The Decline and Fall of Christianity in America

The Decline and Fall of Christianity in America

Abandoned church in Coaldale, Pennsylvania. (Shutterstock)Why Religion Went Obsolete The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian SmithOxford University Press, 440 pp., $34.99WHILE TOURING THE UNITED STATES in the early 1830s, French aristocrat and author Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the American republic depends on the mores of the American people to survive, and that these mores were largely the result of “religion and libert…