The Typewriter
Traditional religion today is like "a typewriter in the age of the smartphone." People still use it but there’s more viable and attractive alternatives out there. That is the prevailing sentiment in Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith’s 2025 book Why Religion Went Obsolete.
According to Smith, America’s current zeitgeist is “culturally mismatched” with traditional religion. Like a western film about cowboys and Indians duking it out on the country plain, religion is out of touch, unfit for the modern world. That’s quite a claim. Is it true?
Empirically speaking, yes. Smith writes
“Traditional religion has been losing ground among Americans, especially younger ones, no matter how you measure it: affiliation, practices, beliefs, identities, number of congregations, and confidence in religious organizations have all been declining.”
He's not the only scholar sounding alarms. Michael Graham, Ryan Burge and Jim Davis’ book The Great Dechurching reports that the majority of Americans today aren’t members of any house of worship, and just 3 in 10 attend services weekly.
And although the latest edition of Pew Research’s Religious Landscape Study reported that American Christianity’s decline has recently plateaued, when we glance at the generational breakdown, the future looks bleak. Each generation of Americans is less Christian than the previous one by basically every measure.
The data is straightforward, the conclusion is simple: Christianity is not at the center of American culture today and it does not resonate with young people.
The Opportunity
Suppose you’re an executive at a shoe company trying to increase your market share. You’re going to take a close look at your product, your messaging, and your competition.
In the religious marketplace, secularism is the dominant alternative to Christianity in America today. Secularism’s value proposition, from all the way back to its days as a startup during the Enlightenment, consisted of a few basic claims.
(I’m addressing only two for the sake of space.)
Claim 1: Religion is fanatical and divisive so a society with less religion will be rational and harmonious.
This argument has a long history. The crusades, the inquisition, the sea of bloodshed flowing from the religious wars in Europe’s 16th and 17th centuries make a compelling case for religion being a negative force for any society. When religious beliefs were challenged throughout the modern period – either by new ideas or opposing groups – believers became threatened and were fanatical and divisive.
But taking a closer look at recent history complicates the notion that religion causes these maladies. Do you want to live in ‘harmonious’ and ‘rational’ societies like Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia?
Recent American history complicates it further. As religiosity has declined in America over the last 30 years, our country’s negative polarization hasn’t gone down. It’s skyrocketed. We have not become more rationally unified; we’ve become more bitterly divided.
John Lennon’s dream of secular harmony – people holding hands and singing kumbaya around a campfire – never came true. Instead, we got a junior high lunchroom: two cliques shouting at each other, disturbing the peace, with no lunch monitor in sight.
University of Virginia professor James Davison Hunter’s book Democracy and Solidarity explains the depth of our disunity:
“It is not an exaggeration to say that American public life is divided not only in its opinions but in its vocabularies and not only in its vocabularies but in its premises about what is real and true and how we know these things, about what is right and just, and about what the nation is and what it should be…[We've] become unable to tell a common story about ourselves.”
As indicated in the quote, Hunter’s book makes the case that the breakdown of a broadly shared Protestant ethic in America has fragmented the culture and caused widespread political dysfunction. Secularism has taught that there are no universal moral absolutes, so individuals must determine morality for themselves. As more and more people came to believe this, our culture held fewer and fewer common truths or values to bind it together.
Losing our religion led to losing our shared moral values which lead to losing our capacity to get along and solve conflict.
These dynamics create a rich irony. Many proponents of secularism boasted that a society with less religion would become more rational. But as Hunter argues, instead of more free-thinking debate, our disagreements are so elemental that we’ve given up on persuasion.
“Actors on each side had begun to abandon the idea of civic persuasion…precisely because the disagreements on the surface of public life were underwritten by fundamentally different assumptions about what it meant to be human and a full member of the body politic, what is valued, what constitutes flourishing, how we should treat those who are different from ourselves."
We can see the full flowering of Hunter’s claims in recent presidencies, ones dominated by executive orders and judicial rulings. Our system of government is designed to manage disagreement through debate and legislation. Both parties increasingly rely on presidential fiat and court decisions to advance their agenda – like a marriage that requires legal mediation to decide who does the dishes. We need therapy.
Claim 2: Religion de-emphasizes happiness in this life so a society with less religion will be happier.
When you consider humanity’s long arc of progress in technology and prosperity – its forward march from Aristotle to air conditioning, from medieval serfs to modern CEOs – it is remarkable how unhappy people are today.
Secularism claims that all happiness and meaning can be found in this life. The path to satisfaction begins by discovering your unique blend of abilities, interests and desires and then passionately pursuing your particular dream against what anyone else might say – religious or otherwise.
The generation that bought this vision wholeheartedly, Gen Z, the most individualistic and least religious generation on record, is not having a good time. Jonathan Haidt’s recent best-seller The Anxious Generation lays this out:
“After more than a decade of stability and improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures.”
Haidt attributes the plunge to “the great rewiring of childhood,” (e.g. phones and the decline of play), not the onset of secularism. Nevertheless, Haidt believes that secularism and cell phone use have worked in concert to “spiritually degrade” America’s youth. Haidt, an atheist, wrote:
“There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”
Not quite what a youth pastor would say, but pretty close. Without God at the center of our lives, garbage has taken over our souls.
Part of the reason for our sinking spirits is that religion promotes the healthy long-term relationships that are the most important factor in long-term life satisfaction, according to Harvard’s happiness guru Arthur Brooks. There is evidence linking the decline of religion to the marriage crisis, the fertility crisis, and the loneliness crisis.
In our individualistic society, when people give up on God, they tend to double down on themselves and cut off others – to their detriment. At least, that’s my take.
Here’s what’s certain: American society is more secular than ever before and it is very unhappy.
The Moment
The man who saw this coming was Tim Keller. Long before others joined the chorus, Keller argued that secularism’s inability to lay a firm foundation for objective moral values would produce an implacably divided country. Keller showed that secularism doesn’t offer a satisfaction deeper than one’s circumstances nor a meaning that withstands the realities of suffering.
If Christians are to meet the cultural moment, we need to begin to see the gospel and the secular world with Keller’s eyes. That’s one reason why Lakelight is offering a Fellows program this fall devoted to seeing what he saw. John Stott said that effective gospel-proclaimers live between two worlds, at the intersection between the culture and the Kingdom.
We want you to gain a graduate-level understanding of how the gospel connects and confronts today’s world – so that your faith in Jesus looks less like an obscure western film ill-fitted for today's world and more like a hope “that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” (1 Peter 1:4)
Want to learn more about our Fellows program? Sign up for one of our upcoming informational nights.
*Théodore Géricault | Oil on Canvas | 1819 | Dept of Paintings, Mollien Room 700 Wikimedia Commons
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