologists focus on, you know, number of people who say they attend church or the percentage of Americans who say they believe in God, et cetera, et cetera. All that matters, but I think what really finally matters in the end that the concept of obsolescence references is cultural. It's a sort of a shared set of sensibilities, of aesthetics, of beliefs at a sort of a macro level. And I think the word zeitgeist captures that much better than just these other organisational metrics. So a lot of the book is dedicated to explaining sort of deep historical causes of religious obsolescence. Part of the story of my book is it didn't just happen all of a sudden, that there are deep developments over a period of time, that they're complex, that they're historical, that a lot of them don't have to do with religion per se, but they have consequences on religion. So, but 1991, I argue in the book, is the pivotal year. A whole lot of things happen, including the final end of the Cold War, which had consequences for American national identity and the place of God in American self-identity, the development of the internet and eventual cell phones and social media. So I spell out a whole lot of things that were changing right around the beginning of the '90s. And this is also the year when the number of Americans, the percentage who started to say they were not religious, started to uptick until 1991. The percentage of Americans who said, I'm not religious, or I'm none of the above religions, was about six or seven percent. And starting in 1991, it started to grow noticeably and has been growing ever since then. So I think if we want to understand the key cultural changes, the decades where the two straddling the turn of the century, the 1990s and the 2000s.

13. 06:08

    Michael Horton

    And why 2009?

14. 06:12

    Christian Smith

    Well, as you read there, there isn't an exact ending, so to speak. And as far as I'm concerned, the zeitgeist that I describe in the book continues on. But all of the pieces of the, what I call the millennial zeitgeist, that had this effect of making religion go obsolete, were in place. There weren't any major new developments after the late 2000s, and many of them seemed irreversible at the time. And so after then, the zeitgeist was kind of pretty well established. Millennials had pretty well put their culture in place, and the subsequent generation, Generation Z, has just kind of picked it up and run with it. It's not that the zeitgeist came to an end and something new replaced it. It's that the process of obsolescence was at the cultural level, the macrocultural level, was pretty much set into place.

15. 07:09

    Michael Horton

    Now, it might shock people to read a book with the title Why Religion Went Obsolete. Can you explain what you mean by obsolete?

16. 07:21

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, so by obsolete, we're talking about most people, and again, this is at a cultural level, not a statistical question, but most people feel something is no longer needed or useful because something else has superseded it in function or in style. And the reason I like the idea of obsolete conceptually is I really do think at a macrocultural level, traditional religion, and that's what we're talking about here, traditional religion, not alternative religions and New Age, sort of fell out of fashion. And in kind of a critical mass of post-boomers, I'm also talking about younger than baby boomer generation, pretty much decided that traditional religion was out of fashion, not something they were interested in, not something that would be useful to them. The advantage of the idea of obsolescence, however, is that things can go obsolete and they're still around. People still use them. They're not extinct. They're not useless either. So one of the metaphors I use in this book is electric typewriters, which is what I learned how to type on in high school. There weren't computers, but when desktops come along and laptops, they made the electric typewriter basically go obsolete in offices in most of our lives. There still are electric typewriters around. They're still just as useful as they've ever been. They still can function and do what—and there are probably people that write their letters and whatnot, manuscripts on electric typewriters. So I think religion, traditional religion kind of functioned that way in the culture. It's still around. There's still a minority of Americans who are religious, and there's a minority of them who are very committed and faithful. But at a macrocultural level, in terms of meanings, in terms of importance, in terms of association, I think obsolete captures what other people call the decline of traditional religion. The other feature of obsolescence that I think matters here is that in order for something to be functional in people's lives, it has to be supported. There have to be enough other people around using it. If you have an electric typewriter, you need to be able to buy the ribbons and get it repaired. And part of obsolescence is it's harder to get replacement parts. It's harder to get anyone to repair it. And so even if somebody wants to use an obsolete item, it just becomes more and more work and there's less and less support around for that. So take a 22-year-old who wants to be faithful in their religious tradition. If increasingly fewer of their friends are interested, or practicing, and they're inviting them to do other things. It just makes it all the harder to continue.

17. 10:10

    Michael Horton

    You call this the network effect.

18. 10:12

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, there's a network effect. There's— there are a number of things in our lives that only work if everyone else is using them. Like email, we may think email's great, but it requires everyone else to be using it. You got to be able to send it to somebody and receive it from somebody. Or another example is singing in a community choir. I mean, you may say, I love choir, I want to sing in a choir. If there aren't enough other people doing it, then you can't do it. So it's a similar effect. So the point being, obsolescence is a collective or a group function. It's not just a matter of some individual saying, well, I'm still committed to this. It becomes much harder.

19. 10:51

    Michael Horton

    You point out, especially in chapter two, that a lot of people, even people who say that they know about religion, they know about the Bible, nevertheless really show considerable ignorance of the content of the Bible and the Christian faith, and even hold views that are pretty out of step with historic Christianity. Can you unfold that a little bit?

20. 11:21

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, so in order to explain why and how traditional religion went obsolete, I have to explain what is it Americans are expecting from religion? What is it that if religion, if they think traditional religion failed them somehow or is no longer useful, we need a baseline of what were they expecting out of religion and what do they think religion is good or useful for? So in the second chapter, I try to lay this out based on my whole career interviewing people of all different ages, parents, teenagers, post-boomers, and it turns out that a lot of what Americans are after in religion or what they think religion is good for isn't really what the religious traditions themselves hope or think that they're offering. And this connects back to the MTD conversation. A lot of it is about religion helps you make good choices. It gives you a nice community. It helps people be more moral. It sort of curbs the bad people in society. It's kind of a functionalist view. Religion serves a certain function, a pro-social function for society. So we need pastors and religious leaders to be good models for society. And then historically, this is the one that's really sort of really gone out of fashion now, but historically, religion helps to hold Americans together. It's kind of a glue. And this was much more so during the Cold War, I think. Religion's kind of a glue that holds us together as a people, given all of the rest of our diversity. If you look at those six things I enumerate that most Americans think make religion good or valuable, they're not really the traditional Christian gospel. They're not really orthodox, historically orthodox Christian faith, or Jewish faith for that matter, I would say. There's a real disjunct. There's a real disconnect between sort of what the consumers think they're out on the market to get out of religion, and what the suppliers hope that they're delivering.

21. 13:22

    Michael Horton

    Is it a shift from a transcendent orientation or God-centered orientation to a—

22. 13:30

    Christian Smith

    Part of it is, part of it is, it's really not about, I want to go to heaven. You would think there'd be more people who say, well, I want to go to have my ticket to heaven punched or whatever. But it's really not much about the eternal, the divine, the transcendent, or discipleship or personal transformation. It's really about, it's an institution that serves our imminent needs and feelings. It helps us to have better lives here on the earth now. And I also document in the book with some evidence that religion to some degree has fed into that. If you look at religious discourse over time, there appears to be a backing away from talk about things having to do with the transcendent and the eternal, and therefore more focus on the imminent, this world, this life now, which is what most people consider to be of real value.

23. 14:23

    Michael Horton

    When it was chic to be a part of a church, it was the glue that held Americans together. And it was something that encouraged morality and so forth. Today, would you say the ground is being prepared for further disaffection because people are actually seeing religion as divisive, dividing Americans, part of the polarization?

24. 14:57

    Christian Smith

    Yeah.

25. 14:58

    Michael Horton

    And also, as for moral examples, you just, you know, see on every hand, lots of moral failures in the church.

26. 15:11

    Christian Smith

    Yeah. So part of the overall story about why religion went obsolete is up against these expectations, however you might judge them theologically, the performance of the church and other events in history sort of made people think, well, religion isn't really delivering what it's supposed to be good for. It's supposed to bring community and peacefulness and help people get along. But religion isn't doing that. There's a lot of conflict, there's a lot of division. Some of that had to do with events that didn't have to do with American religion, such as 9/11. Radical Islamists attacked the United States. And what I argue is, even though the president at the time tried to say, look, this isn't even Islam, this is a radical faction of Islam, in the public imagination, in Americans' minds in general, partly with the help of the New Atheists in the mid-2000s, very many people just came to associate religion broadly with violence, with aggression, with being attacked, with murder, and so on. And that didn't help anything at all. But, and then of course, yeah, all the religious scandals. I have a whole chapter on religious self-destructions. So many scandals that in the Catholic Church, like just pretty much everywhere, the Catholic Church, conservative Protestantism, every tradition, people Went from thinking, well, if religion is supposed to make people behave and be good and make good choices, then I know a lot of non-religious people who are good. And look at all these religious people who are doing horrible things. And so this really isn't interesting to me. This isn't relevant. I'm against this now.

27. 16:51

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28. 17:48

    Michael Horton

    You also talk about a kind of re-enchantment. The New Atheists aren't finally the winners here. It's, it's really the spiritual but not religious, kind of a New Agey sort of vibe. We just had Ross Douthat on the show, and he seemed to indicate that this propensity might be short-lived because a lot of these folks are not part of robust communities and they're not having children. What do you think about that?

29. 18:21

    Christian Smith

    Yeah. So, but just backing up one second. Yeah. Part of my story is most people would assume if religion is in decline or going obsolete, that means secularism is winning. And I'm trying to say it's much more complicated than that. There are other alternatives in the cultural field now. So actually it's a small minority of Americans who are pretty hardcore secularists. And I think most Americans who exit religion have gone into, you know, various forms of spirituality and paganism and Eastern religions and so on. As far as Douthat's point there, that could be the case. I think time will tell. However, there's a danger here. This is what I would like to point out. We often view everything through the lens of our established received categories. So we have clear ideas in mind about what a real, quote unquote, real religion looks like, or what somebody sticking with a faith will look like. And this whole reenchanted culture or a culture, as I talk about it, it operates differently. It has a different feel. It has different organization and structure and dynamics. And so it could be that we will think, oh, it'll fall apart because it doesn't look like the Methodist Church down the road, et cetera. I think it'll have much more cultural significance and staying power over the longer run. Even though it's less institutionalized, it's less—it looks less like a traditional voluntary association. The question of demographics and fertility, yeah, we've studied for a long time how good are mainline Protestants and evangelicals and Catholics at passing on the faith to their children. And it may be time now to, you know, find out how good are Satanists or New Age people in passing on faith to their children. And probably not very good because their attitude many of their attitudes is like, this isn't necessarily the truth. This works for me. You do what you think is the right thing. Or yeah, they don't have as many children or fewer children. That takes some decades to play out. So it's always an interesting combination of recruitment of new people and intergenerational transmission. But I think in anything like the nearest term, the winner of what I'm describing in the book is not the secular world, not hardcore secularists, not followers of Richard Dawkins, but people that are into a looser, more fluid spirituality or New Age kind of approach to life.

30. 20:57

    Michael Horton

    One of the things that I really appreciate about the book is you not only talk about, but you, you really explore. This is a vibe. This is not just, you know, people changing their doctrinal views and so forth. People might even say, yeah, I'm a Christian, I'm a Bible-believing evangelical Christian, or I am a regular, I go to Mass every week. But you dig underneath there and it's not Christian presuppositions really that guide them. So you talk about this vibe, and I appreciate it because, you know, I heard my own kids say, I'm not feeling it.

31. 21:36

    Christian Smith

    Yeah.

32. 21:37

    Michael Horton

    There seems to be a lurch towards a right-wing vibe right now in America, uh, that really was off limits not that long ago. New York Times reported that 20-year-old Gen Z men were more likely to vote for a Republican than 75-year-old men. Have you seen that as part of the zeitgeist more recently?

33. 22:10

    Christian Smith

    I would say the specific sort of right-wing dynamic that we're looking at these days, it isn't part of the zeitgeist that I analyze in the book. So it could be that things are morphing around already and changing. It is to the effect that the zeitgeist I described doesn't have strong political commitments. It's really kind of whatever you're into, whatever floats your boat, just don't bother anybody else. Right-wingers are less worried about bothering other people these days. But no, it could be that things are developing in really interesting ways that we need to keep our eye on. Or it could be that what you described, the New York Times reports, is kind of a blip or is a shorter-term development. We have to distinguish between the latest, I don't want to call them fads because that sort of underestimates a lot of cultural changes, but the latest developments and longer-term developments. Sometimes there are these longer-term trajectories that are just going to stick and shorter-term things come up here and there, but they don't really change things in the long run. Or it could be that we're really at a pivot point. Part of the story of my book and my general outlook is it's really hard in the middle of big social changes to understand what's going on. I mean, when it was in the '90s, I paid attention to this stuff professionally and didn't really have a clear sense of the obsolescence that was developing. It's much easier in hindsight to look back and realize, oh yeah, that's what was going on. So maybe we're in the middle of something now that's really interesting and big, but I think it's pretty hard to say at the moment. We just have to—track it over time and make sense of it as things develop.

34. 23:57

    Michael Horton

    Sort of related to this, you talk about the feeling that a lot of younger people, especially younger men, have in society today. The American dream is not working for them. They don't—they were expected to embrace the American dream, but a lot of—they're swimming against the stream in a lot of ways. You got to work extra hard to get ahead.

35. 24:25

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, hustle. You gotta hustle.

36. 24:26

    Michael Horton

    Hustle culture. Yeah. And that surely affects participation in religious activities.

37. 24:34

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, sure. So millennials, when they were really little, they were taught the same thing you and I were taught generally, or many Americans used to be taught, which is, look, if you work hard, put your head down, get an education, be responsible, that'll pay off. Like, you'll do okay. And you'll be materially rewarded for that. And millennials, there was a dot-com bubble burst, there was the 9/11 recession, a whole number of things happened. And then later when they were older, the 2008-09 financial meltdown, that millennials really faced a difficult economic world. And very many of them came away feeling what I was told is wrong, like almost a betrayal, like I've been ripped off and my the baby boomers are the ones who benefited from all the post-war prosperity, and our generation is getting screwed. So if you pay attention to culture, there's a fair amount of intergenerational hostility. And along with that goes the idea that if people feel disenfranchised or alienated from their society, like they don't have a stake in society because society's not doing much for them, if that's how they feel, then they're much more likely to withdraw, to either get radicalized or to become apathetic and disengaged. And so because traditional religion has traditionally, historically been part of sort of a package of a way of American life, if young people are like, well, I'm getting screwed by society, I'm not benefiting, I'm not—the American dream isn't working for me, then the idea of, well, I'll settle down, I'll have a family, I'll get involved in my neighborhood and my community, is not something that comes naturally then. It's not something that really makes cultural sense. And I think that's part of why there's a general disengagement from religious congregations, say. So it's really interesting sociologically how the economic, including globalization and neoliberalism, the economic and organizational changes in relation to technology, work their way down to whether somebody wants to get out of bed Sunday morning and go to a religious service or not.

38. 26:45

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, when they can open their laptop or go to social media.

39. 26:49

    Christian Smith

    Yeah. And when the nature of the changing economy requires that they take an extra course, upgrade their skills, work on their resume, apply for more jobs, think about a master's program, just not to fall behind. All of that competes against and crowds out sort of settling down and getting involved in traditional religion.

40. 27:09

    Michael Horton

    You summarize what you call the contours of the millennial zeitgeist in 36 common expressions you came across. Can you summarize some of those expressions that give us a feel for what's going on?

41. 27:25

    Christian Smith

    Oh, you mean like the popular expressions? Yeah. Well, one, I mean, so one of them is like, you do you. You know, like “everybody, just be yourself. Nobody's trying to impose anything on anybody. And we're accepting of anything.” Like, there's no social or cultural expectations. And, you know, another one is very popular at the time, especially is, you know, “don't judge me,” or “I'm not judging you.” Like, everything's okay. It's all relative. Don't worry about it. Another one is “everything happens for a reason,”which this is less in that chapter, but it's a kind of a secularized idea of providence. You know, it's not that, well, God is in charge and he'll take care of you. God has a mysterious plan for all of the history and cosmos. It's just like, bad things happen, but don't stress about it too much because it must be doing something in life and just keep moving forward. Yeah, so there's a whole host, there's a whole lot of them related to advertising about, you know, you deserve to be happy, you deserve to be fulfilled. Some of them are kind of jaded, like cynical or ironic. The zeitgeist that I describe has a lot of complexity to it, but it all adds up to this kind of individualistic focus on the imminent world, very anti-institutional, relativistic, distrustful of institutions, attitudes that show up in a lot of these phrases.

42. 28:55

    Michael Horton

    Do you see any potential for things that might disrupt The network effect, you think of it as a spider's web, any rocks that could be thrown into that web to break it up?

43. 29:09

    Christian Smith

    The growing political polarization is one thing that'll be interesting to see how that plays out and what happens in sort of Americans divided against each other into camps. What happens economically if there's a recession or a depression? That could matter. I think on the horizon, we have technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence that, you know, if you pay attention, different people say a lot of different things about them. Some people say, discount this, this isn't going to be that big. Other people say this will revolutionize everything. I personally find it very hard to guess what kind of consequences they will have on culture and on religion specifically. Some people I've heard have a kind of an attitude like, well, if things get really bad, maybe we'll have a religious revival. where people will turn back to God in desperation. My book is oriented toward explaining the past and what comes up to the present, not thinking about the future. I don't like to try to guess the future, but we do know from other historical precedents that when cultures get really seriously disrupted and even threatened, they can invent new religions. There's cargo cults in the Pacific and there's ghost dance religions among Native Americans. when they were under threat. But those don't tend to be their traditional religions. They tend to be sort of syncretistic, almost desperate religions to try to make sense of the world, and they're not long-lasting. So it could be that what I'm calling a culture, or what others talk about as re-enchantment, is people switching over to some kind of spirituality or faith or worldview that makes sense in a world that feels like it's growing increasingly out of control. But all that speculation, we just have to see how it plays out. To answer your basic question, I really don't know. I hesitate to think too much about the future. We do know things change. Nothing's going to stay the same. There will be an eventual zeitgeist shift. What that looks like, I do not know.

44. 31:16

    Michael Horton

    One of the things that I found fascinating throughout your book is the series of paradoxes, if not contradictions. You know, for example, you quote one person who said, “The Bible makes my eyes roll. I've never read it, actually. I know it's hard to read.”

45. 31:37

    Christian Smith

    Yeah.

46. 31:38

    Michael Horton

    There's a vibe.

47. 31:39

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, part of the zeitgeist is people feel, post-boomers especially, feel entitled to criticize religion. Because it's so criticizable, it's so commonly sort of critiqued that people that really don't know anything about religion or any religious tradition feel entitled or authorized to criticize it. And they'll even confess, well, I don't really know anything about it, but I think it's bad. And I think that's a sign of things having turned against at a macrocultural level, a tide turning against it. So, of course, as a sociologist, when you're interviewing somebody, you're not able to challenge them. You can't say, wait a minute, you can't say that. I'm thinking it, but you can't say it. You have to record it as data. But yeah, there's a lot of inner contradiction. Things don't really add up. Things aren't really rational that people are saying. And near the end of the book, I talk about traditional religion at this point is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. Like if it tries to get hip and tries to be entertaining, whatever, that's shallow and superficial. If it tries to be traditional and have, you know, candles and liturgy, then that's old-fashioned and nobody's interested in that. So there's this whole long series of ways I enumerate that no matter what religion does, whatever strategy it attempts to try to reach people and the culture, it'll be dismissed. Just make more of a leap. Yes, sexual ethics, like, okay, the liberal Protestants liberalize, anything's acceptable. Well, that's not interesting. Like, what's there that would be attractive? Or if other people say, no, we have serious, like, sexual ethics here, then that's old-fashioned and out of date. That's unacceptable. So yeah, it's partly because people are not all that rational. But it's also because if traditional religion gets defined culturally as obsolete, as irrelevant, etc., the doors close for possibilities of options that you might take.

48. 33:41

    Michael Horton

    Another paradox in your findings that I thought was interesting is despite all this, don't judge, I'm not—I don't want to judge you, and antipathy towards doctrines like original sin, atonement, certainly hell, the reality of final judgment. Despite all of that relativism, many of the people you interviewed, you said, believe in karma.

49. 34:16

    Christian Smith

    Yeah.

50. 34:17

    Michael Horton

    And so that—how can you believe in the most ruthless form?

51. 34:23

    Christian Smith

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think what karma buys you—and again, I don't mean to denigrate any of the religious traditions that karma grows out of where it's a serious belief.

52. 34:32

    Michael Horton

    Right.

53. 34:32

    Christian Smith

    But if we're talking about the pop version of pop appropriation of karma, I think what it buys you is it leaves some kind of justice in the world, like bad people will get theirs. And it gives you a motivation to still try to be a good person. But you don't have to deal with a personal God. Like karma is like this kind of force or this ethereal dynamic. You don't have to deal with a personal God. There's not a personal responsibility or accountability. And so you can do away with the whole traditional Christian infrastructure of doctrine and still hold on to some sense of cosmic right and wrong. Again, it doesn't all add up. People may say like, oh, you know, there isn't really any right or wrong. But they also want to live in a world where rotten people don't get away with it. And they also want to live in a world where their neighbor, if not themselves, has some motivation to be at least nice and civil, if not decent and good. But again, part of that is, I don't want to be reductionistic here, but part of that is this goes back to like a macrocultural sensibilities or vibe. You can say karma, oh, it's just karma. And no one's going to challenge you on that. Like, it's kind of cool to say that. Whereas if you say, you know, God's going to hold that—on Judgment Day, somebody's gonna have to account for it. Like, that's totally out of bounds. So, and there's no reason why one or the other should be in any rational sense, but it's just what's culturally hip. It's what resonates.

54. 36:06

    Michael Horton

    We've been talking to Christian Smith, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology at Notre Dame, and his book is Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, published by Oxford University Press in 2025, just recently. And Christian, it's been great to talk to you once again.

55. 36:28

    Christian Smith

    Thank you so much for having me on. I enjoyed the conversation.

56. 36:35

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