On this episode of Religion &, we featured a special preview conversation about Christian Smith’s forthcoming book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (Oxford University Press, 2025). Christian Smith, William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology at University of Notre Dame, has been a leading scholar of American religion for more than 30 years with many agenda-setting concepts, arguments, and books to his name. Based on a new survey and hundreds of interviews, Smith offers a sweeping account of why many Americans have lost faith in traditional religion and why it can be considered “obsolete.” Our conversation will address the book’s main themes and findings, probe Smith’s thinking about religion, secularism, and enchantment, and engage the many implications of the trends Smith outlines. Listen to this conversation that is provocative and illuminating on the current state of faith decline.

Host: Brian Steensland

Brian Steensland is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Indiana University Indianapolis. His areas of interest include religion, culture, politics, and civic life in contemporary American society. His books include Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and Power (Oxford, 2022), co-edited with Jaime Kucinskas and Anna Sun; The New Evangelical Social Engagement (Oxford, 2014), co-edited with Philip Goff; and The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, 2008). His articles include The Measure of American Religion (Social Forces, 2000) and Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State (American Journal of Sociology, 2006).

Panelist: Carol Ann MacGregor

Carol Ann MacGregor is Vice President Academic and Dean (VPAD) at St. Jerome’s University which is the Catholic university federated with the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Dr. MacGregor holds a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and her research on Catholic K-12 education, religious non-affiliation and religion and civic engagement has appeared in journals including American Catholic Studies, American Sociological Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Social Science Research. Dr. MacGregor previously served as Vice Provost of Academic Affairs and was an Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University New Orleans.

Panelist: Christian Smith

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith is a leading American theorist of the philosophy of critical realism and the social theory of personalism. His larger theoretical agenda has been to move personhood, morality, motivated action, culture, and identity to the center of sociological theorizing generally and the sociology of religion specifically. Smith’s critical realist personalism require social science to revise its dominant approaches to causation, social ontology, and explanation.

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