This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Max Weber wrote in the early 20th century of the “disenchantment of the world”, his take on modernity’s expulsion of the old gods from collective practice and imagination. Out went the sacred, he argued, and in came the spirit of accumulation.
Fast forward to the present, and the theme of re-enchantment is in vogue. Paul Kingsnorth’s essays, directed against what he calls “the Machine” of techno-capitalism, are a clarion call for a return to the sacred. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s work on the brain’s left and right hemispheres has major implications for our post-Enlightenment view of rationality and science. Philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book Cosmic Connections looks to Romantic poetry and music as a potential means of escape from our disenchanted troubles.
Then there is Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, whose recent Living in Wonder argued the case for Christian re-enchantment. For Dreher, “the sickness of the modern West comes from our having cut ourselves off from the source of enchantment”.
This lens of enchantment and disenchantment is important context for the engaging new book from sociologist of religion Christian Smith, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Smith finds that an ongoing “cultural re-enchantment” is bad news for Christians and secular materialists alike, as post-Boomers turn to “supernatural, enchanted, magical, esoteric, occultic, and sometimes dark ideas” as replacements for traditional faith. His discovery of this re-enchantment is not a major part of the book — but is key to understanding it.
The book’s central argument is that traditional religion has become culturally “obsolete” amongst American post-Boomers in the sense that they “feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest”.
Smith’s analogy is that religion has become obsolete in the same way the typewriter did when the computer came along. Whilst religion is clearly not a technology to be supplanted like the horse and buggy, the image is still useful in highlighting the severity of the situation for those in the corner of faith.
Given Smith’s academic background and previous work on religion and American youth, it is no surprise that the book is heartily peppered with tables and data. The author conducted over 200 interviews with 18- to 54-year-olds, ran four focus groups and surveyed over 2,000 adults to paint a picture of what he calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist”. This zeitgeist is characterised by “postmaterialist” individualism, mass consumerism, neoliberalism and digital transformation.
Smith centres his analysis of this generational decline in the practice of traditional religion on the “perfect storms” of the 1990s and 2000s, arguing that the 2010s onwards merely continued the trend set in those decades. The pace of change has been almost unbelievable. The share of Americans who don’t identify with a religion (also known as “nones”) rose from 6 per cent in 1991 to 29 per cent in 2021. For younger people in the 18-29 age bracket, growth was even more stark as the figure reached 43 per cent.
Whilst there is not anything particularly surprising in the wide range of cultural and social forces which Smith points to as contributors to the decline of traditional religious affiliation and practice, his sketch of these factors is interesting — and sometimes entertaining, as with the long digression on the cultural importance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
His long list includes the end of the Cold War, the unsettling nature of neoliberal capitalism, rapid technological change, the decline of marriage, widespread sexual liberalism and pornography, religious pluralism, September 11, the New Atheism movement, and distrust of institutions and authority. Combined with the long lists of sexual and financial scandals at religious institutions, there is little here to disagree with.
Smith expects his tale of obsolescence to be “enlightening, even if disheartening” for religious readers. It is that, but his commentary on the lack of zero-sum progress for secularism is perhaps the more surprising side of the story. The decline of religious affiliation has fundamentally not resulted in a move towards the sunny uplands of rationalism and secular materialism as understood by the New Atheists.
Smith’s data found that a big minority of Americans firmly believe in “spiritual, paranormal, magical, occultic, esoteric, and New Age ideas”, whilst 40–45 per cent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 68 are totally on board with karma.
Americans are looking for enchantment in some dark new places, as survey respondents spoke favourably of involvement in belief systems from Wicca to witchcraft. In this context, it is important to understand that traditional religion contributed to its own disenchantment. Churches downplayed transcendence and reduced their message to an unattractive moralism.
Part of the story for the post-Boomers who have rejected traditional religion is that they were underfed on a bland diet of faith overly focused on the material (often veering into politics) at the expense of the eternal. We have a lot to blame on what might be called “Boomer Religion”. Smith’s term for the common American religion of liberal indifference, popularised in an earlier work, is “moralistic therapeutic deism”. As he points out, the tenets of Liberal Protestantism — paradoxically given shrinking congregations — won the day.
Whilst Smith’s general sketch of a fundamentally transformed religious landscape has many convincing elements, recent indicators can be found which challenge his thesis. In its latest major study, the Pew Research Center found the Christian share of the adult US population stabilised at around 62 per cent between 2019 and 2024.
Across the Atlantic, a YouGov survey flagged a sharp jump from 4 per cent to 16 per cent in the number of 18–24-year-olds going to church in England and Wales between 2018 and 2024. Record numbers — since modern data collection began — of adult Catholic baptisms were reported at Easter this year in both France and Dublin, in countries with (ahem) mixed attitudes towards the Church.
Whilst such data indicates a cultural shift in how Gen Z approaches the sacred, it is not at this stage foolproof evidence of a nascent widespread revival of Christianity. Indeed, given the relative lower religiosity of younger generations, Pew anticipates “further declines in the American religious landscape in future years”. If the cultural disconnect from religion does accelerate further, as Smith anticipates, he cautions (surely correctly) that we will see more mental health problems ahead, on top of the epidemic already afflicting the young.
Smith’s book, a significant contribution to the debate on the status and future of religion in America, ends with a thought-provoking reference to Christ’s Parable of the Sower: “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.”
When it comes to how that fruitful life might appear, Smith thinks a focus on “doctrinal and ethical ideas” and church programmes are both “sociologically naïve”. Firmly rejecting moralistic therapeutic deism, and inauthentic and instrumentalist versions of faith, would surely be a good start for those who desire a Christian re-enchantment of the world.
