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Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America de Christian Smith

Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America

Autor Christian Smith
en Limba Engleză Hardback – iul 2025

Observăm în ultimele decenii o transformare profundă a peisajului sociologic american, unde religia tradițională pare să fi intrat într-un proces de eroziune ireversibilă. Why Religion Went Obsolete nu se rezumă doar la a constata scăderea numărului de credincioși, ci investighează mecanismele cauzale din spatele acestui fenomen. Ne-a atras atenția rigoarea cu care Christian Smith analizează convergența unor forțe globale — de la impactul tehnologic al internetului la reconfigurarea normelor de gen — care au transformat instituțiile religioase în entități percepute drept anacronice de către noile generații.

Structura lucrării echilibrează datele statistice reci cu nuanțele extrase din sute de interviuri, oferind o perspectivă multidimensională asupra conceptului de „spiritual dar nu religios”. Apreciem în mod deosebit modul în care autorul evită predicțiile simpliste despre un viitor pur ateu, argumentând în schimb că nevoia umană de sacru caută noi forme de manifestare, în afara structurilor organizate afectate de scandaluri și pierderea încrederii publice.

Cititorii familiarizați cu Faith No More de Phil Zuckerman vor aprecia modul în care volumul de față extinde analiza de la experiența individuală a pierderii credinței către o teorie sociologică sistemică a „obsolescenței culturale”. Această abordare continuă linia de cercetare începută de Christian Smith în lucrări de referință precum Divided by Faith sau Religious Parenting, unde acesta a explorat intersecția dintre religie, rasă și dinamica familială. Dacă în volumele anterioare se concentra pe vitalitatea comunităților evanghelice, aici Smith documentează momentul în care presiunea mediului extern depășește capacitatea de adaptare a tradiției.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780197800737
ISBN-10: 0197800734
Pagini: 440
Dimensiuni: 165 x 236 x 38 mm
Greutate: 0.77 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte cercetătorilor și studenților la sociologie, dar și celor interesați de istoria culturală recentă. Veți câștiga o înțelegere clară a motivelor pentru care modelele religioase clasice eșuează în fața generațiilor tinere. Este o lectură esențială pentru a înțelege cum forțele macroeconomice și tehnologice reconfigurează viața interioară a unei națiuni, oferind un diagnostic precis al spiritului vremii noastre.

Despre autor

Christian Smith este profesor de sociologie la Universitatea din Carolina de Nord, Chapel Hill, fiind recunoscut drept unul dintre cei mai importanți analiști ai fenomenului religios din Statele Unite. Opera sa vastă include titluri fundamentale precum American Evangelicalism și The Paradox of Generosity. Prin cercetările sale, Smith a influențat decisiv modul în care mediul academic înțelege transmiterea valorilor religioase între generații și impactul religiei asupra structurilor sociale americane, fiind un expert în utilizarea metodelor de cercetare calitative și cantitative.

Descriere

Is traditional American religion doomed?Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in "organized religion" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and increasingly fewer American children are raised by religious parents. All this is clear. But what is less clear is exactly why this is happening. We know a lot more about the fact that traditional American religion has declined than we do about why this is so. Why Religion Went Obsolete aims to change that. Drawing on survey data and hundreds of interviews, Christian Smith offers a sweeping, multifaceted account of why many Americans have lost faith in traditional religion. An array of large-scale social forces-everything from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the internet to shifting ideas about gender and sexuality-came together to render traditional religion culturally obsolete. For growing numbers of Americans, traditional religion no longer seems useful or relevant. Using quantitative empirical measures of big-picture changes over time as well as exploring the larger cultural environment--the cultural "zeitgeist"--Smith explains why this is the case and what it means for the future. Crucially, he argues, it does not mean a strictly secular future. Rather, Americans' spiritual impulses are being channelled in new and interesting directions.Why Religion Went Obsolete is a tour de force from one of our leading chroniclers of religion in America.

Recenzii

This is an era-defining work. What Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew was in the 1950s, what Lenski's The Religious Factor was in the 1960s, and what Wuthnow's Restructuring of American Religion was in the 1990s, Christian Smith's Why Religion Went Obsolete is to the early 21st century. It is a remarkable work of scholarship and essential reading for anyone keen to understand the perplexing status of religion in contemporary America.
What has driven millions of Americans, especially the younger generations, to desert church pews? Drawing upon a rich multimethod body of evidence, Christian Smith presents an updated Durkheimian argument that American churches lost their core social functions during the late twentieth century due to both major historical events and complex societal developments. This readable study will provide fresh insights into reasons for the decay of religion in America, which has contributed to a fervent cultural backlash among the remaining faithful.
In this provocative new book, one of America's most eminent social scientists marshals a wealth of data and a lifetime of study behind a stunning argument: traditional religion became obsolete starting in the year 1991. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the precipitous decline of religion in American society.
Why Religion Went Obsolete is not a book of theological reflection, but it should be required reading for theologians, pastors, educators, and lay leaders alike.
The work is well-researched, detailed, and offers those active in the American church an experience of ecclesial blunt force trauma.
Smith's book is a new and important way of understanding the fate of institutional religion in the United States.
Why Religion Went Obsolete constitutes an important corrective to theories of secularization.
Smith's book serves as a helpful tool for understanding the challenges Christians face as they seek to live faithfully in the modern age.
This is a masterly study, of genuine originality, marshalling hard data to show how, why and when our religious landscape changed.
With its combination of plausibility, readability, and rigor, Why Religion Went Obsolete stands out in the growing corpus of scholarship asking what happened to American religion.

Notă biografică

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith is well known for his research focused on religion, adolescents and emerging adults, and social theory. He has written many books, including Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (with Michael O. Emerson), as well as Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melinda Lundquist Denton).