Christian Smith

The more religiously committed parents are, the more they want their children to grow up believing and practicing the family’s religion. This is especially true of parents who are religiously traditionalist or conservative. The desire to pass on the faith to offspring in a world that does not seem . . . . Continue Reading »

The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faithby timothy larsen oxford, 272 pages, $45 The discipline of anthropology is often considered post-religious if not anti-religious. Most working anthropologists profess no religious faith. And anthropologists stand in a structurally and . . . . Continue Reading »

Are human beings naturally religious? Should we take religion to be in some way an innate, instinctive, or otherwise inevitable aspect of human life? Or is religion a historically contingent, nonessential aspect of basic human being? These are not questions of merely academic curiosity. The answers . . . . Continue Reading »

Peter Leithart’s response to my book is more reasonable than some reviews I have had the misfortune to read recently. But his response essentially dodges rather than engages my book’s central argument. The case I argue in the first half of my book is simple, consisting of four central claims and a conclusion. First, I claim that biblicism, which I define clearly, is widespread in American Evangelicalism. Biblicism is a particular theory about how the Bible ought to function as an authority in Christian life… . Continue Reading »

After the Baby Boomers:How Twenty- and Thirty-­Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion by robert wuthnow princeton university press, 312 pages, $29.95 Baby boomers are becoming old news and dated scholarship. For nearly a half century after the Second World War, the cohort of babies . . . . Continue Reading »

Question: Are families that choose private schools and home education for their children more likely than families involved in public schools to be socially isolated and withdrawn from participation in civic life? Answer: Absolutely not. In fact, to the contrary, recent survey data from the U.S. . . . . Continue Reading »