Christian Smith

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 . . . . Continue Reading »