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American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
In the late 1990s, I (Russ) was a student at Westmont College, and Christianity felt like part of the air you breathed. Chapel attendance was strong. Church participation was assumed. Even among students who questioned belief, religion itself did not yet feel optional. Faith might be debated, doubted, or resisted, but it was still there, shaping our thoughts, conversations, and community. It was easy to assume that the church as I knew it would always be preeminent.
Looking back, however, we were standing at the edge of a transition we could not yet name. The structures that had long sustained American religion were already eroding. Only later did language emerge to describe what we were already experiencing.
In his recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete, sociologist Christian Smith names the shift with unsettling clarity. American religion, he argues, has become optional. Religion still exists. It still functions. But it no longer comes readily to mind as necessary.
Smith is careful about what he means. Obsolete things are not useless. Horses still work, but automobiles reshaped how people imagine transportation. Slide rules still calculate, but digital tools displaced them from daily life. In the same way, Smith argues, traditional American religion has slipped from the basic structures that once organized everyday meaning.
Crucially, Smith does not blame aggressive secularism. Americans have not become uniformly atheistic or disenchanted. Many remain spiritually attentive, morally serious, and open to transcendence. Religion, instead, lost its cultural footing because the world around it changed in ways that made its replacement possible.
Smith’s diagnosis is bracing. But it is also clarifying. American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness. And the gospel has never belonged to that category.
How Usefulness Became the Measure
Over the course of the twentieth century, American religion came to be understood primarily as a source of moral guidance and personal support. Religion was good insofar as it helped people be ethical, cope with life, raise decent children, and stabilize society. Prayer, worship, doctrine, and tradition mattered mainly as means to those ends.
Once framed this way, religion entered a crowded marketplace. Families, schools, therapists, coaches, and social institutions could offer similar goods—often with fewer demands and greater flexibility. Religion no longer “owned” a unique terrain. As Smith observes, it held no patent on its most valued product.
At the same time, sweeping cultural changes reshaped the conditions under which religion once thrived. Work intensified. Time grew scarce. Geographic mobility increased. Consumer capitalism trained Americans to see themselves as choosers rather than inheritors. Digital culture rewarded immediacy and novelty while eroding the habits required for patience, silence, and repetition. In such a world, traditional religion—rooted in stability, embodied presence, and slow formation—felt increasingly inconvenient.
Religion did not lose because it was attacked. It lost because it no longer seemed necessary.
Smith’s analysis is especially important pastorally. Many clergy carry a crushing guilt that declining attendance is primarily a personal failure. Smith helps reframe that burden. Forces such as the normalization of dual-income households, rising divorce rates, and the sheer number of work hours required simply to survive have profoundly altered the conditions under which congregational life once flourished. These changes are not theological or ecclesial; they are structural. For Smith, religion did not lose because it was attacked. It lost because it no longer seemed necessary.
At the same time, Smith may underestimate the degree to which some secular projects actively work to marginalize Christian truth claims. The church is not merely facing neutrality, but at times opposition. Naming these pressures frees the church to confess again that its life rests not on cultural influence, but on Christ himself.
An Older Christian Warning
Long before American religion faced cultural optionality, Christian theology anticipated this danger. Martin Luther warned that religion itself can become part of humanity’s project of self-justification—an attempt to secure worth, meaning, or moral standing before God and others. When religion takes on that role, it inevitably collapses under expectations it cannot sustain.
This is not a denominational claim. It is a theological one. When religion is judged primarily by usefulness it places itself on a curve of performance. And anything on a curve can be surpassed.
The gospel, however, does not belong on that curve.
Why the Gospel Is Not Optional
The gospel does not exist to make people happier, nicer, or more functional. It announces something far stranger: that God justifies the ungodly. It declares forgiveness not as therapeutic reassurance but as a verdict spoken over people who cannot secure it for themselves.
The gospel does not do any of this. It names sin without collapsing into shame and announces forgiveness without requiring self-exoneration.
In a culture shaped by achievement, expressive individualism, and relentless self-optimization, this claim cannot be replaced. Wellness cultures still demand improvement. Therapeutic frameworks assume progress. Many contemporary spiritualities offer meaning without judgment and comfort without reckoning.
The gospel does not do any of this. It names sin without collapsing into shame and announces forgiveness without requiring self-exoneration. No algorithm, mindfulness practice, or spiritual technique dares to absolve.
This is why the gospel endures even when religion becomes optional. It does not compete for relevance. It declares what is true.
Christ, Not Religion, at the Center
Paul’s letter to the Colossians offers a strikingly different response to religious anxiety. He does not defend religion’s usefulness or attempt to shore up its relevance. He proclaims Christ.
Jesus, Paul confesses, is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). God is not hidden behind spiritual techniques or religious insight. God has chosen to be known concretely and decisively in Christ. All things—visible and invisible, sacred and secular—are created in him, through him, and for him (Col 1:16). Christ does not compete with rival powers; they exist for him. Christ is preeminent.
Most importantly, Paul insists that Christ is “the head of the body, the church” (Col 1:18). The church is not sustained by cultural support or moral contribution. It exists because Christ lives and gives it life. “In him all things hold together” (Col 1:17), Paul writes—not in religious institutions, not in spiritual practices, not in cultural relevance. Here the church finds both its judgment and its freedom. Religion may become optional. Christ does not.
Re-Enchantment Without Absolution
One of Smith’s most important observations is that religion’s marginalization has not produced widespread disenchantment. Americans have not stopped seeking transcendence. If anything, they are seeking it more energetically than ever.
This re-enchantment is real. It should not be mocked or dismissed. It testifies to a stubborn human hunger for meaning that neither consumerism nor secularity has satisfied.
But here a deeper theological question emerges: What kind of transcendence is being offered and at what cost?
Many contemporary forms of re-enchantment share a common structure. They promise depth, healing, or purpose, but only on the condition of effort, alignment, authenticity, or progress. One must choose wisely, practice faithfully, optimize consistently, or live sincerely enough. The path may be therapeutic, spiritual, political, or technological, but the logic is the same. It is the logic of the law.
In Christian theology, the law is not merely a set of rules. It is any framework that tells us what must be done in order to be whole, worthy, or at peace. The law can inspire and motivate. It can even console for a time. But it cannot forgive. It condemns.
The gospel speaks a different word. It announces not a path of ascent, but a way of mercy. God meets us not at the height of our striving, but in the depths of our failure.
Conversation and Consolation in a Fragmented World
Christianity has never been only a set of beliefs or private experiences. It has always been a shared life. For the Reformers, faith is sustained through the conversation and consolation of believers through speaking, listening, confessing, forgiving, and bearing one another over time (Smalcald Articles, Book of Concord, Kolb-Wengert edition, p. 319).
The church does something increasingly rare. It gathers people who did not choose one another and teaches them to remain.
This matters because fragmentation is now one of the defining features of American life. Mobility, digital mediation, and individualized spirituality have left many people connected but not known, informed but not accompanied. Loneliness has become a public crisis. Meaning is pursued, but often in isolation.
The church does something increasingly rare. It gathers people who did not choose one another and teaches them to remain. It creates space where stories can be told truthfully, where failure can be named without expulsion, and where consolation does not depend on performance. This is not efficient. It is not scalable. But it is human.
For this reason, there will always be a place for the church because people are finite, fragile, and in need of mercy spoken aloud.
Power, Credibility, and a Clarifying Loss
Smith rightly identifies misuse of power as a central reason younger Americans distrust religious institutions. Hypocrisy, coercion, and moral incoherence have cost the church credibility. On this point, the church must listen carefully.
Christian history offers a cautionary reminder. The gospel has never depended on cultural dominance for its power. In fact, it often suffers when confused with it. Christianity is not a tool for moral superiority or partisan movements, but an announcement that confronts every hearer with grace and judgment alike.
The gospel’s power does not reside in cultural control. It resides in proclamation.
A Clarifying Conclusion
Christian Smith has helped the church see with clarity why American religion became optional. For that we are grateful. His work strips away illusions of cultural necessity and forces a hard reckoning.
The more urgent question now is whether Christians trust that the gospel remains true even when religion is no longer assumed.
If so, the future of Christianity will not depend on reclaiming relevance or rebuilding cultural dominance. It will depend on the church’s willingness to gather people, speak ancient words, and proclaim grace to a world exhausted by the endless work of trying to be enough.
Religion may become obsolete. Christ is not!
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