The conventional narrative of how the West lost God goes something like this: As people became more educated, as science became more revered, and as people became more materially prosperous, the need for a transcendent being began to wane. Nietzsche was able to declare, "God is dead," because he thought the human race was finally growing up. After all these millennia we were starting to get over "it" (that is, God).
Not so fast, says Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center and author of How the West Really Lost God (with "really" emphasized). The received story of secularization fails to take into account what she calls "The Family Factor." While there is plenty of merit in secularization theories that explain the decline of Christianity in Europe and America as a consequence of the Enlightenment, Darwin, and Freud, little attention is afforded to the connection between faith and family.
Most of us who think on these matters, Modern Reformation readers included, assume family decline naturally follows religious decline. However, Eberstadt argues that we have put the cart before the horse, or more precisely, what we are looking at are two horses permanently attached to each other.
Eberstadt offers no hard correlation studies to prove her thesis’difficult to do when your subject is more historical in nature and covers a thousand years of human activity. Rather, she holds up the "double helix of family and faith" and tells us the evidence is compelling, even if it must labeled (as any good social scientist would label it) as circumstantial. Her research relies on other works of secularization theory, demographic records, inductive reasoning, and her own spirited postulating. Her spunky style makes for an enjoyable read.
As for the double helix, imagine a DNA ladder whose twin rails of family and faith are connected by the rungs of church participation and doctrinal assent. This, she says, is how we should picture the importance of the natural family in its association with belief. Family and faith are congruent markers: when one is present, so is the other; when one is absent, so is the other.
To put it bluntly, the Christian church cannot exist without strong families. Now here is a subject Reformed-minded folk sometimes dodge, either because we do not want to upstage the primacy of the gospel by overemphasizing virtuous living or maybe because we think there is absolutely nothing we can do about the pathetic state of modern matrimony.
Eberstadt claims the Christian story itself is one communicated through the prism of the family. She asks, "How does Mary's profound obedience to God ('let it be done to me as you will') make sense to generations taught to regard birth itself as an act of 'choice'?" Pressing the point, she suggests broken homes pose a problem to the receptivity of the Christian message. "In an age when many people live lives that contradict the traditional Christian moral code, the mere existence of that code becomes a lightning rod for criticism and vituperation’which further drives some people from the church."
As a devout Catholic she does not hesitate to scold Protestants for letting go in 1930 of the church's allegedly longstanding teaching on birth control, a watershed event given fuller treatment in her previous book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, where she links the Pill to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its cultural consequences. Bible-believing Protestants would do well to think about her provocative scholarship.
How the West Really Lost God is not without its shortcomings. At times Eberstadt's tone is overly moralistic, as when she refers to the local church as a "like-minded moral community." Apparently, her thesis would hold true for all communities of faith, whether Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist. One could easily substitute "religiosity" for "Christian faith," and if this is the case, we need look no further than to the changing face of Europe to say that she is correct.
Also, it is a bit unfair for her to trace the loosening of divorce laws back to the Reformation. The historical facts are well established that the "family" was on the skids in Europe prior to the Reformation. While the new order did place divorce in the hands of civil authorities, Luther and Calvin helped save the institution from a contemptuous mess (see, for example, Steven Ozment's When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe).
The author ends on both a pessimistic and optimistic note. On the downside, the United States is statistically only a decade or two behind Europe with regard to the family. It does not take a math degree to figure out what will happen to churches if we stop having babies. On the upside, crisis situations often precipitate renewal. If our welfare state runs out of money, we are going to have to take care of each other, and historically there is no institution that does a better job in tending to children and the elderly than the family.
