On February 13, 2026, First Things published an essay by Christian Smith (b. October 23, 1960) called “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame.” Its first sentence said he retired at the end of 2025. The second sentence corrected the first. “More accurately, I left.”
He was sixty-five. He held the William R. Kenan Jr. chair in sociology, which carried a research fund. He called his salary enviable. He had brought in about $15 million in external grants and had chaired the dissertation of the best-placed doctoral graduate in the department's history, by then a full professor at Yale University. He had won teaching awards. A man in that position could work another decade. He left without a next post.
The essay ran several thousand words and did three jobs at once. It described one university. It indicted a discipline. It closed a career. To read it as a retirement complaint is to miss that Smith had been writing versions of it, in other registers and about other institutions, for thirty years.
Start with a bad job talk.
In 1993 the sociologist Glen Elder picked Smith up at Raleigh-Durham airport. Smith stayed at the Carolina Inn. He later called his hiring a miracle, since the job talk went badly. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hired him anyway and he arrived in 1994. His chair, Arne Kalleberg, gave the new assistant professor two pieces of advice: do not study religion, and write journal articles rather than books. Smith wrote books about religion. Kalleberg later laughed about the advice, and in time published books of his own.
The twelve years at Carolina supplied the habits. Smith watched rain flood the parking lot next to Hamilton Hall. He handled book reviews for Social Forces in a windowless room across the hall from a colleague's office. He ate lunch with graduate students at Sutton's on Franklin Street and went to Christmas parties at the chair's house. On the morning of September 11, 2001, a graduate student emailed him that something had happened in New York, and he watched the rest of it on a television in the sociology office with his colleagues. He said later that if American sociology practiced the methodological rigor standard at Carolina, everyone would be better off.
The training before that had crossed three worlds. He grew up evangelical, and he credits his Philadelphia upbringing for his difficulty in not naming things frankly. He attended Wheaton College from 1978, transferred to Gordon College in Massachusetts and took his BA in sociology in 1983, spent a year in theology at Harvard Divinity School, and earned his MA in 1987 and PhD in 1990 in Harvard University's sociology department. His advisors included Daniel Bell (1919–2011), Harvey Cox (b. 1929), Steve Rytina, and Kiku Adatto. The dissertation treated the emergence of liberation theology. A man who has sat in an evangelical college classroom, a divinity school seminar, and a Harvard sociology proseminar has learned three vocabularies and three sets of manners. He spent the rest of his career translating among them.
The dissertation became The Emergence of Liberation Theology in 1991. The argument there set the pattern for everything after. Liberation theology, like other religious convictions, supplied the categories through which people identified injustice, formed organizations, took risks, and kept going. Resisting Reagan, on the U.S. Central America peace movement, followed in 1996 with the same claim.
Then he turned on his own former world. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving appeared in 1998, written with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink. Older secularization theory expected pluralism to dissolve conservative Protestantism. Smith found the opposite. Groups stay strong when they hold enough distinction from the surrounding society to give members a clear identity. The sense of being under attack increases esprit de corps. He called this subcultural identity theory.
In 2000 he published Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want, which found evangelical political opinion more varied and more compromising than the culture-war literature assumed. The same year he and Michael O. Emerson published Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. That book argued that White evangelicals read racial inequality through an individualist framework: personal responsibility, individual conversion, cross-racial friendship, colorblind treatment. The framework let sincere people oppose racial hatred while rejecting structural explanations and collective remedies. It won the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion's Outstanding Book Award in 2001.
Anyone who wants to file Smith as a conservative critic of progressive sociology has to account for Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, which is assigned by people who despise his politics and which treats racial inequality as structurally produced and White Christian moral individualism as an inadequate account of it.
The project that made him a household name in seminaries began in 2002 with a telephone bank.
The National Study of Youth and Religion started dialing in the early summer of 2002, using random-digit dial with in-house randomization to reach households with a teenager aged 13 to 17. Each completed case meant a forty-minute survey with the teenager and a thirty-minute survey with a parent, to capture family, neighborhood, and school facts the teenager would not know. A Spanish-language version was available. The survey oversampled Jewish households. It finished with 3,370 completed cases. The nationally representative core was 3,290 teenagers and their parents, with 80 Jewish oversample cases on top.
Then interviewers went to see them. In the summer of 2003, trained interviewers conducted 267 personal interviews with youth drawn from the survey respondents. Seventeen interviewers worked across 45 states, each doing between ten and twenty interviews. Consultation with other youth scholars had suggested matching interviewer and interviewee on race where possible, and most of the 267 interviews matched on race and gender. The design combined the 2002-2003 national survey with follow-up surveys in 2005 and 2007-2008 and personal interviews in 2003, 2005, and 2008. A fourth wave came in 2013, when the respondents were 23 to 28.
Soul Searching, written with Melinda Lundquist Denton, came out of the first wave in 2005. Its lasting contribution was a phrase. Smith and Denton found that beneath denominational labels, American teenagers who called themselves Christian tended to share a small set of assumptions: a God exists who created and orders the world; God wants people to be good, nice, and fair; the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself; God stays out of the way except when needed to solve a problem; good people go to heaven. They called it moralistic therapeutic deism.
The concept did what few sociological terms do. It escaped. Youth pastors used it. Seminaries built courses around it. Kenda Creasy Dean of Princeton Theological Seminary took it as the organizing diagnosis of Almost Christian and argued that teenagers held this faith because parents and churches had taught it to them.
Its escape brought objections. Smith and Denton had conceded in the book that no teenager would use the term to describe himself. Some critics disputed the use of “deism”; others defended it on the grounds that Enlightenment deists and moralistic therapeutic deists share a generic monotheism in which all religions worship the same God. Writing in America (magazine) in 2010, Tom Beaudoin urged theologians and educators to be careful in adopting the concept, judging the reasons against it at least as strong as the reasons for it. A category built to summarize interview transcripts became a device for clergy to explain away a congregation.
He followed the same cohort forward. Souls in Transition, with Patricia Snell, appeared in 2009 and traced what happened when the teenagers left home. It found that college professors were a smaller cause of religious change than family formation, friendship, romantic partners, and how much religion had mattered in the home. Lost in Transition in 2011, with Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog, widened the frame to money, sex, civic life, and substance use, and reported that many young adults could condemn an action without a vocabulary for explaining why it was wrong beyond preference and harm. Young Catholic America followed in 2014. Religious Parenting in 2019 and Handing Down the Faith in 2021, the latter with Amy Adamczyk, put parents at the center of transmission and found that no program, school, clergyman, or peer group typically matched a parent's example.
He ran a parallel research program on generosity. Passing the Plate in 2008, with Michael Emerson and Patricia Snell, documented the gap between Christian teaching about giving and Christian giving, documented the gap between Christian teaching about giving and Christian giving. The Paradox of Generosity in 2014, with Hilary Davidson, reported that generous practice tracked with stronger relationships and higher reported well-being.
He moved to the University of Notre Dame in 2006 as Kenan Professor, founded the Center for the Study of Religion and Society and directed it until 2017, founded the Center for Social Research and ran it from 2008 to 2014, and held a concurrent appointment in theology. Across his career he took in more than $20 million in grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Lilly Endowment, the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, and others. He was, by any measure the profession uses, a builder: surveys, datasets, interview archives, conferences, research teams, placed students.
While building it he was working out a philosophical position that would eventually make the building itself look questionable to him.
Moral, Believing Animals came out in 2003 and argued that people live inside moral orders and constitutive stories, that the notion of a morally neutral person is incoherent. What Is a Person? followed in 2010 and rejected accounts that reduce persons to biological processes, utility maximizers, bundles of preferences, discourse effects, or intersections of identity. Persons are embodied, conscious, relational, morally responsible agents with emergent causal powers. Society forms them and does not determine them. To Flourish or Destruct in 2015 argued that social scientists cannot avoid substantive judgments about human well-being, since every description of oppression or dysfunction presupposes an account of what is good for persons. His own summary of the program was that critical realist personalism requires social science to revise its dominant approaches to causation, social ontology, and explanation.
The philosophy came from Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014), whose critical realism holds that a reality exists independent of our descriptions while our knowledge of it stays fallible and theory-laden, and which distinguishes observable events from the deeper structures capable of producing them. Margaret Archer (b. 1943) supplied the account of how inherited social conditions condition action while action reproduces or transforms those conditions. His listed influences also include Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025), Charles Taylor (philosopher) (b. 1931), Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), Nicholas Wolterstorff, Aristotle, and Bell. Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters applied the position to his own subfield in 2017.
In 2010 he and his wife entered the Catholic Church. Fr. Bill Miscamble, writing after Smith's departure, recalled that Smith had once explained that the many models of faithful Catholic living and thinking at Notre Dame had drawn him into the Church. The Bible Made Impossible followed in 2011 and made the argument that sincere, competent Christians derive incompatible doctrines from the same text, which he called pervasive interpretive pluralism, and that no theory of Scripture can conceal the work interpretation does. He narrated the conversion more personally in How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps.
Two books appeared in 2014, and together they explain everything that happened twelve years later.
The first was Building Catholic Higher Education, written with John Cavadini Smith describes it as affirming and encouraging toward Notre Dame. He sent copies to academic leaders and colleagues. The entire faculty of one Protestant university on the West Coast read and discussed it. A few colleagues in other departments told him it was nice work. No leader of his own university acknowledged it. He compared the silence to a family dinner table where someone says the wrong thing and everyone freezes and then carries on.
The second was The Sacred Project of American Sociology. Its thesis was that American sociology, as a collective enterprise, is committed to realizing the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous, self-directing agents free to construct their own identities, enter and exit relationships at will, and enjoy experiential and bodily gratification equally. Smith used Émile Durkheim's category of the sacred against the discipline that inherited it, and argued that a nominally secular field expresses an inescapable sacred, generates its own false consciousness, and reacts against Weberian disenchantment. Sociology does not escape the net it casts over everyone else. He also argued that the sacred project can corrupt double-blind peer review, and pointed to Peter L. Berger (1929–2017), James Davison Hunter, and José Casanova as scholars whose work violated the orthodoxy and who largely withdrew from the profession. Sociology, he concluded, is accountable only to sociologists, which is to say accountable to no one.
The reaction was fast and personal. Philip Cohen reviewed it under the title “It’s Modernity, Stupid.” Andrew Perrin wrote that the evidentiary base was haphazard, interpreted disingenuously, in places factually wrong, and that the pages were filled with score-settling, as though Smith had kept an enemies list and published it. He also counted the misspelled names and dropped verbs. Smith answered both. He wrote a reply on Cohen's own blog, noting that colleagues had told him Cohen's piece was so lopsided it was not worth engaging, and made a clarification that reviewers had missed: he embraces many features of sociology's sacred project himself, and asks not for its elimination but for honesty about it and room for a plurality of such projects. He added that colleagues around the country told him privately the book was essentially right and would not say so publicly, out of fear and self-preservation, and called the result uncoordinated self-censorship.
That reply contains the strongest and the weakest thing about the book at once. The private agreement he reports cannot be checked. The claim is structured so that silence confirms it.
Stephen Turner's review credited Smith with describing the status quo of ideological vetting accurately and faulted him for not attending more to the structures that produced those circumstances. Turner also noted the oddity of the author's position: a Harvard product with a Carolina past, a member of the Sociological Research Association, publishing in conventional journals, running survey research and a research center, and therefore an insider of sorts.
Eleven years later he published the largest book of his career. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America came from Oxford University Press in 2025 at 440 pages. Its claim is that traditional institutional religion has not only weakened and declined but become obsolete among Americans under fifty, which he takes to mean nearly all of America before long. By obsolete he means no longer deemed useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest.
He explained it to a Canadian interviewer in February 2026 with a comparison to vinyl records. Vinyl did not fail and may sound better; other formats fit changing habits. Traditional religion, he said, does not fit ordinary life, “in a cultural vibe way.” He put the turn at 1991: the Cold War ended, globalization accelerated, Nirvana and Seinfeld marked a reorientation of sensibility, and the share of Americans claiming no religion began its climb. He rejects the account that names enemies. Religious conservatives look for antagonists in media, universities, atheists, and secular elites, and he treats those as minor factors. What he emphasizes instead is a mismatch of expectation: most Americans value religion for helping people behave well, cope, and find community, and few care about doctrine, liturgy, death, or salvation. Churches accommodated that demand, redefined themselves around goodness and niceness, and had nothing left to offer a generation that wanted resources for suffering.
Reviewers split along predictable lines and one unpredictable one. Mark Massa in America treated it as an extremely important study from a scholar with three decades of careful work behind him. The Gospel Coalition‘s reviewer accepted the analysis, called it valuable for pastors, and pushed back on the fatalism, noting that religion also acts on cultural conditions and that a century ago nobody would have predicted the shifts Smith documents. Ryan Cragun, reviewing it in the Journal of Church and State, read the book as a lament and even a condemnation of the cultural changes that lowered interest in religion, and noted that a demand-side explanation would surprise scholars who had followed the supply-and-demand debates unless the book were read carefully. Cragun’s objection is the one that bites. A book arguing that a thing has lost its cultural fit, written by a man who thinks the thing is true, has to work to keep diagnosis and grief in separate columns.
He cleared his office in December 2025. Six weeks later the essay ran, and it ran into a fight already under way.
In January 2026 Notre Dame announced the appointment of Susan Ostermann to direct its Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, effective in July. Her published support for abortion rights drew objections from faculty and from the president of Students for Life. At least nine bishops joined the local bishop in the outcry, and Smith's essay was used as ammunition against the appointment. Students marched on the Dome on February 27. Ostermann withdrew.
Smith's own indictment had four parts. The first was that Notre Dame's official statements about Catholic mission are not acted on consistently, that the requirement for a predominant number of Catholic faculty is often satisfied by treating anyone baptized Catholic as Catholic, and that nothing is done to orient new faculty in the tradition. He offered specific remedies: send short-listed candidates a document explaining the mission, discuss it in interviews, give new hires a course release for a faculty seminar on the Catholic intellectual tradition, and weigh contributions to the mission in tenure and promotion reviews. He reported one anecdote from a job candidate, a convert from Protestantism, who wrote to him afterward that interviewers kept telling her not to worry about the Catholicism. Her impulse was to answer that the Catholicism was why she applied. She said nothing.
The second was fear of conflict. He credited John I. Jenkins with an impressive early vision and traced a turn to wary defensiveness after the fights over The Vagina Monologues and Barack Obama's honorary degree.
The third was a craving for acceptance by peer institutions, which he named: Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, Emory, Rice, Stanford, NYU. By endowment, facilities, selectivity, alumni loyalty, and research, he argued, Notre Dame already belongs, and only Catholicism makes it suspect. He connected the anxiety to the history of American Catholic exclusion, including students brawling with the Klan in South Bend in the 1920s, and to the pressure that Church teaching on sexual questions puts on Catholic professionals who do not wish to be snubbed at the bar and on the golf course. He worried that serious engagement with the tradition could threaten the university's newly acquired membership in the Association of American Universities.
The fourth was the iron triangle. Excellent undergraduate education, a serious Catholic mission, and rapid ascent to research pre-eminence cannot all three be had. No amount of money can produce enough believing Catholic scholars who are also top researchers and excellent teachers, and asking new faculty to spend time on the Catholic intellectual tradition takes time from the research they were hired to do. The governing logic of the research university is hyper-specialization. A Catholic intellectual mission pulls toward integration. He argued that his own department chose the mainstream path, chased rankings and top journals, quarantined Catholic influence in religion, family, and education, and ended up neither fulfilling the mission nor becoming a great department.
He was careful about two things. He wrote that his analysis privileges neither conservatives over liberals nor religious people over secularists, that an atheist with the right knowledge and methods can serve the mission better than a disgruntled Catholic or an indifferent careerist, and that conservative activists running pressure campaigns do more harm than good by reinforcing the conflict-aversion and by implying that fidelity reduces to culture-war positions. He also wrote that he was not telling a story of decline from a golden age, since he lacked the perspective to assess that, but comparing stated goals to observed reality. And he reported that when he circulated a paper arguing that Ex corde Ecclesiae obliges theology faculty at Catholic universities to engage colleagues in other disciplines, the meeting with most of the theology faculty revealed a suspicious, self-protective isolationism.
Then came the details that did the most work with readers. The campus bookstore's ground floor had held shelves of academic, theological, and devotional books when he arrived; it now holds clothing and branded merchandise, with books moved to a corner upstairs, and the coffee shop has become self-serve. Browsing the online store, he found tarot cards. He listed the stadium concerts, the football weekends in Ireland, the branded wine. He described graduate students pressured to finish efficiently under threat of losing funding, and called the result technicians with doctorates. He gave the phenomenon its name from his own discipline, goal displacement, and said his intellectual life at Notre Dame had one rewarding interlocutor from another department. He described a senior finance major, weeks from graduating and worried about the environment, who told him she had never heard of Catholic social teaching in four years at the business school. He described being left exposed by a department chair who sided with graduate students seeking to overturn the theory canon, and colleagues freezing when a junior colleague endorsed a student's charge that the university and the department were white supremacist.
The replies arrived within weeks.
M. Cathleen Kaveny and Robin Darling Young, both former Notre Dame faculty, answered in Commonweal (magazine) on February 18. They opened with the image of Smith nailing ninety-five theses to the door of the basilica and said the feeling was presumably mutual. Their argument was that Notre Dame is a shrine as well as a school, founded in 1842 by French priests, a place where alumni pray at the Grotto and students propose marriage there, and that the mixing of sacred and profane is standard at shrines. Trinket shops line the approach to St. Peter's. Smith wants purity, and shrines are never pure. Their verdict on him was one line: “His is a Protestant, not a Catholic, sensibility.” They also charged that he tacitly suggests opposition to firm Church positions should not be platformed, borrowed Mary Douglas (1921–2007) on purity and danger to explain why the Vagina Monologues fight was about pollution rather than moral argument, recalled that they had themselves served on one of the panels Jenkins required after each performance, and invoked John T. Noonan Jr.'s appeal to the informed conscience at the 2009 commencement.
Chris Damian, writing in the National Catholic Reporter on March 10, defended Smith against that particular charge and then hit him from another side. Damian said Kaveny and Young had caricatured him, since Smith's argument leaves room for platforming opposing views. But Damian argued that Smith seemed unaware of the history he had joined: the failings predate his tenure and are not unique to Notre Dame, having been laid out in James Tunstead Burtchaell's 1998 book The Dying of the Light and going back at least to the 1967 Land O'Lakes Statement. Damian, who entered Notre Dame as an undergraduate in 2009 and organized a course-advising program for students seeking an integrated Catholic education, listed others who had paid for the same criticism: David Solomon, removed from the directorship of the Center for Ethics and Culture; Janet Smith, denied tenure; Bill Kirk, fired from residence life. Then the charge that stuck: Smith spoke hard truths from a position where he could comfortably step away without professional consequence, and his parting gift to his colleagues was a dump of despondency.
The Irish Rover ran two faculty letters on February 25. Fr. Bill Miscamble, professor emeritus of history, agreed with Smith on leadership's lack of vision and courage, agreed on hiring for mission, agreed on the craving for mainstream acceptance, and gave it a phrase borrowed from Jacques Maritain: kneeling before the world. He judged the current provost's strategic framework to have the tone of a tepid Catholic NGO. Then he objected. Smith's comments on the theology department were ill-directed and his shot at the business school ignored current work there. Smith's lens was narrow and self-referential, passing too quickly over a sacramental life that feeds the intellectual life, and ignoring colleagues who stay and fight. And he pressed the question directly: given Smith's criticism of conservative pressure campaigns, what would he have the objectors to the Ostermann appointment do, stay silent?
The second letter came from Walter Nicgorski, who had joined the faculty forty-two years before Smith arrived. He called Smith's essay well grounded and important, and then explained why his own experience differed. He landed in two of the pockets Smith conceded exist, political science and the Program of Liberal Studies, and never felt the loneliness Smith described. He also supplied a fact from the 1980s that supports Smith more than anything in Smith's own essay: when the diminishing number of practicing Catholic faculty became a public argument, a majority of the faculty voted through the Faculty Senate that academic prestige was to be preferred whenever it conflicted with the university's Catholic mission.
Four Catholic scholars, four positions, and no clean split between defenders and critics. Kaveny and Young think he mistook a shrine for a seminar. Miscamble thinks he was right about the administration and wrong about his colleagues. Nicgorski thinks he was right and unlucky. Damian thinks he was late, and safe.
In February 2026 Smith took a Zoom call from St. Petersburg, Florida. Asked about his own faith, he said he has mixed experiences with faith and church like many religious people, that this informs his perspective, and that his aim is sociological, to pursue truth as best he can. He said the loss of religion's wisdom about the darker dimensions of life is a loss. He offered clergy caution: work out what in the tradition is essential, and spend time outside church walls learning how people live.
His next book is Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality, written with Bridget Ritz and Matthew Coetzee, on the individualized spiritual practices he sees replacing institutional religion: neo-paganism, tarot, reiki, manifesting, the law of attraction. He told the interviewer it was due out in the fall of 2026.
There is a line running through all of it. Religious belief does not reduce to economic interest. Persons do not reduce to organisms, preferences, systems, or identity positions. Morality does not reduce to taste. Institutions do not reduce to their official statements. Social science does not reduce to the measurement of observable variables. He built the largest longitudinal study of American adolescent religion ever conducted and then wrote three books arguing that surveys cannot reach what he wanted to know. He accepted more than $20 million from foundations to build research infrastructure inside the modern research university and then argued that the modern research university's governing logic cannot coexist with an integrated intellectual life.
The open questions are the ones his critics ask. Whether a discipline of thousands of people has one sacred project, or whether Smith generalized from the parts of it that stung him. Whether the standard he held Notre Dame to could be met by any American research university, which would make the essay a description of higher education wearing the costume of an institutional complaint. Whether the interviews produced moralistic therapeutic deism or the phrase went looking for the interviews. Whether a diagnosis of obsolescence written by a believer stays a diagnosis.
He supplied the test. He asked that institutions be measured by the distance between what they say and what they do. He left a place he had described as intellectually starving, at sixty-five, with a chair and a research fund and a salary he called enviable, and took no other post. He is in Florida, finishing a book about tarot.
Notes
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/kaveny-young-notre-dame-christian-smith-shrine-higher-ed. Irish Rover faculty letters, February 25, 2026, Miscamble and Nicgorski. Chris Damian in NCR, March 10, 2026. The Ostermann sequence (January appointment, at least nine bishops, February 27 March on the Dome, withdrawal) is documented in the NCR piece’s caption and the Commonweal link to OSV News; the appointment coverage is at Zeale. Michael Boorstein of the Washington Post flagged the essay on X, which is a signal about how far outside Catholic media it traveled. There is also aggregation and Protestant reaction, including Stephen Adubato drawing a parallel to Fordham, which you could use if you want the argument extended past Notre Dame.
The Carolina scene. Every detail (the RDU pickup by Glen Elder, the Carolina Inn, the bad job talk, Kalleberg’s two pieces of advice and his later laughter, the Hamilton Hall window, the Social Forces windowless room, Sutton’s on Franklin Street, the Christmas parties, the September 11 email from a graduate student) comes from Smith’s own alumni reminiscence on the UNC department’s history page. That page is a gold mine and almost nobody writing about him has used it. He also names Peter Bearman, Sherryl Kleinman, Bev Wiggins, Ken Bollen, Howard Aldrich, Dick Simpson, Dick Cramer, Rachel Rosenfeld, and Kraig Beyerlein.
NSYR numbers. Research design page. Methodology on the personal interviews, including the seventeen interviewers, the ten-to-twenty range, the race matching, and the 45 states. The 3,290 versus 3,370 distinction (the Jewish oversample of 80). Wave 4 dating (2013, ages 23 to 28) is confirmed in an unrelated methods paper that used the data.
MTD reception. Beaudoin’s caution in America. The deism dispute and the authors’ own concession that no teenager would use the term. Kenda Creasy Dean’s use.
Sacred Project fight. Perrin’s review, which is where the “haphazard,” “score-settling,” and misspelled-names lines come from. Smith’s reply as guest blogger on Philip Cohen’s site, which is where the self-censorship claim and his clarification that he endorses much of the sacred project appear. Stephen Turner’s review, including the “insider of sorts” characterization. The thesis statement I paraphrased is quoted in full in the First Things review. Kemeny’s review, with the Berger, Hunter, Casanova point and the accountability conclusion. Paul Sullins on the critical realist personalism.
Obsolete reception. America (Mark Massa). Ryan Cragun in the Journal of Church and State, the lament reading. Gospel Coalition. Kirk Center, page count and price. Englewood, the definition of obsolescence. Broadview interview, February 6, 2026, which is where St. Petersburg, the vinyl comparison, 1991, Nirvana and Seinfeld, the “cultural vibe” line, the refusal to name antagonists, the answer about his own faith.
Biographical spine. Wikipedia for the birth date, the advisors (Bell, Rytina, Cox, Adatto), the influences list, and the grants figure. Wheaton and Gordon dates and the SSSR 2001 award and Gordon Alumnus of the Year 2007. His own faculty page. CVs: https://sociology.nd.edu/assets/396769/smith_christian_cv.pdf and https://christiansmith.nd.edu/assets/176451/christian_smith_cv_9_24_15.pdf.
MacIntyre, whom Smith lists as an influence, was a permanent research fellow at Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center and died in South Bend on May 21, 2025, seven months before Smith cleared his office.
WSJ: “What if We Just Liquidate the Discipline?”
Pamela Paul writes July 24, 2026:
Other sociologists say the impulse toward activism is compromising not only the aim and use of sociological research, but the quality of the research itself. In lieu of engaging in objective analysis, the discipline is shaping, even bending, the truth.
Critics of the activist-scholar model frequently cite Christian Smith’s 2014 book, The Sacred Project of American Sociology, as persuasively diagnosing a discipline increasingly corrupted by what amounts to a quasi-religious activist impulse.
“Sociology’s sacred project champions emancipation, autonomy, equality, justice, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism,” Smith wrote. “In the end that sacred project actually tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of nonconformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.”
Smith quit the ASA around the same time, demoralized by what he saw as a lack of self-awareness among his colleagues, whose work focused on the world’s wrongs while failing to recognize their own. Professors teach from textbooks he describes as “thinly veiled political progressivism watered down to pathetic mush.” This past January, he resigned from University of Notre Dame, where he was a professor of sociology for 20 years.
“From my point of view, sociology should be producing intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world,” he says. Instead, he says, it’s producing technicians and activists. “The painfulness of all this is that I believe sociology really matters and makes a contribution. But sociology is heading down the wrong road. Over time, I’ve thought to myself, ‘What if we just liquidate the discipline?’”
During her campaign for the presidency of the ASA this year, Melissa Wilde, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, signed a petition objecting to an ASA vote on Sociologists for Palestine’s proposed boycott. She believes that sociologists, as a body, should remain neutral.
“While the activists will not be constrained in their activism if the ASA becomes politically neutral, the sociologists who do not want politics mixed into their research would be deeply constrained in their research and its impact if the ASA becomes activist,” she says. (She lost the election.)
To Ilana Redstone, a sociologist who specializes in political polarization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sociology’s troubles gained traction through the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power Co., which deemed that practices with a disparate impact on employees are illegal. According to her analysis, the moral equation of disparate outcomes with discrimination soon became enshrined within institutions like academia and the media. Underrepresentation or unequal pay among groups served as evidence of bias, she argues, leading to a proliferation of D.E.I. practices, including concepts around unconscious bias, harm and intent.
Within sociology, it meant that any inequality among groups was de facto the result of discrimination, rendering moot other possible theories, Redstone says: “We’re treating questions around causation as settled.” Even suggesting research into alternative sociological explanations is viewed as racist, morally wrong and victim blaming at best.
The consequences are playing out across society. “Once a claim is made that suggests, ‘We are on the right side of history, we are doing the work of good people who care about justice,’ that creates a lot of social pressure,” she says. It forecloses disagreement, she says, “And that has an enormous destructive effect on democracy.”
Redstone’s critique builds on others circulating within the profession. In interviews and on panels convened by organizations like Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan organization devoted to academic reform, critics say that overt politicization—of research, of teaching, of practice—is killing the discipline. They refer to a discipline in disarray, write papers with titles like “How Sociology Can Save Itself” and blog about “Sociology’s Pervasively Dubious Assumptions.”
They describe an atmosphere in which to get ahead, you must consistently submit to political litmus tests, publish accordingly and pray that you make it to tenure without getting excommunicated. Specializing in a stodgy subject like religion, the military or law enforcement—especially if one has anything positive to say—is as unfashionable as flaunting a fur coat.
In their view, contemporary sociology’s relentless focus on race, gender and class, its emphasis on the need for social change over the benefits of social stability and its obsession with inequality amount to an abdication of scholarly duty, decreasing the value of sociological research, reducing its impact and undermining public trust. (According to one analysis, 80% of articles published in today’s flagship sociology journals touch on inequality.)
The Most Unflinching Look Since Gouldner
Oxford University Press published The Sacred Project of American Sociology in the summer of 2014. The catalogue copy and the jacket carried a line from Philip Gorski of Yale, who called it “the most unflinching look at the discipline since Alvin Gouldner.”
Then the fight started, and nobody went back to the sentence. Philip Cohen reviewed the book and Andrew Perrin reviewed the book and Christian Smith answered both. First Things, Heterodox Academy, and the Christian Scholar’s Review took his side. The Catholic press ran it as news from the academy. In none of it did anyone ask what follows from a blurb that measures a Catholic personalist at Notre Dame against a Marxist who died in 1980.
What follows is more than either camp wanted.
Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920–1980) took a business degree from Baruch College and a doctorate from Columbia under Robert K. Merton (1910–2003), with a 1954 dissertation on industry and bureaucracy. He taught at Buffalo, Antioch, and Illinois. He went to Washington University in St. Louis in 1957, into a joint department of anthropology and sociology, and in 1968 became Max Weber Research Professor of Social Theory and department chair. He held the presidency of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
In 1961 he stood up before that society and attacked the professional ideology of his colleagues. The address appeared in the winter of 1962 in Social Problems, pages 199 through 213, under the byline of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. It opened with a joke about a magnificent minotaur named Max, meaning Max Weber (1864–1920), whose lair sociologists visit as a holy place and who never held the doctrine attributed to him.
The argument was that value-free social science serves the people who claim it. A young discipline fighting for a place in the university needs a warrant for its authority, and neutrality is that warrant. The doctrine also does interior work. It relieves the sociologist of responsibility for what his findings are used to do, permits him to take money from any patron, and licenses him to sell technical services without asking what they serve. Gouldner argued that they had confused a professional convenience with an epistemology, and that Weber had been conscripted into the confusion after his death.
Eight years later he built the apparatus. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology came from Basic Books in 1970, 528 pages, twelve dollars and fifty cents. Its charge was that sociologists who advertise their objectivity produce work derived from assumptions of which they are only partly conscious. Gouldner gave those assumptions two names, background assumptions and domain assumptions, and demanded that sociologists trace them to their social and psychological sources. He wanted the discipline’s own tools turned inward. He called the result a reflexive sociology. Most of the book went after Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and the functionalism Gouldner took to have governed American sociological thought for three decades.
Set the two arguments beside each other.
Both men say the discipline rests on commitments its members do not examine. Both say those commitments function as an unacknowledged moral project. Both say the commitments get presented to outsiders as the neutral conclusions of science. Both say professional ideology protects them from scrutiny, and both name the protection as ideology in the technical sense. Both propose the same remedy, which is to apply the discipline’s own analytic apparatus to the discipline. Both reach for Durkheim on the sacred and Weber on disenchantment to do it, Smith explicitly, Gouldner through the minotaur. Both wrote from inside the establishment they described. Gouldner held an endowed research professorship and a chairmanship; Smith held a Kenan chair, ran two research centers, and had taken in more than twenty million dollars in grants. Both were accused by professional reviewers of using scholarship to settle scores. And both, on the evidence of their own replies, expected that accusation and treated it as confirmation.
The difference is direction. Gouldner’s target was Parsonian functionalism and a profession whose establishment was liberal and whose claim was neutrality, and he attacked from the left. Smith’s target is a commitment he summarizes as emancipation, equality, and the moral affirmation of autonomous self-directing agents, and he attacks from a Catholic personalist position at a moment when the establishment is progressive. Same instrument. Opposite end of the room.
That symmetry is the argument’s most inconvenient property, and Gouldner discovered it before anyone could point it out to him.
In 1968, in The American Sociologist, volume three, pages 103 through 116, he published “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State.” He began by noting that six years after the address, he found himself drawing back from some of the people his argument had persuaded, and that he did not wish to seem ungrateful to them but would not soften the point out of professional courtesy. His fear was that the myth of value-free social science was about to be replaced by another myth, and glib acceptance by glib rejection. His target was the underdog sociology of Howard S. Becker (1928–2023), whose own presidential address to the same society had asked which side sociologists were on. Gouldner’s answer was that partisanship on behalf of the deviant, the marginal, and the client of the welfare state was no more examined than neutrality had been, and that it flattered the sociologist in a new way. His opening formulation was that sociology begins by disenchanting the world and proceeds by disenchanting itself, and that voluntary confessions should always be suspect, since a man complaining about his chains may be resentful or comfortable.
The reflexive argument has a second act, and the second act eats the critic’s own coalition. That is the test of whether the instrument is an instrument or a weapon.
Smith has not published the second act. He has come close, once, and not in a book. When Cohen’s review appeared, Smith wrote a reply on Cohen’s own site clarifying that he embraces and endorses many features of sociology’s sacred project, that his aim is honesty about it, and that he wants a greater pluralism of sacred projects inside the discipline. That sentence is the hinge of his whole position and it lives in a blog comment. Nothing in the book does to critical realist personalism what “The Sociologist as Partisan” did to underdog sociology. The nearest thing is his positive program, where he asks sociologists to earn their keep by reporting accurately to the societies that fund them, including to stakeholders whose projects contradict the sociologist’s own. He calls that service social self-reflexivity. The word is Gouldner’s word. The demand is aimed outward.
Now the reception.
Bennett Berger reviewed The Coming Crisis in Social Problems in October 1970, in the same journal that had printed Gouldner’s presidential address eight years before, and took it apart. Parsonianism never dominated American sociology; sociologists of that era ran on their own tracks; the most popular books of the 1950s were not Parsonian. Berger found the critique of Parsons superficial and read Gouldner as implying that Parsons was a fraud whose reputation rested on his Harvard address. He noted claims made without evidence. He also conceded the thing that made the book live, which is that Gouldner, trained by one of Parsons’s own students, used the critique as the basis for a sociological analysis of where Parsons’s ideas came from and what they had to do with laissez-faire capitalism in the 1930s and welfare-state capitalism after. John Rhoads followed in the American Journal of Sociology in July 1972 and argued that Gouldner had Parsons wrong on technology and wrong about wanting to prove American superiority over the Soviet bloc.
Stanley Rothman reviewed it that December in Commentary:
In the social sciences, at least, no group of academics has been more sympathetic to the students of the New Left than have sociologists, and David Riesman has even contended that the profession has contributed in some measure to the development of the movement. Ironically, New Left students who are now becoming New Left Ph.D.’s in sociology have begun to rebel against what they consider the “conservatism” of some of their ex-professors. Alvin Gouldner’s book argues that all of this presages the emergence of a new “radical” sociology, and he tries to create a theoretical framework to serve as its guide.
Essentially Gouldner’s book consists of five interrelated parts: an attack on “objective,” “value-free” social science; a sociology of the history of sociology; a critique of Talcott Parsons, together with an analysis of the sources of his thought; some comments on the state of Marxist sociology in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; and, finally, a short statement of the author’s proposal for a new sociology.
Gouldner’s critique of the cult of “scientism” in contemporary American social science makes some telling if obvious points. The overly abstract language used by sociologists (and political scientists) frequently conceals conceptual poverty. Today’s social scientists often lack historical perspective and their excessive concern with methodological purity can contribute little or nothing to understanding contemporary American society and its problems. Certainly many of those who emphasize their “objectivity” and the value-free character of social science produce studies which derive from only partially conscious assumptions about the nature of reality.
What is Gouldner’s remedy? Part of it involves the recognition that social science can never achieve complete objectivity, and the demand that sociologists strive to understand the social and psychological sources of their own biases, or, as he labels them, “background” and “domain assumptions.” Social scientists must renounce the attempt to achieve complete detachment and strive to bring into existence the good, the true, and the beautiful. In evaluating their own work they should be primarily concerned with the social consequences of their findings. Their task, in short, is to produce studies and theories which contribute to the “liberation” rather than the continued repression of man. Thus the way is paved for a deeply self-aware, “reflexive” sociology.
Smith’s reception ran the same course at higher speed. Perrin called the evidentiary base “irresponsibly haphazard,” said it was interpreted disingenuously and in places factually wrong, described the pages as filled with score-settling as if Smith had kept an enemies list, and counted the misspelled author names and missing verbs. Cohen wrote under a title that dismissed the thesis as a misdiagnosis of modernity. Meanwhile First Things ran the argument and extended it to all the human sciences in the elite universities. P. C. Kemeny, writing for an evangelical journal, credited Smith with calling out most American sociologists as religious bigots and summarized the conclusion that sociology answers only to sociologists, which is to answer to no one.
In both cases the professional journals said the evidence was thin and the outside press said the diagnosis was correct. In both cases the sorting ran along the line of who stood to gain. That pattern is not a refutation of either book. It is data of the kind both books claim to be about, and neither author’s supporters treated it that way.
Which brings the frame back onto its author, and this is where the parallel stops being flattering to anyone.
Gouldner had published Enter Plato in the middle 1960s, a study of classical Greece and the origins of social theory. In the spring of 1968, someone in his department pinned a poster on the sociology bulletin board. It followed a format then running in Ramparts, in which a public figure appeared as an animal with a mock-Latin species name. Gouldner appeared as Inter Alios Platonicus, the “Silver-Tongued High-Priestly Bird,” given to nesting in high places, soaring before dropping to feed on carrion, chewing on thoughts when no personalities were available. Everyone in the building would have caught the reference to the book.
Wustl
Gouldner decided that Laud Humphreys (1930–1988) had written it. Humphreys had trained as an Episcopal priest, and the poster carried Latin. Humphreys was a senior graduate student, outspoken, and a protégé of Lee Rainwater, who was Gouldner’s rival in a department already at war. Gouldner had given up the chairmanship and found his influence gone. Graduate students were organizing and asking for a veto over faculty hires.
Humphreys’s diary entries for May 20 and 21, 1968, describe Gouldner coming into his office, hitting him repeatedly, and Humphreys going to the emergency room afterward. The New York Times covered it in June under a headline reporting that a sociology professor stood accused of beating a student. Gouldner denied the allegations and framed the episode as a dispute inside a radicalizing department. Accounts since have not converged. Eight senior faculty left the department in 1969 and 1970, for Harvard, Boston University, Rutgers, Arizona, Vanderbilt, Cornell, and NYU. Washington University eventually closed sociology down and did not restore it for decades. Humphreys, who had been expected to stay on as an assistant professor there, went to Southern Illinois at Edwardsville instead, and published Tearoom Trade in 1970.
Set that against the 1962 address. The man who told sociologists that their unexamined background assumptions and their flattering self-image required analysis walked down a corridor and hit a student who had drawn him as a bird. A reviewer in The American Sociologist later made the general form of the complaint: Gouldner never followed his own call for a reflexive sociology in any systematic way, and turned the analysis back on himself only sporadically.
So the test the frame produces is not whether Smith is right about American sociology. The test is whether he has run the instrument on himself, and the record is mixed.
On the credit side, Divided by Faith is his. In 2000 he and Michael Emerson documented White evangelical racial individualism and treated racial inequality as structurally produced, which is the finding his later admirers on the right have the least use for, and he has never withdrawn it. He concedes in print that his own work rests on moral judgments about flourishing and dignity. He states that an atheist with the right knowledge can serve a Catholic university’s mission better than a disgruntled Catholic. He argues in Building Catholic Higher Education for the institution he later left.
On the debit side, his account of his own conduct is temperament. In the First Things essay he attributes his difficulty with institutions that fall short of their stated principles to a residue of Protestant Reformation sensibility, and his refusal to soften what he names to a Philadelphia upbringing. Both explanations are charming and neither is sociology. A reflexive treatment would ask what position a mid-career convert occupies in a Catholic research university, what returns accrue to the role of the frank insider, and what the market for that role looked like in the Catholic press in 2026. He describes his colleagues freezing when a junior faculty member endorsed a graduate student’s charge that the department was white supremacist, and he casts himself as the man asking hard questions and everyone else as afraid. That may be an accurate report. It is also the only account of the episode in circulation, written by one party, and the frame he made his name with would ask why the account has that shape.
Then there is the claim that cannot be checked. Smith reported that colleagues around the country told him privately his book was essentially right and would not say so publicly out of fear and self-preservation. Gouldner had the same instinct and warned against it in the same breath, which is the point of his line about suspecting voluntary confessions. A claim that silence confirms the thesis has left the discipline’s evidentiary rules behind. It also cost him nothing to make, because it is exactly what a reader sympathetic to him wants to hear.
Two consequences follow.
The first is that the instrument is symmetric. If Gouldner was right that a discipline’s unexamined commitments show up in its research questions, its hiring, its journals, and its treatment of dissenters, that is true whichever commitments happen to be in force. Anyone who accepted Gouldner in 1970 and dismissed Smith in 2014 owes an account of the difference that does not reduce to the identity of the target. Anyone who cheered Smith and would have dismissed Gouldner owes the same account in the other direction. As far as I can find, nobody in either fight has supplied it.
The second. The reflexive argument is easy to launch and hard to complete, because completing it means turning the analysis on the coalition that is applauding. Gouldner did it once, in 1968, and paid for it, and then failed the test in a corridor a few months later. Smith has done it in a blog reply. Aiming the instrument outward brings allies, invitations, and a hearing. Aiming it inward brings what Gouldner got from the people he had persuaded.
Gouldner died of a heart attack in Madrid in December 1980, at sixty. The journal he founded in 1974, Theory and Society, outlived him, and his name survives mostly as a stop on reading lists and as the punchline of a story about a poster. Smith is sixty-five and in Florida, finishing a book about tarot and reiki. Neither man turned the argument all the way around. It is still the best instrument in the toolbox and it is still mostly used as a club.
Notes
The blurb. Gorski’s line is on Oxford’s own page for the book, and repeated in the Amazon listings. Gorski is a target of the value-free-sociology defense that cites Gouldner against him, in Bradley Campbell’s “Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Sociological Morality,” Society, 2014. Campbell borrowed Gouldner’s title to argue the opposite of Gouldner’s conclusion. I left that out of the essay because it opens a second argument, but it is a live thread if you want to show how contested the Gouldner inheritance is.
Anti-Minotaur. Social Problems 9(3), Winter 1962, 199 to 213. Full text PDF. Extracts. The opening about the minotaur named Max is quoted at Semantic Scholar. Social Problems itself now groups Gouldner’s address with Becker’s as the two SSSP presidential contributions that made the journal a site for arguments about knowledge and power. One date discrepancy to resolve before publishing: Gouldner says in the 1968 essay that he delivered the address in 1961, Wikipedia gives his SSSP presidency as 1962, and the article appeared in the Winter 1962 issue. I wrote “delivered in 1961, published in the winter of 1962,” which reconciles them.
The Coming Crisis. Basic Books, 1970. Page count and price from Rothman’s review header. The background-and-domain-assumptions summary and the reflexive-sociology demand are set out in the publisher and reader summaries. Table of contents. Bernard Phillips’s attempt to reconstruct the reflexive-sociology idea, in The American Sociologist, is the source for the observation that Gouldner never followed his own call systematically: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02691807, with the fuller abstract.
The Sociologist as Partisan. The American Sociologist 3(2), 1968, 103 to 116. The opening pages, including the disenchantment line and the passage about drawing back from his own persuaded readers. Becker’s “Whose Side Are We On?” is Social Problems 14, 1967, 239 to 247. Martyn Hammersley’s “Which side was Becker on?”, Qualitative Research 1(1), 2001, argues Becker was widely misread and notes that Gouldner later softened toward him, which complicates my account slightly and is worth reading before you commit. Gouldner reprinted both essays as the first two chapters of For Sociology (1973), listed at http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/gouldner4.html.
Reception of Coming Crisis. Berger, Social Problems 18(2), October 1970, 275 to 280. Rhoads, American Journal of Sociology 78(1), July 1972, 136 to 154. Rothman, Commentary, December 1970.
Reception of The Sacred Project. Perrin. Smith’s reply on Cohen’s site. First Things. Kemeny. Smith’s positive program and the “earn our keep” passage. Stephen Turner’s review, which credits the description of ideological vetting and faults the neglect of structure.
The Humphreys episode. Wikipedia’s account and its citation to the Times. The poster text and species name, drawn from the appendix of the Humphreys biography, at https://scatter.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/tearoom-trade/ and https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/the-day-alvin-gouldner-punched-a-guy/ and Scott McLemee’s Inside Higher Ed column. The departmental context, including Rainwater, the graduate-student organizing, and Gouldner’s loss of the chairmanship. The diary entries for May 20 and 21, 1968, and the Times coverage are reproduced as figures in Janice Irvine’s Marginal People in Deviant Places. The biography itself is John Galliher and others, Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology. Gouldner’s denial is summarized at Grokipedia.
The Sacred Project of American Sociology
Smith writes:
This may seem strange for a discipline devoted to showing how individual people are powerfully influenced, if not constituted and determined, by their social environments. But sociology’s sacred project finds a way to finesse this tension. The controlling influencer that society is, which sociology reveals, is associated with the constraining (oppressive, exploiting, discriminating) part of human experience, which the individual needs to resist and overcome if he or she is to be free, happy, and healthy.
Smith is making a point about sociology’s normative anthropology, not about what sociologists study. Those come apart. As a description of research objects, the claim is weak. Most of the discipline works at levels where no individual appears: demography, stratification and mobility, network analysis, organizational and economic sociology, historical-comparative work, criminology, urban sociology. Those fields produce rates, distributions, and institutional histories. The single most cited theorist in the field is Bourdieu, whose habitus exists to deny that people author themselves. Nothing in that body of work is individual-focused in any sense Smith needs.
As a description of the evaluative vocabulary, he is on much better ground. When sociologists stop describing and start judging, the good outcome is usually framed as the removal of constraints on self-definition. Agency, voice, resistance, authenticity, self-determination. The structure-and-agency problem gets solved in practice by finding agency, and finding agency counts as a positive result. That pattern is real, and it does sit oddly with a discipline whose founding claim is that people are made by their surroundings.
Social constitution gets coded as pathology when it produces outcomes the analyst dislikes and as authentic expression when it produces outcomes he likes. The same causal story becomes internalized oppression or community formation depending on the destination. A woman shaped by her church is constrained. A woman shaped by a consciousness-raising group has found herself. Both are socialization. There is no worked-out account in the literature of which social influences count as constitutive and which count as coercive, and the sorting tracks politics. That asymmetry is Smith’s best find and it survives the objections to the rest of the book.
Now the objections.
First, the largest normative strand in sociology over the last thirty years runs the other way. The critique of neoliberal responsibilization, of therapeutic culture, of the self-help subject, of personal-responsibility framings, of the atomized consumer, of declining social capital. That is a sustained attack on individualism. Smith’s own Divided by Faith is one of the more influential entries in it. He wrote the book documenting that White evangelicals cannot see structure because their culture supplies only individualist categories, and then wrote a book saying his discipline is committed to the free-floating individual. Both can be true, since the target differs, but he never reconciles them and a reader is entitled to notice.
Second, the two halves of his own formula pull against each other. Emancipation and autonomy point at the individual. Equality, as sociology actually pursues it, points at groups: class position, racial position, gendered position. Intersectionality and critical race theory are explicitly anti-individualist and treat colorblind individualism as the enemy. Philip Gorski, in the blurb Oxford printed on the book, asked whether Smith’s three values were at odds with one another in unexamined ways. That question was never answered, by Smith or anyone.
Third, Philip Cohen’s objection, which he published in July 2014 under the title “It’s modernity, stupid.” His argument is that what Smith identifies is not sociology’s peculiar project, and that Smith’s own summary of it reads as a description of liberal modernity. Sociologists are educated Americans, and educated Americans hold these commitments. To show a sacred project distinctive to the discipline, you would need evidence that sociologists differ from comparably educated non-sociologists, and Smith supplies none. Cohen also noted that Smith’s prose slides into strings of hyphenated enemies, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Fourth, the evidence. Smith’s method was to look at the books on display at the ASA meetings and the titles reviewed in Contemporary Sociology, and to reason from a career’s observation. Perrin called the evidentiary base irresponsibly haphazard, and he was right. The claim is testable. Content-code the flagship journals across four decades for whose autonomy is being defended and against what, and the answer would be a finding. Nobody has done it, as far as I can find, which is odd given how much the argument circulated.
Sociology’s objects are structural. Its moral imagination is emancipationist. Its emancipation is sometimes individual and sometimes collective, and it has never worked out the relation between the two. Smith caught the discipline in a real inconsistency about which social influences liberate and which oppress, and then overstated it into a unified project held by a field of thousands, which is the same move he spent his career objecting to when other people made it about evangelicals.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
David Pinsof’s essay exposes the engine that Christian Smith describes in The Sacred Project of American Sociology. Smith argues that modern social science operates not as a detached, objective discipline, but as a spiritual crusade. This crusade seeks human emancipation, the eradication of oppression, and the mitigation of inequality. Pinsof shows how this crusade manifests in the intellectual elite’s obsession with the misunderstanding myth. By framing war, bigotry, and political division as simple errors in processing information, intellectuals position themselves as the essential cure.
The myth serves a vital function for the academic class. If the masses are merely broken or blinded by cognitive biases, then the social scientist becomes a secular savior. His interventions, nudges, and policy recommendations replace traditional religious paths to redemption. Smith notes that social scientists carry a deep, unacknowledged faith in their own moral righteousness. Pinsof grounds this insight by revealing that this apparent benevolence masks a competitive drive for status and power. Intellectuals claim they want to enlighten the public, but their theories allow them to look down on ordinary citizens and defend the political interests of their own social group.
Evolution shapes humans to compete for resources, status, and control of the state apparatus. Social scientists are not exempt from this Darwinian logic. Their focus on correcting biases is a tool to delegitimize their rivals. When a sociologist attributes conservative politics or working-class attitudes to misinformation, he engages in the zero-sum conflict that Pinsof describes. He uses his professional authority to fight dirty under a veneer of therapeutic care. Smith’s framework shows that the social sciences have built an entire institutional structure to justify this behavior. They turn political preferences into clinical diagnoses, converting raw competition into a moral duty to fix a broken species.
The Great Delusion
If John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right that humans are tribal at their core, driven by survival, and shaped almost entirely by group socialization before their reasoning faculties ever develop, then the personalist sociology of Christian Smith faces a fundamental challenge.
Smith anchors his entire sociological framework in personalism. In works like What Is a Person? (2010), he argues that humans possess an ontological nature characterized by particular capacities, distinct features, and emergent properties that make them persons. To Smith, humans are not just products of socialization or evolutionary survival drives. They are teleological beings, naturally oriented toward distinct goods, truth, and flourishing.
If Mearsheimer’s stark, evolutionary realism is correct, the implications for Smith’s sociology are severe.
First, the concept of human rights and dignity loses its ontological foundation. Smith argues that human rights are real because they emerge from the objective reality of what a person is. If Mearsheimer is right, these rights are merely a late-stage liberal fiction. Mearsheimer views rights as a universalist ideology invented by a specific culture, used to justify ambitious foreign policies. If survival and group allegiance dictate human behavior, then dignity is not an inherent quality but a luxury concept that groups grant or revoke based on strategic utility.
Second, the human capacity for moral agency becomes an illusion. Smith views moral mapping as a core capacity of personhood, where individuals consciously navigate and evaluate their lives toward the good. Mearsheimer reduces this capacity to an unchosen inheritance. Because the long period of human childhood allows intense socialization to occur before critical faculties develop, the individual receives an enormous value infusion from his group. By the time a man can reason, his moral code is already fixed by inborn attitudes and social conditioning. Smith’s active moral agent is replaced by a thoroughly socialized tribal actor.
Third, the nature of social institutions shifts from moral projects to survival systems. Smith views institutions as structures that can either deform or promote human flourishing. For Mearsheimer, institutions and social groups exist primarily because a man cannot survive as a lone wolf. Cooperation is a calculation of security. The group shapes identity to ensure cohesion against external threats, not to elevate the human soul or fulfill a higher purpose.
If Mearsheimer is right, Smith’s personalism is an account of a being that does not exist. The emergent, truth-seeking person is replaced by a deeply socialized creature whose moral horizon is bounded by the tribe, whose reasoning serves his sentiments, and whose primary logic is survival.
The Logic of Confidence
On June 1, 2023, the Association of American Universities announced six new members. Arizona State, George Washington, UC Riverside, Miami, South Florida, and Notre Dame. The additions brought the total to 71 institutions, 69 American and two Canadian. Membership comes by invitation, and the invitation rests on an extensive set of quantitative indicators describing the breadth and quality of a university’s research and education. The association was founded in 1900 and its main attraction for nonmembers is prestige. New presidents of nonmember universities often list admission as a goal of their administration.
Notre Dame’s president gave a statement. John Jenkins said the university’s mission was “to be a preeminent research university,” to provide an unsurpassed undergraduate education, and to have everything it does informed by its Catholic mission. The chair of the board of trustees called the day a major milestone in the history of Notre Dame and credited Jenkins, his administration, and the faculty.
Read that statement again and count. Three goals, in that order.
Thirty-one months later Christian Smith published an essay arguing that those three goals cannot coexist, that the third had been sacrificed to the first, and that the sacrifice followed from a logic nobody had the courage to name. He borrowed the iron triangle from project management to make the point: cheap, fast, and good, pick two.
Both documents are accurate. The press release states the organization’s aspiration and the essay states what happened to it. What neither supplies is an account of why the arrangement is normal, and that account has existed since 1977, in the flagship journal of the discipline Smith spent forty years in.
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan published “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony” in the American Journal of Sociology in September 1977, volume 83, number 2, pages 340 through 363. Both were at Stanford. Their argument runs like this. Formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. Organizations incorporate those rules, which function as myths, and by incorporating them gain legitimacy, resources, stability, and improved survival prospects. Organizations that become isomorphic with the myths of their institutional environment, as against organizations shaped by the demands of technical production, reduce internal coordination and control in order to keep that legitimacy. Structures get decoupled from each other and from activity. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of confidence and good faith operates. Confidence in structural elements is maintained through three practices, which they take from Goffman: avoidance, discretion, and overlooking. Decoupling lets an organization hold standardized legitimating structures while its activities vary with practical necessity. Organizations in a field come to resemble one another in formal structure, reflecting shared institutional origins, while differing widely in practice.
Now put Smith’s inventory of grievances beside that paragraph and watch them sort themselves.
The mission statement is the myth. Smith quotes it and quotes three presidents and a provost restating it, and treats the repetition as evidence of insincerity. In the theory the repetition is the structure working. The requirement of a predominant number of Catholic faculty is the ceremonial element. Counting anyone baptized Catholic as Catholic, which Smith calls the tick-box approach, is the decoupling: the category stays intact and available for inspection while hiring proceeds on other grounds. Two theology courses and two philosophy courses for undergraduates is ceremonial classification. The centers and institutes are what the theory predicts most precisely, and Smith describes them accurately without seeing what he is describing. He says engagement with the Catholic tradition happens in pockets. Pockets are where you put a myth so that it can be pointed to without disturbing the units that do the work. He calls this a failure of integration. The theory calls it buffering, and treats it as the design.
Then there is the anecdote he tells with the most feeling.
In 2014 Smith published Building Catholic Higher Education with John Cavadini, a book he describes as affirming and encouraging toward his own university. He mailed copies to academic leaders and to colleagues. The entire faculty of a Protestant university on the West Coast read and discussed it. A few colleagues in other departments told him it was nice work. Not one leader of Notre Dame acknowledged it. Smith compared the silence to a family dinner table where somebody says the wrong thing and everyone freezes and then carries on as though nothing had been said. He read it as fear, and found it almost funny.
Avoidance, discretion, overlooking. Those are the three words, published when Smith was sixteen years old, for what happened to his book. The silence was the maintenance procedure. Acknowledging the book would have meant opening the ceremonial structure to inspection, and the logic of confidence exists to prevent inspection, because inspection produces the conflict and the loss of legitimacy that decoupling is there to avoid. Notre Dame’s leaders did not fail to respond. They responded correctly. Smith wrote a book that pointed at the gap between the myth and the practice and mailed it to the people whose job is to keep the gap unexamined, and then recorded their behavior as a character defect.
That is the shape of his whole essay. He explains the gap structurally in one section and then attributes it to deficient men in every other. Leaders lack vision and courage. Administrators are petrified of conflict. Nebulous terms suffice for people who have only a vague sense of what engagement would look like. His prescriptions follow from the diagnosis: be clear, be vocal, have the argument. Meyer and Rowan predict the gap in any organization whose legitimacy comes from conformity to environmental myths and whose output resists technical validation. A university is the paradigm case. Nobody can measure whether an education worked. That is why the mission statement cannot be enforced without cost, and why an institution in Notre Dame’s position will restate it, indefinitely, no matter who is president.
Smith’s remedies are proposals to recouple. Send short-listed candidates a document about the mission. Raise it in interviews. Give first-semester course releases for a seminar on the Catholic intellectual tradition. Weigh contributions to the mission in tenure and promotion reviews. Every item takes a ceremonial element and attaches it to a practice with consequences. The theory says recoupling has a price. Two literatures since have measured what the price is, and both were available to him.
Patricia Bromley and Walter Powell published a review in the Academy of Management Annals in 2012, volume 6, number 1, arguing that the familiar understanding of decoupling as a gap between policy and practice conceals a more prevalent and more consequential form, “a gap between means and ends.” Where policy-practice decoupling may be largely ceremonial, means-ends decoupling has extensive consequences, often unintended. And they locate its source in rationalizing trends: the growing influence of managerial science, rising demands for accountability and transparency, pressure to align policy with practice across an expanding array of domains.
That distinction reorganizes Smith’s case. Notre Dame is not mostly running smoke and mirrors. It requires the courses. It funds the centers. It counts the Catholics. It files the reports and collects the metrics. What nobody can demonstrate is any connection between the activity and the end it is said to serve. Smith supplies the evidence himself when he reports that even the reductive practice of counting studies on Catholic topics has been partly abandoned. That is a means-ends gap noticed and then left alone.
Here is what follows. Smith files two separate complaints. One is that the Catholic mission has been hollowed out. The other is that the university has been overrun by administrative bloat, neoliberal efficiency metrics, annual reports, procedural updates, and external review letters. He treats these as two grievances that happen to share a target. Bromley and Powell say they are one phenomenon. The rationalizing apparatus he hates is what generates the means-ends decoupling he mourns. More accountability machinery produces more elaborate activity with weaker connection to purpose. His demand for clearer standards, documented expectations, orientation seminars, and mission criteria in tenure files is a demand for more of the apparatus, which by this account produces more of the disconnection. He wrote the diagnosis and the disease into the same essay and never noticed them shaking hands.
Michael Sauder and Wendy Espeland supply the other half, in the American Sociological Review in February 2009, volume 74, number 1, pages 63 through 82. Studying law schools, they explain why rankings permeated those organizations so thoroughly and why the organizations could not buffer the pressure. Their finding is that decoupling does not depend only on external enforcement or on the capacity of members to hide activity. Members internalize the pressure and become “self-disciplining.” An earlier paper of theirs, in the American Journal of Sociology in 2007, made the case for the reactivity of public measures, which recreate the worlds they claim to describe.
Smith’s picture of daily life at Notre Dame is a portrait of self-disciplining members. Faculty too harried by careerist competition and bureaucratic demand to sit down and talk about ideas. Graduate students on a specialization treadmill under threat of losing funding if they do not finish efficiently. A dean’s office whose highest stated priority is publication in top journals. A department that mimicked every other sociology department and clawed at the rankings. Nobody in that account is being coerced by an inspector. They have taken the measure inside themselves, which is what Sauder and Espeland found and what makes buffering fail.
Which returns us to June 1, 2023. The buffer that had protected the Catholic mission for decades was slack: unmeasured time, unaudited units, undisturbed pockets. Rankings and quantitative membership criteria consume slack. Notre Dame spent twenty years acquiring the measures that would eliminate the space in which its myth had been comfortably housed, and the trustees called the acquisition a milestone. On this reading the prize and the loss are the same event, and Smith’s departure two and a half years later is a lagging indicator.
Tim Hallett published “The Myth Incarnate” in the American Sociological Review in February 2010, volume 75, number 1, pages 52 through 74. His question is what happens when a rationalized cultural ideal stops being symbolic and is given tangible flesh. Two years of ethnography in an urban elementary school gave him recoupling processes, through which myths and practices that had been loosely connected become tightly linked. Recoupling accountability to classroom practice produced a condition the teachers themselves named “turmoil.” Turmoil had two dimensions: epistemic distress, and a partisan reconstruction of meanings.
Now the winter of 2026. Notre Dame appointed Susan Ostermann to direct the Liu Institute in January. Her published support for abortion rights drew objections, at least nine bishops joined the local bishop, Smith’s essay appeared on February 13 and was immediately used as ammunition, students marched on the Dome on February 27, and Ostermann withdrew. Within three weeks Cathleen Kaveny and Robin Darling Young argued in Commonweal that Notre Dame is a shrine and shrines are never pure, Fr. Bill Miscamble argued in the Irish Rover that the administration’s cowardice was on display and that Smith’s critics of the appointment were doing the Catholic tradition’s work, Walter Nicgorski argued that Smith was well grounded and that his own experience had been different, and Chris Damian argued in the National Catholic Reporter that the failings predate Smith by sixty years and that his parting advice against hope was the real failure.
Four Catholic scholars, four incompatible accounts of what a Catholic university is, published in three weeks. That is the partisan reconstruction of meanings, on Hallett’s schedule. Somebody tried to make the myth incarnate in a personnel decision, and the turmoil arrived.
Smith spent two decades asking for recoupling. Recoupling began six weeks after he cleared his office, in the form he had warned against, driven by the conservative pressure campaigns he said do more harm than good, and it produced exactly the institutional conflict the theory says decoupling exists to prevent. He was right that the gap was real, right that closing it would generate contention, and wrong about who would close it and how.
Notes
The AAU announcement of June 1, 2023, with the membership count and the invitation criteria. Notre Dame’s own version, with Jenkins’s three-part statement and John Brennan’s milestone line. Coverage giving the prestige framing and the detail about nonmember presidents listing AAU admission as a goal: Forbes and Higher Ed Dive. Jenkins listing the three goals in that order, in that document, is the single best find in this piece and I have not seen anyone put it next to Smith’s iron triangle. Smith’s essay refers to the membership as just-acquired without naming the date.
Meyer and Rowan. American Journal of Sociology 83(2), September 1977, 340 to 363, JSTOR. Full text circulating at https://www.studocu.com/row/document/addis-ababa-university/strategic-management/institutionalized-organizations-formal-structure-as-myth-and-ceremony/16955413 and https://www.studocu.com/sv/document/stockholms-universitet/organisation-ii/meyer-j-rowan-b-artikel/10831429, which is where the passages on decoupling, the logic of confidence and good faith, and the avoidance-discretion-overlooking triad appear. The Goffman source they cite for the triad is Interaction Ritual (1967), pages in the 200s. Their companion piece on schools, Meyer and Rowan, “The Structure of Educational Organizations” (1978), is the education-specific version.
Bromley and Powell. Academy of Management Annals 6(1), 2012. Bromley hosts a PDF, which is where the line about means-ends decoupling having extensive and often unintended consequences sits. Note for accuracy: Powell was at Stanford’s School of Education and Bromley was at Utah‘s political science department when it ran.
Sauder and Espeland. American Sociological Review 74(1), February 2009, 63 to 82. The earlier reactivity paper is Espeland and Sauder, American Journal of Sociology 113, 2007, 1 to 40. Their frame is Foucauldian, on surveillance and normalization.
Hallett. American Sociological Review 75(1), February 2010, 52 to 74. The two dimensions of turmoil, epistemic distress and partisan reconstruction of meanings, are summarized at https://www.academia.edu/7733818/The_Myth_Incarnate. He is at Indiana, and the inhabited-institutionalism program he works in is the same tradition, so using him does not break the single-frame rule.
Smith’s essay and the replies. All the Notre Dame detail is from https://firstthings.com/why-im-done-with-notre-dame/, fetched in full, so the bookstore, the pockets, the tick-box hiring, the theology faculty meeting, the graduate students and funding, the goal-displacement passage, and the account of the silence around Building Catholic Higher Education are his own words paraphrased. Kaveny and Young: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/kaveny-young-notre-dame-christian-smith-shrine-higher-ed. Miscamble and Nicgorski, including the Faculty Senate vote: https://irishrover.net/2026/02/faculty-responses-to-christian-smith/. Damian, with the Land O’Lakes and Burtchaell background and the March on the Dome caption: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/christian-smiths-un-christian-critique-notre-dame.
Mission Muster
Somewhere in Flanner Hall, at a sociology department faculty meeting, the subject of mission hires comes up. Christian Smith reports what happens next. The conversation sometimes turns to strategizing ways to recruit the colleague the department already wants, for reasons unrelated to the Catholic mission, who might nevertheless pass mission muster in the dean’s office.
He offers this as evidence of bad faith. Look instead at the phrase. Mission muster is a test that can be passed. A test can be passed only where the criteria admit of work. And criteria admit of work when they are vague. The department is not defeating the mission language. It is using it as designed.
David Pinsof’s “Vague Bullshit,” published June 30, 2025, argues that status games are unstable, because being seen as a status-seeker lowers your status. The only way everyone can compete is by convincing themselves they are pursuing something else, something selfless and larger than the self. Authenticity, honor, wisdom, justice. He calls the thing that holds this together a high-minded mission statement, and says the game could collapse without it. The ladder stays sturdy because nobody sees it as a ladder.
His second claim is that vagueness is strategy. A vague statement sorts an audience: the people who understand it are similar to you, close to you, paying attention, and disposed to treat you as worth attending to. Decoding it correctly feels like hitting the social jackpot. Failing to decode it marks you as outside. Vagueness is a covert signal.
Set that against Notre Dame’s constituencies and the mission language stops looking like evasion.
The trustees want AAU standing, endowment growth, and a president who does not create headlines. The local bishop and the nine who joined him want doctrinal fidelity enforced in personnel decisions. Alumni want the Dome, the football team, the Grotto, and their children admitted. Faculty want journal placements, grant support, and no one auditing their syllabi for Catholic content. Applicants want prestige with a chapel in the dorm. Donors want all of it and no fights.
A statement precise enough to act on picks a winner. Every constituency that loses learns it lost, on the record, in language it can quote back. The words identity and character survive because every party can decode them favorably and none can prove another party wrong. Smith reports that nebulous terms suffice for leaders who seem to have only a vague sense of what serious engagement would look like. Pinsof’s reply is that the leaders have a precise sense of what it would look like, and of what it would cost, and that the vagueness is what allows five groups who want incompatible things to sit at the same table.
The university’s marketing slogan asks what you would fight for, and he says it rings hollow given the stated central purpose. A slogan that named what to fight for would not ring hollow. It would ring, and half the room would walk out.
The sorting works too, exactly as Pinsof describes it. Smith says engagement with the Catholic tradition happens in pockets: certain programs, certain centers, certain individual faculty. Those are the people who decode the mission statement the way its authors would endorse, and who feel the jackpot when they find each other. Smith was one of them for years. He arrived believing the university was serious and tried to make his contribution, with some success by his own account. Then he stopped reading the vagueness as depth and started reading it as evasion, which is what happens when a man leaves the in-group, and he wrote the essay.
Now the correction. Smith is not making the naive claim. The essay’s third section is structural. He takes the iron triangle from project management, argues that excellent undergraduate education, a serious Catholic mission, and rapid ascent to research preeminence cannot all be had, and says the compromise of the mission follows from an inexorable logic and was predictable. He adds that Notre Dame should stop calling the project ambitious and start calling it impossible. He also states that he is not narrating decline from a golden age, since he lacks the standing to assess that, and is instead comparing stated goals to observed reality. Those are the sentences of a man who knows that institutions do not do what they say.
What is naive is the affect, and the affect and the analysis sit in the same essay without meeting. He explains the gap structurally in one section and reacts to it as an outrage in every other. He calls himself disappointed and vexed. He left at sixty-five over it. If the logic is inexorable, disappointment is a category error, and the essay never notices that it has supplied its own answer.
Which brings the useful hit into view.
In “Incentives Are Everything,” from January 22, 2024, Pinsof names two rival worldviews. The first is incentive determinism: behavior is determined by incentives, where incentives are things in the world that human primates evolved to want. The second is what he calls likability determinism, the habit of explaining outcomes by the moral quality of the people involved. Bad things happen because bad people did them, using their free will powers. Good things happen because good people rose up from nowhere. Under this view, policy is bad because we lack good enough people in power, and if we installed the more likable people everything would improve. He adds Robin Hanson’s term righttalkism for the corollary: that the way to fix the world is to get people to talk the right way.
Now inventory Smith’s causal claims about Notre Dame.
Leadership lacks vision and courage. Top administrators are petrified by the prospect of conflict and avoid it like the plague. Many university leaders have only a vague sense of what engagement would look like. Some department chairs are indifferent to the mission and some actively resist and subvert it. A former chair threw him under the bus to coddle a faction of graduate students. His colleagues froze with fear when a junior colleague endorsed a charge of white supremacy. Nothing petrifies white liberals more than being called racist.
Every one of those is a claim about deficient character or deficient understanding. And his first remedy is that leaders should be consistently clear and vocal about the purposes of a university with a Catholic mission, which is righttalkism in its pure form: the problem is what people say, and the solution is for them to say it better and more often.
Pinsof’s answer is that the people in the hole understand the hole. Notre Dame’s administrators can price a serious Catholic intellectual mission. It costs journal placements, because faculty time spent on the tradition is time not spent on output. It narrows an already thin hiring pool, which Smith concedes himself when he writes that no amount of money can produce enough believing Catholic scholars who are also top researchers and excellent teachers. It generates public fights that unsettle donors and alarm peers. And it puts at risk a membership acquired on June 1, 2023, awarded by invitation on an extensive set of quantitative indicators describing the breadth and quality of research and education. Smith himself worries in print that serious engagement could get the AAU card revoked. He identifies the incentive and then declines to let it explain the behavior.
Nd
The best evidence against his diagnosis came from a man defending the university. Walter Nicgorski, explaining why he stayed after forty-two years, reported that when the declining number of practicing Catholic faculty became a public argument in the 1980s, a majority of the faculty expressed their view in a Faculty Senate vote affirming that academic prestige was to be preferred whenever it appeared to conflict with the Catholic mission. That is not confusion, cowardice, or a failure of vision. That is a body of people stating a priority in a recorded vote, forty years before Smith’s essay, and then leaving the mission statement on the books where it does its other job.
Smith’s proposed remedies are incentive design. Send short-listed candidates a document explaining the mission before they interview. Raise it in the interview alongside the research and teaching record. Give new hires a first-semester course release to attend a seminar on the Catholic intellectual tradition. Weigh contributions to the mission in tenure and promotion reviews. Every item takes a cheap word and attaches a price to it. Course release is money. Tenure criteria are careers. That is a man who knows exactly how little talk costs and is trying to make it cost more.
He notes that graduate students are pressured to finish efficiently under threat of losing funding, and traces the specialization treadmill to that threat. He names goal displacement, which is an account of what happens when secondary organizational rewards crowd out primary purposes. He observes that the dean’s office made top-journal publication the highest priority and that the department behaved accordingly. Those are incentive explanations, correctly drawn.
So the essay contains two theories. Smith applies the character theory to the people and the incentive theory to the plumbing, and never notices the two are in the same document doing incompatible work. If the incentives explain the graduate students and the publication treadmill, they explain the deans. If the deans need courage, the graduate students need courage too, and the funding threat is beside the point.
Pinsof lists three ingredients required to change the world with words. Something new and important to say that nobody else was going to say. An incentive for people to listen. An incentive for them to respond the way you intended. You control the first. You do not control the other two. His example of the third failing is Darwinism turned into a warrant for eugenics.
Run Smith’s career through that.
In 2014 he published Building Catholic Higher Education with John Cavadini, mailed copies to academic leaders and colleagues, and got silence. A few colleagues in other departments said nice work. No leader acknowledged it. Ingredient one was in hand. Ingredient two was absent. Nobody in the Main Building had any reason to read a book whose subject was the distance between what the university says and what it does.
In February 2026 ingredient two arrived, and not because the argument had improved. Notre Dame had announced in January that Susan Ostermann would direct the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and her published support for abortion rights had already produced objections from faculty and outside groups. An audience existed with a reason to want a document like his. The essay ran on February 13 and traveled.
First Things
Then ingredient three failed, on the timetable Pinsof would predict.
Smith had written that conservative activists who mobilize pressure campaigns against what they see as the university’s apostasies can do more harm than good, that their tone and methods reinforce the conflict-aversion that shuts down real discussion of the mission, and that the fundamental issue is engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition. He put that in the text, unmistakably, in his own voice.
Within five days, Kaveny and Young reported in Commonweal that his essay had already been used as ammunition by those opposing the Ostermann appointment. At least nine bishops joined the local bishop in the outcry. Students marched on the Dome on February 27. Ostermann withdrew. Fr. Bill Miscamble, writing in the Irish Rover, addressed the passage and asked what Smith would have the objectors do.
The essay’s most-quoted effect was to strengthen exactly the campaign its author had disowned in writing. He had one job he could control and did it. The other two belonged to people with their own agendas, and his words were relevant to those agendas.
What He Could Not Be Told
Christian Smith and his wife entered the Catholic Church in 2010. He had arrived at Notre Dame in 2006 as William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology. Fr. Bill Miscamble, writing sixteen years later, recalled that Smith had once explained that the many “models of faithful Catholic living and thinking” at Notre Dame had drawn him into the Church.
Four years on campus, then reception into full communion, on the strength of watching particular people work.
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) trained as a physical chemist and turned to philosophy in his fifties. He introduced tacit knowing in Personal Knowledge in 1958 and gave it its slogan in The Tacit Dimension in 1966: we can know more than we can tell. The later book treats tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments as constituents of knowledge rather than as contaminants of it.
His account of skill runs against the manual. Rules of an art are maxims. A maxim guides a man who already possesses the practical knowledge the maxim summarizes, and misleads a man who does not. Connoisseurship passes by example through prolonged contact between a practitioner and someone watching him, which is apprenticeship, and the apprentice submits to an authority he cannot yet justify. The submission is the condition of acquiring the skill rather than an obstacle to it.
Smith lists Polanyi among his influences.
Set the frame down and the position of any convert comes into view.
A man raised inside a tradition acquires two bodies of knowledge. The first is the doctrine, which is written, teachable, and available to anyone who reads. The second is the working knowledge of which commitments get enforced, which get restated, which get quietly dropped, and in what register the official statements are spoken. Nobody writes the second down. Writing it down would change it, because the statement that these commitments are ceremonial cannot be made ceremonially. He acquires it by watching adults for twenty years and noticing what they do after they finish saying things.
A convert acquires the first from books and from the best living exponents he can find. He arrives holding the doctrine at full strength with no calibration.
Three consequences follow. He reads official statements literally, having no acquired sense of the register. The distance between statement and conduct registers to him as a scandal rather than as weather. And he is frequently correct on the merits, since the doctrine he holds is the doctrine, and the calibration he lacks is not a doctrinal truth about anything.
Smith knew the underlying epistemology before he converted, and published it after.
The Bible Made Impossible appeared in 2011. Its argument is that sincere, competent, well-intentioned Christians derive incompatible doctrines from the same text, a condition he named pervasive interpretive pluralism. Biblicism cannot generate a coherent Christian system on its own. Something unstated has to do the work, and what does the work is interpretation, tradition, communal authority, and theological judgment. The explicit text underdetermines the practice.
That is Polanyi’s argument applied to Scripture. Smith did not cite him for it, and he did not need to. He entered a Church on the grounds that it possessed the tradition, authority, and judgment that a text alone cannot supply. He converted for the tacit dimension.
The conversion manual came out the same year from Cascade Books in Eugene, Oregon, 205 pages, twenty-four dollars, under the title How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps. Smith states on page two that he was received into full communion in 2010, and on page three that the book is a how-to rather than a theological treatise or an apologetic argument. He borrows Thomas Kuhn to frame the transition and writes on page 184 that leaving evangelicalism and becoming Catholic requires a paradigm revolution. Mark Noll and Thomas Howard supplied endorsements.
The reviews arrived in 2013, and one of them names the deficit with precision.
Chris Castaldo, writing in Credo Magazine in February 2013, opened with Leo X describing Luther as a wild boar in Exsurge Domine and a line about converts being destructive. His central charge was that Smith portrays evangelicalism at its worst and Catholicism at its best from cover to cover. Then the sentence: “As a new convert, perhaps Smith is unaware” that the Catholic Church explicitly denounces this approach. Castaldo cited the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, in Summons to Witness to Christ in Today’s World, acknowledging in a spirit of repentance that both communions have been guilty of proselytism in its negative sense.
A convert wrote a conversion manual. A critic reported that the Church he had joined holds a teaching against the rhetorical mode he had used, and that he appeared not to have met it. Kenneth Stewart, in Themelios, judged the book partisan rather than an objective treatment.
The pattern repeats at Notre Dame, in a room, with witnesses.
Smith circulated a paper arguing that Ex Corde Ecclesiae obliges theology faculty at Catholic universities to engage colleagues in other disciplines. He reports that the ensuing meeting with most of the theology faculty revealed a suspicious, self-protective isolationism.
StuDocu
Here is what the room held that the paper did not.
John Paul II (1920–2005) promulgated Ex Corde Ecclesiae on August 15, 1990. The document mentions the mandate once, in passing, at General Norms Article 4, section 3, requiring that Catholic theologians be faithful to the Magisterium as the authentic interpreter of Scripture and Tradition. A subcommittee of four canonist-bishops drafted the American Application, studying commentary on Canon 812 and settling on the Latin, mandatum. The bishops approved the Application on November 17, 1999. The Congregation for Bishops gave the recognitio on May 3, 2000. It took force as particular law in the United States on May 3, 2001, followed by the Guidelines Concerning the Academic Mandatum. The mandatum applies to Catholic theologians teaching at Catholic colleges and to nobody else, and it is the most controversial element of the constitution. American Catholic theologians petitioned the bishops to protect academic freedom under it. Adverse personnel actions never materialized and implementation stayed minimal.
A theologian on the Notre Dame faculty in the 2010s had lived through that. He knew who reaches for Ex Corde, in what circumstances, with what follow-through, and what a colleague from another discipline circulating a paper about theologians’ obligations under it has historically signaled. Smith had read the constitution and taken it at its word.
Both men are reporting honestly. Their exposure differs, and the difference is invisible to the man with less of it, because what he lacks was never said out loud.
Stephen Park Turner (b. March 1, 1951) complicates the picture and sharpens the conclusion. He took his doctorate at Missouri, studied with Richard Rorty and Edward Shils, has taught at the University of South Florida since 1975, and spent 1985 as a visiting professor at Notre Dame.
The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions ran to 156 pages from the University of Chicago Press in 1994. Its fourth chapter is called Transmission, its last The Opacity of Practice. Turner’s claim is that a practice understood as a tacit understanding shared by a group has a fatal defect, since no plausible route exists by which the practice gets transmitted or reproduced from head to head. The assertion that the same practices and presuppositions get into many people’s heads requires a means of transmission nobody has supplied. What people have instead are habits, built from individually different learning histories, which produce functionally equivalent results in similar situations.
In Understanding the Tacit, from 2014, Turner adds that when implicit knowledge is made explicit, what gets communicated are “functional substitutes for bits of tacit knowledge” for particular audiences and particular purposes, invented on the fly.
Run Smith’s four remedies through that sentence. Send short-listed candidates a document explaining the mission. Raise it in the interview. Give new faculty a course release for a seminar on the Catholic intellectual tradition. Weigh contributions to the mission in tenure and promotion review. Each item is a functional substitute made for a particular audience. Under Turner, that is what an explicit rendering of a tradition can be. It is more than nothing, and it does not move the thing.
Smith’s own formation is the counterexample to his own prescription. Four years of proximity to particular Catholics doing particular work, which is Polanyi’s apprenticeship and Turner’s habituation, produced a convert. He then proposed a document, a seminar, and a line in a review file.
Four objections, and they are strong enough that the frame has to be stated with its limits attached.
The first is that this argument excuses anything. Recode every outsider complaint as missing tacit knowledge and the insider never answers the complaint. Cathleen Kaveny and Robin Darling Young ran the polite version in Commonweal on February 18, 2026, arguing that Notre Dame is a shrine as well as a school, that shrines are never pure, that trinket shops line the approach to St. Peter’s, and that his sensibility is Protestant. That form of the argument protects the gap by explaining the man who noticed it.
Semantic Scholar
The second is Nicgorski. Walter Nicgorski had been on the Notre Dame faculty forty-two years before Smith arrived, and he called the essay well grounded and important, while explaining that his own experience in political science and the Program of Liberal Studies had been different. Maximum exposure, same conclusion. The deficit does not predict the disagreement.
Catholic Culture
The third is Damian. Writing in the National Catholic Reporter on March 10, 2026, Chris Damian argued that the failings predate Smith’s tenure and are not unique to Notre Dame, having been set out in James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light in 1998 and traceable to the Land O’Lakes Statement of 1967. Cradle Catholics have been making this criticism for sixty years.
AbeBooks
The fourth comes from Smith’s own record and cuts against the tidiness of the story. A reviewer for The Gospel Coalition caught him telling readers to wonder when the great apostasy happened, and pointed out that the term belongs to Mormon usage for the period between the apostles and Joseph Smith’s vision in 1820, with no standing in Protestant theology. Smith spent fifty years inside evangelicalism and had studied it professionally since 1989. Whatever an insider’s working knowledge protects, it did not protect his account of the world he was leaving.
So the frame explains his affect and not his conclusions, and a reader who wants it to do more should notice that Kaveny and Young already tried.
What it does explain is the thing nothing else in this case explains.
Smith wrote that the compromise of the Catholic mission was predictable, that it followed an inexorable logic, and that Notre Dame should stop calling the project ambitious and start calling it impossible. He also wrote that he was not narrating decline from a golden age. Then he left over it at sixty-five, without a next post, and described himself as disappointed and vexed.
Explicit knowledge of a structure does not calibrate an acquired expectation. He held the iron-triangle argument as a proposition, arrived at by analysis, and he held Catholic intellectual seriousness as a formation, acquired by watching men do it in a building in Indiana between 2006 and 2010. Propositions do not reach formations. A man can prove to himself that the thing he was promised cannot exist and still be unable to stop expecting it, because the expectation was never a proposition.
Which returns to the pockets.
Smith says engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition at Notre Dame survives in pockets: certain programs, certain centers, certain individual faculty. Those pockets converted him. The men Miscamble says Smith named as models were doing, in his presence, over four years, the work he later said the university does not do.
Both reports are accurate. There were enough such men to make a sociologist a Catholic and not enough to make a Catholic university.
