This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mowell, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Christian Smith is the William R. Keenan, Jr., professor of sociology, and he's director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

Prior to joining the faculty there at Notre Dame, he was professor of sociology for years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He received his MA and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.

He is the author of more than 20 books, his book Soul Searching, and then the subsequent work, Souls in Transition, were the topic of previous conversations on thinking in public.

But today it is his most recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete, that is the topic of our conversation. Professor Christian Smith,

welcome to thinking in public. Thank you for having me. Well, we've had conversations before.

I greatly appreciate so much of your work. And as a matter of fact, you and your team contributed

one of the major, I think, intellectual tools for understanding religion,

and in particular Christianity in America over the course of the last generation or so,

that category of moralistic therapeutic deism.

It's a thing.

And you very powerfully defined it, your work in in terms of the the spirituality of

teenagers and young adults is still very influential as much of the your larger work in the sociology

of religion but your latest book why religion went obsolete the demise of traditional in America, is a little bit different, I would argue, than what you have done heretofore.

So is it a different mood? Are you in a different mode here? How does it come about?

Yeah. So much of my work in the past has been focused on religious people who are still religious

and what they're doing, what parents are doing, what's going on with teenagers and so on.

This book came out of a big project that arose from conversation I had with some funders

who told me that they, and this was my sense too, but they told me that a lot of people

on the ground that they talk with in religious communities were just really struggling and

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