WHAT PUSHED RELIGION into obsolescence? Smith doesn’t offer one answer, but instead offers an account of “two decades of converging perfect storms”—the 1990s and 2000s—to explain the development. His main points are these: The rise of consumer culture made personal choice and subjective experience the highest goods, degrading values like communal norms and institutional loyalties in the process. The deinstitutionalization of marriage and family (as indicated by lower marriage rates, more cohabitation, and diverse family structures) helped undermine religion’s traditional functions when it comes to both shaping morality and replenishing the population of the faithful in the pews. Meanwhile, the digital age decentralized authority, democratized information, and enabled new forms of identity and belonging beyond religious institutions, opening up alternatives to religion that had not existed before. Suddenly, traditional religion wasn’t just competing with rival faiths but with the sensibility of the early internet: moral relativism and “live and let live” was an ethos available to anyone with a dial-up connection.
While many of these underlying factors took decades to develop, Smith argues they were jointly catalyzed in what he calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist”: Millennials did not simply reflect these cultural changes, but actively embraced them and accelerated their uptake into American culture more generally. Coming of age in a world shaped by the digital revolution, economic instability, expanding personal freedoms, and pervasive pluralism, Millennials entered adulthood at a time when traditional religion no longer seemed necessary or compelling. Smith describes this cohort as individualistic, anti-institutional, relativistic, fluid, multicultural, and consumerist—traits whose collective effect was to make this group less receptive to the authority, exclusivity, and the discipline of organized religion.
While Smith’s story culminates with Millennials—the fulcrum year for his analysis is 1991, when survey data show a sharp generational drop in religious affiliation and attendance that, for the first time, did not reverse as people got older—he notes that prior generations made important preliminary contributions: Boomers set the stage for religion’s decline, and Gen X marked the first major generational break away from faith. Millennials inherited larger cultural tendencies from these earlier generations.
Yet the Millennials’ generational ethos has profoundly reshaped the religious landscape. And they have not abandoned it as they’ve grown up. Despite early hopes that aging Millennials might return to the church, they’ve largely stayed away. Historically and demographically, Smith sees less of a swerve on this matter than a watershed: He argues that Generation Z is already inheriting and reinforcing the same ethos and, with it, the concomitant stance towards religion. And as Millennials begin raising their own children outside of religious traditions, we should expect this trend to continue and grow.