Decline of religion

[Fake Messiah]

Even the Christian news portal is running an article about how Christianity and religion in general is going down.

And although they have some wrong ideas about the role of religion in society, they make interesting points why Christianity has become obsolete.

Christianity isn’t just in decline — it’s become obsolete, says sociologist

Christian Smith says that traditional religion hasn’t merely lost adherents — it’s become culturally obsolete. That’s the claim at the heart of his 2025 book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America.

He urges us to shift our gaze from church stats to the cultural currents shaping everyday life. “In the current zeitgeist, traditional religion just doesn’t make sense,” he says. By “traditional religion,” Smith means the institutional faiths that have long shaped American life, like Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, white evangelicalism, Black Protestantism and Mormonism. And the problem isn’t simply about belief, or lack thereof. “It doesn’t fit ordinary life — not in a cognitive or theological way, but in a cultural vibe way.”

In the United States, the cultural shifts Smith identifies began in the early 1990s and accelerated through the 2000s. Their effects are generational: each cohort — from baby boomers to gen X, millennials and now gen Z — has been progressively less religious than the one before. Millennials, he notes, are the “pivot generation,” coming of age in a world where traditional religion no longer resonated as it once had. (The Canadian case suggests a parallel dynamic unspooling on an earlier timeline.)

Smith points to 1991 as an epoch-altering year. Politically, the Cold War ended, and the Reagan-Bush era was waning. Economically, globalization ramped up, reshaping markets, consumption and daily life. Culturally, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Seinfeld’s “show about nothing” signalled a broader reorientation of values and sensibilities. Religiously, surveys recorded what would become a lasting shift as the share of Americans identifying as non-religious began to climb.

“It was the end of one moral and symbolic order,” he says, “and the beginning of something quite different.” By the early 2000s, the conditions for religion’s cultural eclipse had already been established. Then came the shock of 9/11, enabling New Atheists like Richard Dawkins to gain traction and to cast religion as a public problem rather than a resource.

Along with globalization and mass consumer capitalism, the digital revolution reshaped the cultural milieu in which faith had once made sense. The internet, in particular, made inherited beliefs easier to question, loosened the grip of institutional gatekeepers and expanded the range of imaginable forms of belonging well beyond churches and denominations. It also brought long-suppressed denominational scandals into public view, further eroding trust in religious institutions.

Smith resists accounts framing all this as the work of enemies or ideology. “Religious conservatives often look for direct antagonists — the media, universities, atheists, secular elites — but those are minor factors,” he says.

In principle, Smith argues, traditional faith is meant to grapple with life’s darker realities. It should have had the internal resources to meet the deeper struggles of millennials — their despondency, anger and search for meaning — drawing on centuries of reflection on suffering, brokenness and redemption. Instead, by the late 20th century, traditional religion had largely redefined itself to meet prevailing cultural expectations. Many churches came to emphasize goodness, niceness and happiness, responding primarily to cultural demands for positivity.

This cultural accommodation, Smith argues, ultimately hollowed out religion’s relevance for younger generations. “Millennials — facing wars, environmental crises and economic hardship — didn’t see religion as relevant,” he observes. “Religion, packaged as ‘nice,’ didn’t resonate.”

https://broadview.org/christian-smith-book-religion/

There you go, another Christian blaming culture for declining religion. But people started leaving religion simply because it was not forced on them anymore. Religion was not about "giving people hope in times of personal darkness", it was to oppress them.