Last fall, in his side gig as a New York Times columnist, NR’s film critic Ross Douthat wrote an uncharacteristically hopeful column about the resurgence of traditional religious faith. “Success in the battle of ideas is often about recognizing when the world is ready to go your way, when audiences are suddenly primed to give your ideas a fuller hearing than before,” Douthat wrote. “Such an opportunity confronts religious writers today.”
Alas, such an opportunity does not exist. Not by a long shot. Or so the prolific and influential sociologist Christian Smith argues in his new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete. Smith, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of important works on the sociology of religion, including Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (2003) and Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005). In Soul Searching, written with Melinda Lundquist Denton, he characterized much contemporary Christian belief as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Younger believers, with the complicity of their elders, had abandoned most of the theologically and morally challenging aspects of their faith. A belief in sin, judgment, redemption, and the afterlife was exchanged for an embrace of a distant and undemanding God, whose moral edicts are tailored to the essentially benign aspirations of his creatures.
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