How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. By Mary Eberstadt, Templeton Press, 2013.
When studying Western society and culture over the past couple of centuries, nearly all researchers, commentators, and observers have noticed that religious observance has declined in Europe. Religious people have watched these developments with trepidation and sadness, while some secular people have glorified in the de-churching of the West. Secularization is indeed a trend, but the extent and continuation of this trend may be not be as certain as some people believe it to be.
While most researchers believe that secularization is widely occurring, they disagree widely as to why this process has happened so suddenly, so extensively across the West. In How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes extensively on society and religion. Due to her topics of interest, the problem of secularization is very important to her. In the introduction to How the West Really Lost God, Eberstadt writes that:
“Most books have their origin in some kind of enduring mental distraction that has grown so large and ungainly in the author’s mind that only hammering it out at book length will fully exorcise the thing. The volume you are reading on your screen right now or holding in your hands is no exception. The particular puzzle that started this effort happens to be– at least to some people– one of the most interesting questions in all the modern world. It is this: How and why has Christianity really come to decline in important parts of the West? ”(p. 3).
Certainly many people have come up with reasons why the West became less religious. Marx and Engles, for example, argued that secularization was a natural and irrevocable process in civilization. Other prominent figures have argued that the World Wars crushed the spirituality of Europe, that a more comfortable standard of living sapped people’s interest in a hereafter, or that modernization, changing culture, scientific advances, and other forces affected the religious beliefs of a continent.
Eberstadt treats all of these factors in a way similar to the fable of the six blindfolded men and the elephant, where each man touched a different part of the elephant and came to a different conclusion about what the animal looked like. One man touched the elephant’s ear and thought the creature looked like a fan, another the leg and believed an elephant looked like a tree trunk, another the trunk and claimed an elephant was snakelike, and so on. Eberstadt believes that all of the commonly cited theories for secularization have some truth to them, but she argues that all of these factors need to be taken as a whole, and there is another crucial factor that has long been overlooked.
“It is the contention of this book that just about everyone working on this great puzzle has come up with some piece of the truth– and yet that one particular piece needed to hold the others together still has gone missing. Urbanization, industrialization, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking population: yes, yes, and yes to all those factors statistically and otherwise correlated with secularization. Yet, even taking them all into account, the picture remains incomplete… It is as if the modern mind has lined up all the different pieces on the collective table, only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but still leaves something critical out.
This book is an attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over how and why Christianity exercises less influence over Western minds and hearts today than it did in the past…
Its argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship. It also is plausible– and I will argue, appears to be true– that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline. And if this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of Christian faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it, as we shall see.” (pp. 5–6).
The idea that faith and the family are linked is an intriguing one, and Eberstadt makes an excellent case for why the two should be inextricably linked. Family life is integral to society. The more strong and vibrant the family is in a culture, Eberstadt argues, the stronger and more vibrant religion tends to be in society. Where the traditional family is shattered, so is the religious structure. Divorce, broken or never-together families, and children growing up without siblings all affect the strength of the family in society. Secularization is not a natural and inevitable progression of civilization’s development, as many atheists insist, but instead is connected to the basic unit of society: the family. As Eberstadt argues, more family equals more God. Eberstadt expands upon her theories, pointing out that her family thesis changes how we may view the commonly-observed “falling-away of religious youth” phase, where teens raised in religious homes stop practicing their faith during college, and often do not resume until they get married and have children of their own. Eberstadt suggests that the separation from their families may be a pivotal factor in the cessation of religious observance.
“Like the collapse of Christianity in many of the same places, the collapse of the natural family has reshaped the known world of just about every man, woman, and child alive in the Western world today. For years now, secular sociologists have debated the meaning of the changes that have diminished the hold that the natural family once had over an individual’s life. Divorce, single parenthood, widespread use of contraception, legal abortion, the sharp drop in the Western birthrate: these are just some of the prodigious transformations in family structure on which experts train their sights. And while scholars as well as nonscholars take sides on the question of whether these are good things or bad things for society, no one seriously suggests that radical family change hasn’t happened across the Western world. Obviously, it has.” (p. 11).
Throughout her analysis, Eberstadt addresses numerous aspects of the process of secularization, and notes that many people’s assumptions are wrong. One particularly important point that Eberstadt addresses is the falsity of the ubiquity of Christianity across Europe for approximately a millennia and a half. It is true that at certain points in the Middle Ages that the vast majority of Europeans were nominally Christian, but it is impossible to tell just how devout the average person was. There is a very strong possibility that at various points over the centuries, significant percentages of the population were religious in name only. Though Eberstadt does not refer directly to this, for much of America’s early history, many settlers had limited access to organized religion. Secularization, therefore, ought not to be viewed as a sudden process that started relatively recently in the wake of over a millennium and half of unquestioning, blind, religious faith. Religion, in Eberstadt’s view, has frequently been on the decline, but it has also made numerous resurgences, and there is nothing to prove that Christianity will not make a comeback in the West. In order to explain why religious influence ebbs and flows, it is important to understand the causes of the process. There is, however, a lot of controversy as to why these cultural shifts happen, and Eberstadt makes a compelling case as she addresses and critiques the potential causes of secularization.
Once the “unquestioned religious homogeny” viewpoint is discounted and the perspective of shifting bull and bear markets for religious practice is adopted, it stands to reason that the current trends of secularization may not be permanent. Indeed, Eberstadt produces numerous examples to indicate that in some cases, the state of Christianity in Europe is getting stronger, even as many powerful public figures are increasingly, violently antireligious. Additionally, the increased Muslim population in Europe is affecting approaches towards religion from numerous perspectives. The future of religion in the West is uncertain, but if history is any guide, there may be many surprises as to what might happen. If Eberstadt is correct in her analysis, in order to revitalize religion, believers will have to revitalize the family.
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