Family rises or falls with religion

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularism

Mary Eberstadt

Templeton Press 

2013 

268 pages

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It is always useful to look at books that identify social trends after some lapse of time from their publication. Mary Eberstadt’s book, How The West Really Lost God, published in 2013, gains added interest in the light of how the factors she identified in the decline of Christian faith in the West have been playing out over the last eight or so years.

Her central thesis is that the “family factor” is a cause as well as a consequence of religious rise or decline. She finds this complex interaction between family and faith largely unacknowledged in the collapse of religious belief and practice across the western world since the 1960s. The “Really” in her title does not discount other widely acknowledged influences at work in the secularisation of western societies but points to what she believes to be a “missing piece of the puzzle” that can more satisfactorily explain why the collapse of religion has been so rapid and defining across all areas of life and culture.

In a widely researched and referenced book, she first sets out a convincing case against those who argue that religious decline is somewhat exaggerated, who identify many green shoots of faith revival and activism in our time. Eberstadt points to a number of conclusive, key metrics from closing churches, disappearing parishes, ignorance of prayers and doctrine to open defiance of the Church’s teaching on abortion and same sex marriage by “cafeteria Catholics”. Against those who argue that religious faith is morphing into new forms, she cites the rapidly rising number of “nones”, in response to questions about religious belief in surveys and polls.

In identifying the “family factor” as the missing piece of the puzzle, she acknowledges other widely accepted causes of religious decline such as rising prosperity, mass education, the advance of science, feminism, urbanisation and church scandals. She does however interrogate each of them and finds them incomplete. She references studies from the US that indicate strikingly higher church participation among the better off and better educated than the “working class”. She also cites studies that show the former demographic are more likely to be married and stay married than the latter. Marriage is now “the fault line dividing American classes”. For Eberstadt the two factors, marriage and religious adherence, are interrelated and “mutually reinforcing”. She does not believe that it is a simple matter of religious belief determining life choices like marriage but argues that there is something about marriage itself that “inclines people towards religiosity”.  

Religion is strong where marriage is strong. She uses the image of the double helix to illustrate the way they accompany rather than follow or lead each other. She finds in this concept the answer to what is described as “American exceptionalism”. “American exceptionalism” is the term for the unexamined, apparently inexplicable, strength of religion in American public life. Eberstadt observes that this parallels the relative strength of marriage and family life in the US compared with Europe. For Eberstadt, the term “European exceptionalism” would be at least as meaningful.

“Children draw parents to Church” is a common phrase and Mary Eberstadt unpacks the truism. Religious participation has a social dimension and parents seek “wholesome peer groups” for their children. She also identifies the more profound truth that the mystery of new life opens our eyes to transcendence and stirs “a profound desire to tether family life to something transcendent”. Commitment to family life involves “godly things” like sacrifice and selflessness. The teaching of faith is grounded in affirming images of family life and a God who is represented as a loving Father. Relatable and affirming for those committed to family life but, as Eberstadt’s book also observes, potentially a stumbling block to those whose experience of family does not include the presence of a loving father or perhaps any sort of father. 

Among faith communities, families are more likely to participate in church and parish life than single people. Eberstadt also acknowledges that women and the elderly are more likely to be religiously inclined. She sees the nurturing role of women in family life and the “familial memory” of elderly people as significant factors in these patterns. The undeniable social and spiritual goods of religion, goods that can be measured empirically in terms of life expectancy, mental health, lower crime rates, higher birth rates and charitable outreach, are among the tangible benefits Christian faith brings to both the building up of the family and society at large. “Sound families” make “sound societies” as well as dynamic churches and for Eberstadt the arrow of influence goes in both directions.

However, while acknowledging that the church and family have both “waxed and waned” at different periods of history, family life in the West has been in freefall since the sexual revolution of the Sixties in an unprecedented way. Eberstadt finds a clear line from “the Pill and related technologies” to the parlous state of the family in today’s western culture. Widespread divorce, cohabitation, the mainstreaming of pornography, single parenthood and low fertility are further confounded by developments in biotechnology that ascribe no particular value to biological parenthood. The result is all family types are “treated with moral equivalence”. 

From the book’s perspective, the future for both family and marriage looks very challenging indeed. However, “the social goods” of the stable biological family, the safety net it provides for its elderly and vulnerable members who are otherwise dependent entirely on the state, along with the “demographic advantage” of religious families, may yet bring about a change of attitude. As we face a “demographic winter” with an ageing, lonely population dependent on ever fewer young it is not unreasonable to think people will rediscover the value of marriage and the natural family unit. 

However, Eberstadt is well aware that we are very far down a very different path at this point. The Churches, including many Catholic pastors, have taken an accommodating if not affirming stance towards behaviours that weaken marriage and in so doing are undermining the foundation of their own institution. Yet, as Eberstadt observes, Christianity “needs the analogy of the family to tell its most foundational story, the creation of the Son of God as man”. The “hard” teaching of Jesus on marriage can’t be swept aside either. The Church’s own well established doctrines on divorce, abortion, contraception and biotechnology still remain obstacles for those for whom both the ambient culture and family experience alike have normalised them. On the other hand, as Eberstadt states, it was hard, uncompromising teaching on “infanticide, abortion and non-marital sex that drew people out of paganism” to begin with. The Church should not flinch from her mission in the world, whatever the season.

Eight years on from the publication of How The West Really Lost God, we can see yet another piece of the puzzle to support Mary Eberstadt’s theory. It is the ever growing attack on the marital, biological family as the optimum milieu in which to raise children by secular ideologues which is advancing as part of a two track campaign alongside the attack on the Church. It is as if those leading the secularist project have at least an intuitive sense that the biological family and religion advance or decline together and are inextricably linked, to use Eberstadt’s image, as the two spirals of the double helix.

The weakness of Mary Eberstadt’s book is one she identifies herself when she writes, “speculation is an intrinsic part of this book”. Despite referencing many major social commentators as supporting sources for her theory, she leaves the reader with a sense that there is indeed something to her argument but that her findings nonetheless remain inconclusive. It is very clear that faith supports family because it sets a clear template for how family is best lived but the reverse is open to counter argument as we observe the way the new “religions” of environmentalism and leftist liberal orthodoxies have captured all family types in today’s world.