The Shadow Gospel & Why Religion Went Obsolete – Book Review(s)

Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway
The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possesses U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics
Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2025. 311 pp., $40.00 pb
ISBN 9780262552271

Karl Marx’s description of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ in his 1844 A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, constitutes one of his most famously misinterpreted statements. His call for the ‘abolition of religion’ takes religious yearning to be a consequence of ‘a condition that requires illusions,’ adding: ‘The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo’ (Marx 1844). But Marx may have been far kinder toward religion than his critics have imagined. What would he say to see forms of religion that constitute not the sigh of the oppressed but the cackle of the oppressor, not predicated upon a condition that requires illusions but, instead, the condition of preferring illusions to reality? Also, how would he interpret a decline in religion in advanced capitalist nations as a direct consequence of capitalism intruding upon all spheres of life? These developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which challenge Marx’s critique of religion, are tracked by two new books: Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway’ The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possesses U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics and Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America.

Phillips and Brockway place at the centre of recent American political and cultural developments what they call ‘shadow gospel,’ being a strange amalgam ‘of false histories and half-truths that uses the language of faith and family—and caricatures of what a liberal is—to exalt the category of “real” Americans, to hell with everyone else’ (7). Their book posits that contemporary frameworks of ‘political polarization’ overlook the nature of what has been happening: that is, the slow and steady replacement of a specific theological worldview with an abstract and amorphous anti-liberal demonology. ‘When ideological conservatives oppose left-wing policies, their dissent is based on arguments over specific courses of action, tenets, or proposals,’ Phillips and Brockway write, while a demonological worldview regards anything coded vaguely liberal as representing part of a vast, overarching threat ‘to undermine God, America, the family, and traditional (specifically conservative) values’ (14-15). In such a schema, hatred of the ‘liberal’ is the measure of one’s love of God, and sustaining anti-liberal conflict will trump developing personal virtues every time Thus, the rise of right-wing leaders whose public displays of morality diverge sharply from traditional Christian virtues, for what matters now is not adherence to the commandments of some old-fashioned testament but, instead, a willingness to fight the reddish menace. Self-styled opponents of white Christian nationalism have overlooked the fact that ‘the shadow gospel isn’t reactionary,’ is not necessarily born of resentment, but is instead progressive, pitching its adherents into ‘a cosmic drama and perpetually fighting a custom-made devil’ (21).

Joe Biden and other Democratic politicians in the U.S. attempted to placate resentful reactionaries through programs of reindustrialization aimed at ‘bringing back jobs,’ but a worldview predicated upon the shadow gospel cannot be combated by the next iteration of New Deal economic policies. This is the real value of the work Phillips and Brockway have undertaken. Although there has been no shortage of high-profile books examining how evangelicals have influenced and distorted American politics—from Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006) to Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (2023)—none of them have quite gotten to the core of two issues that often puzzle secular observers: 1) why evangelicals have proven immune to any criticism that draws upon the scriptures they claim to hold dear, and 2) why evangelical extremism has only increased even as evangelical churches themselves undergo the same (if slightly delayed) decline faced by other denominations. The framework of the ‘shadow gospel’ helps to pick apart these puzzles. But how did we arrive at this point in history?

Christian Smith
Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2025. 426 pp., £26.99 hb
ISBN 9780197800737

Phillips and Brockway trace the origins of the shadow gospel back to the early days of the Cold War, when opposition to communism became mapped onto anything that vaguely smacked of leftist or liberal ideology, such as civil rights, which is why people protesting the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s often carried signs proclaiming, ‘Race-Mixing Is Communism.’ Corporate interests boosted religious anti-communist crusades for their own secular ends, while the rise of parachurch organizations and individual evangelists like Billy Graham weakened denominational structures and, thus, the theology those denominations espoused, allowing certain doctrines to become unmoored. These new evangelicals took from old-style fundamentalists a preoccupation with Satan but placed him, not in the realm of hell and the afterlife, but in this very world, so that their worldview constituted a mirror image of the progressive Mainline Protestants—instead of building a heaven on earth through the social gospel, evangelicals sought to fight hell on earth by exterminating its demons. By defining itself almost exclusively in opposition to the perceived liberal threat, and through the employment of modern media techniques designed to capture attention rather than mould hearts and minds, Evangelicalism became unmoored from any foundational principles. As Phillips and Brockway note, ‘going to church takes time, reading the Bible takes time, becoming a good and moral person takes time. Actual religious belief, belonging, and behavior develop over a lifetime; it’s a process. But hating and mobilizing against Satan, metaphorical or literal, that’s a reflex—and it works’ (116). Had Marx encountered American evangelical adherents to the shadow gospel, he would perhaps have described religion not as the opium of the people, but their crystal methamphetamine.

But although the shadow gospel has driven a great deal of American politics, it has not borne the fruit of greater numbers of the faithful. In fact, as sociologist Christian Smith documents in Why Religion Went Obsolete, American churches have been in decline over the same period during which the shadow gospel rose ascendant. With copious data and patient, detailed arguments, Smith traces a number of trends that, starting in the period following World War II, laid the groundwork for the growing obsolescence of religion: higher education becoming available for the masses, women entering the workforce in increasing numbers (and thus no longer having time to volunteer for church activities, as was traditional), changes in rates of marriage and childbearing (especially the delay of marriage to a time after one became established in a career), intensifying expressive individualism and the decline in face-to-face organizations (such as fraternal lodges and labour unions), and a consumerist culture that emphasizes personal ‘authenticity’ as something opposed to external forces. Mainline Protestantism, consisting of those denominations that embraced individualism, openness, and tolerance, began a decline in the 1960s in part due to its own success, while the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae, with its rejection of artificial contraception, weakened adherence to Catholicism, and the rise of Evangelicalism not only eroded denominational ties but also sparked a backlash against religion in general by those revolted by what they saw.

But it was the 1990s that saw religion move from irrelevance in many people’s lives to obsolescence. Smith points out that the end of the Cold War—the end of America’s perpetual struggle against ‘godless communism,’ a struggle which supercharged the evolution of the shadow gospel—undercut some of the imperative of religious devotion; at the same time, emerging ‘neoliberal capitalism in a competitive, globalized economy raised the bar for what it took to sustain a successful career in the 1990s and beyond,’ (131-132) while also ‘requiring workers to become more mobile’ and ‘cultivating a new cultural sensibility that is antithetical to most traditional religions’ (134) through the valuation of ‘autonomous individualism, continual innovation, material prosperity, market exchange relations, consumer satisfaction, endless competition, global cosmopolitanism, and the monetizing and marketizing of almost all aspects of life’ (136). Meanwhile, the rise of the internet and other digital technologies exposed these atomistic individuals to other points of view and news about the failings of their own religious institutions, while also diminishing people’s attention spans, making religious services an interminable experience for younger generations. The 2000s saw religion tarnished not only by the attacks of September 11, 2001, but also George W. Bush’s explicitly religious crusade against ‘terrorism’ in response. And just as Mainline Protestants had undercut themselves in the middle of the twentieth century with an emphasis upon the social gospel and tolerance, so too did the evangelical emphasis upon a ‘personal relationship with God’ produce ‘the valorization of individual subjectivity as the seat of authenticity and authority,’ (257) thus allowing people ‘to relieve themselves of an obligation to follow any particular teachings about who or what God is or to participate in any religious organization’ (258). Smith’s survey of American post-Boomers finds that many Millennials embrace beliefs of the vaguely spiritual variety (New Age, paranormal), something he describes as ‘the re-enchantment of American culture,’ leading him to conclude that ‘religion did not become obsolete because secularism won the day. Religion lost out in good measure because alternatives that are actually more like religion than secularism emerged as cultural options that proved attractive to many post-Boomers‘ (335; emphasis in the original).

Just as The Shadow Gospel offered an important conceptual shift for understanding developments within the American religious right during these past several decades, Why Religion Went Obsolete constitutes an important corrective to theories of secularization. After all, the obsolescence of religion is not the same as the abolition of religion for which Marx had hoped. What Smith tracks so elegantly through the massive amounts of data he brings to bear upon the problem is not the growth of secularism as ‘a protest against real suffering,’ as Marx put it, but, rather, the dominance of market conditions in all spheres of life. Neoliberal economies leave people with little time to devote toward non-productive ventures such as worship, while also making religion itself subject to the imperatives of individual choice and individual identity. Religion may still be the opium of the people, but it now exists in a state where all the good drugs have been made legal.

Placing The Shadow Gospel and Why Religion Went Obsolete in conversation with each other offers some important lessons for scholars and activists on the left. Phillips and Brockway point out that what has been taken as an ideological conservatism at the centre of the American right wing is, instead, an amorphous demonology that will always shift its tactics and its targets in order to maintain a perpetual struggle that is ‘increasingly deranged, built upon decades of historically disconnected myth, enveloped within a realm of shadowy bizarre that unified all enemies as “liberal,” and animated by the transformation of the apocalypse into a push for clicks’ (177). That has been the legacy of evangelicalism, but the concomitant decline of religious institutions has minimized those organizations that might have provided a bit of friction against the more extreme notions of individual believers. That is to say, the growing obsolescence of religion as a whole left the shadow gospel the primary public claimant to the symbols of Christian traditions in America, and able to reinterpret them to suit its will. When the shadow gospel meets the growing atomization of society that Smith documents, what results is greater extremism, even stochastic violence, produced by people long shorn of community ties. Religions have certainly provided through the centuries theological justification for some of the worst abuses this world has seen, but the growing obsolescence of religion has not resulted in the obsolescence of systems of abuse.

In fact, the same cultural and economic forces that have left churches struggling have also emptied out those institutions of leftist education and organization, such as labour unions, making it that much more difficult to offer a social gospel antidote to shadow gospel poison; moreover, the sidelining of both Mainline Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church has robbed secular leftist organizations of occasional powerful allies on certain shared issues, such as the dignity and rights of migrant workers. One need not believe that religion is necessary for the cultivation of moral virtues to recognize that any efforts to combat the atomization of society fostered by the current regime of neoliberalism may have the effect of also buoying religious organizations. After all, as Pascal Boyer outlined in his 2001 book, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, religious concepts arise from already extant inference systems within the human mind, extrapolating from intuitions about morality and agency that are the result of a long history of evolution—and so religion is more spandrel than opium.

Marx regarded ‘the criticism of Heaven’ as something that would turn into ‘the criticism of Earth.’ Instead, the obsolescence of religion has been made manifest in the emergence of vague spiritualisms and shadow gospel extremism. Perhaps a new approach to religions is needed—where the church is producing no immediate material harm, we might adopt as a motto the words of the ghost in Hamlet and ‘leave her to heaven.’ Perhaps it is time to recognize that, when it comes to the opium of the people, some individuals are best served, at least initially, by clean needles and a safe place to shoot up.