What are people actually seeking from religion?

Ask Better Questions

My 2015 book The Nones Are Alright explored Americans’ shift away from organized religion. For a few years I did the circuit of conferences and church talks where people kept asking the same question: What can we do to bring people back? I never had an answer that made anyone happy, because I had no idea how to bring people back. The ship had already sailed, but people were still standing on the shoreline waiting for it to turn around.

A decade later, there have been more than a few books written on the same topic, from Tara Isabella Burton’s pop-culture history Strange Rites: New Religion for a Godless World to sociologist Ryan P. Burge’s charts-and-graphs-crammed The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. They ask similar questions about the future of religious affiliation, and they come to similar conclusions. Religion is fading away, but faith and belief, somehow, are not. The problem is that how people define faith and belief is just as individualistic as the culture we live in. And the root cause of this drift remains debatable.

Christian Smith brings a sociologist’s expertise to the topic. Key to his thesis is the notion in the book’s subtitle—that what’s dying out are “traditional” ideas about religion, not necessarily the idea that God or a higher power exists. In exploring the idea of “religious obsolescence” and pinning its beginnings to the post-Boomer generations—with a particular focus on Millennials—Smith finds that not only are people drifting away from religion, but that religion has given them plenty of reasons to do so: “Something becomes obsolete when most people feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest.” Religion’s obsolescence wasn’t planned, but is instead the inevitable result of social and cultural structures that have changed over time.

Smith pins this obsolescence on multiple overlapping forces. Some of them include the rise of higher education for the masses, women entering the workforce, the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family, mass consumerism, and individualism. “No cause was sufficient to produce the outcome,” according to Smith. Instead, multiple interacting causes led to larger numbers of young adults disaffiliating from religion.

The nineties, in Smith’s accounting, were the fulcrum in the story of religion’s decline. For Gen Xers like me, who were just entering the workforce, the social opportunities Boomers took for granted were vanishing before our eyes. Steady careers, affordable home ownership, and the privilege of staying put in the same community for most of your life were not going to be available. In turn, that made many Gen Xers cynical about the benefits of religion, and seeing the first clergy sex-abuse scandals break into the mainstream accelerated the decline of interest in religion. This lack of stability only increased with Millenials, and my Gen Z students today are painfully aware that even with a B.A. from Berkeley, a secure home or steady career is not guaranteed.

Religion thrives on community, and due to the forces Smith traces in addition to the more recent outcomes of the pandemic and 2024 presidential election, community is not really available to most younger Americans today. The problems many of my own interview subjects talked about a decade ago persist. It’s hard to settle down and join a church when you have to deliver DoorDash orders on weekends to make ends meet. Climate change and our global political landscape have made many younger adults hesitant to produce the children churches are so eager to catechize. Clergy sex-abuse scandals unfolded just as post-Boomers were coming of age. All of these things, along with resistance to changing ideas about gender and sexuality, have made it difficult for many people to feel like it’s even worth trying to participate in organized religion. This scarcity of time and resources isn’t new. As Smith says, “it is normal in any religious life to experience much fluidity and the drift in and out.” Staying put is a luxury, but for those who enjoy it, it’s harder to understand that “the drift” is more typical than digging in.

Culture moves in waves, and the culture of the nineties, when this arc of disaffiliation began, and today’s culture have much in common. Nihilism and individualism were commonplace in nineties art, and the rise of the internet meant that people were beginning to spend less time in the face-to-face communities religion has long depended on. Such is the case with Gen Z today. But what Smith really drills down to as a major factor in religion’s decline is how much consumer culture has changed people’s relationship to religion. “The more consumerism’s narratives shaped the values, aspirations, and identities of young Americans,” he writes, “the more alien and mismatched traditional religious narratives felt.”

The mismatch happens in different ways, but they all point back to the long-gestating notion that what we buy is who we are. As problematic as that idea might be, we have to acknowledge that Target doesn’t offer only one brand of paper towel and Amazon makes billions of dollars because it allows us to find what we want quickly. In contrast, the satisfactions of religion are abstract and time-consuming. The people I interviewed for The Nones Are Alright felt religion fails to meet them where they are. Churches are not places where you can just walk in and start a conversation; they can sometimes even be hostile to the possibility. Churches cannot always provide people with what they want or need or help them shape their identity. Consumerism, by contrast, is all around us.

As much as we might dislike the way consumerism shapes us, no one can demonstrate that consumer culture doesn’t contribute to their identity somehow. When Pope Francis was in the hospital earlier this year, the Vatican used social media to inform people of how he was doing. Social media is by nature about consumption—of products, information, memes, jokes, and even, occasionally, news. But social media long ago also became the means by which many people find the interests that shape their identities. When churches use social media, they can seem to set the bar so high, to demand so much from believers that unless you hope to become a saint, the point of religion can seem unclear.

There is also the problem of what my students refer to as “cringe” content from religious institutions: priests dancing to Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” on TikTok (seemingly oblivious to the fact that it uses the insult “certified pedophile”); the PreachersNSneakers Instagram account showcasing Evangelical youth pastors in $500 collectible Nikes; the Catholic Answers account creating an AI priest named Fr. Justin that told people it could take their confessions; the Hallow prayer app inviting conspiracy theorist and accused sexual abuser Russell Brand to be a celebrity spokesperson. If that’s what passes for religion, you can see why people have turned away. The Catholic-priest shortage is but one example of this; the number of churches that have closed and denominations that have shrunk down to a fraction of their former size is another.

It’s not just churches that are losing membership. Smith reminds us that “Americans have progressively lost confidence in almost every major social institution over the last half century.” The hypocrisy and greed of politicians and corporate leaders is blatant, but so is the hypocrisy and greed of religion. Scandals in the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and just about every other creed or denomination have pushed more and more people away, with good reason. An institution that promises moral purity but provides abuse and theft can seem very unworthy of a person’s time and investment.

But as Smith explains, and plenty of evidence demonstrates, that doesn’t mean people aren’t in search of spirituality or belief. Religious decline didn’t happen because secularization “won,” but because “alternatives that are more like religion than secularism emerged as cultural options.” These cultural options appealed more to post-Boomers than religion did. Coastal states have seen this coming for a while, with ten yoga studios for every church, legalized psychedelics and marijuana, the proliferation of mindfulness apps and wellness, and people more interested in exploring Buddhism or Wicca than in exploring, say, Presbyterianism. Churches often bemoan this shift without asking why it is happening.

The conclusion that Smith and many more of us who’ve studied these phenomena have drawn is that religion’s decline is not going to stop. But a persistent culture of denial seems to remain in religious communities. Every crumb of data that points to a potential resurgence of traditional religion is greeted ecstatically online, like the surge in online church attendance during the pandemic lockdown, which translated into the same empty pews when lockdown ended.

“What will bring people back?” is the wrong question after pervasive abuse scandals in every Christian denomination, the wrong question after Covid exposed our lack of compassion for one another, the wrong question during the horrors of Trump 2.0, and the wrong question when churches refuse to recognize their own decline, insisting that if people just got with the program, we’d return to the glory days of people lining up for Mass. But one reason people lined up was because they were socially ostracized if they didn’t. We don’t want to believe we need to deploy shame as a spiritual tool to make people fall in line, but that is the reality our parents and grandparents lived in. Is that really what we want to go back to just to keep traditional religion alive?

Smith admits that many sociologists have shown religion’s “prosocial effects,” but he adds that “it would be futile for society to bolster traditional religion just to sustain these benefits.” After all, “embracing such instrumentalist ways of legitimizing itself is part of what set religion up for obsolescence in the first place.” So, again, “What will bring them back?” is the wrong question. Better ones for religious institutions and clergy might be “What did we do wrong?,” “How can we repair the damage we have done?,” and “What are people actually seeking?” Because, as Smith’s book proves, people have never stopped seeking God, transcendence, spirit, or community. They’re just not finding any of those things in church.

This article was published as part of a symposium titled “The Future of American Religion.”

Kaya Oakes teaches nonfiction writing at UC Berkeley and lives in Oakland, California. She is the author of six books.

 

Source: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ask-better-questions