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

THE MYSTERIOUSNESS OF HUMAN BELIEF:A NEW THEORY OF SECULARIZATION "A book on religion? I already know everything worth knowing about that!" If I surmise my readers reactions correctly (I mean you, Dearly Beloved!) then your finger is already poised above the "delete" button. Before you act, ponder a few questions:1. Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in say, 1500AD in our Western society, while in 2013 you find this not only easy.... but inescapable?2. Is religion akin to "opium" as Marx said? Or an "illusion" to use Freud's term? Pagans in ancient Rome could have their concubines, same sex lovers, orgies, etc. They didn't have to tithe plus pay regular taxes; their weekends weren't disrupted by mandatory church services; they didn't have to waste time dragging their kids to religious education; nor were they peppered constantly with fund-raisers and requests for volunteer time. So really, Dearly Beloved! How did Christianity (the "Dims" or "Dulls") manage to defeat the "Brights"? (New Age atheists)3. If you believe that religion has declined because of the Enlightenment, Science, better education, etc., then you probably "know" that less- educated people are more likely to believe in the Christian God; better-educated people less so, because, it is implied, `they are better able to understand the fraudulent nature of Christianity and the mendaciousness of their priests and leaders, etc.' Everybody may "know" these things, but "they" are wrong. A report by msnbc.com entitled "Who Is Going to Church? Not Who You Think," summarized the current work of many sociologists. Church attendance for those at the bottom of the social ladder has dropped precipitously and the "faith gap" with the upper, college educated classes is widening.4. Have `people in our Western culture got so fat, prosperous and happy that they don't need God anymore?' Yes and no. It is indeed true that an unprecedented number of Western people reject belief in anything transcendent. Yet modern atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are frustrated (and amazed) at the resiliency of Christianity. The point Eberstadt makes is that Christianity has waxed and waned many times over the past 2000 years. Not many Romans would have predicted the rise of Christianity; nor would many 19th century Americans have foreseen the survival and prospering of Mormonism. Religion apparently is an institution through which human beings embody and celebrate and reinforce underlying social truths. It is not likely to disappear. It will continue to wax and wane.5. Is there something about being married, or having children, or both, that is making adults in those situations more inclined to Christianity in the first place? Eberstadt's answer is an emphatic yes. A married man with children is over twice as likely to attend religious services as an unmarried man with no children. With each additional child in a traditional marriage, men increase their attendance at services by 2.5 times per year. Cohabitation, by contrast, has a "strong negative effect on the probability of religious activity." An iron law of demographics in every culture: the religious have more children irrespective of age, education or wealth. And children in a traditional marriage "drive" their parents to religion.6. Is the family a bridge of sorts between its members and the transcendental represented by church/synagogue? Consider the evidence. Where in the Western world is religion the weakest? Answer: Scandinavia. Where is the family the weakest? Measured by divorce rates, marriage rates and "cohabitating" rates, the answer is Scandinavia. (Important: this is where the trend first took hold and sociologists call it the "Nordic model.") Example: Sweden has the highest divorce rate in the world and its births out of wedlock from 1996 on exceeded 50%. Its families are the most atomized: almost half of Swedish households contain only one occupant! Families of one are unlikely to "see" God.7. Why is it that the United States, founded in secularism, now is the most religious nation in Christendom, while England, with its established church, is among the least? Richard Dawkins: "I am continually asked this (question) and I do not know." For Eberstadt, the "problem" of American "exceptionalism" does not exist because she doesn't make the assumption that religious non-belief comes first and that this produces the Nordic model. For her, the paradox is explained by the fact that in America, there are still many more families of the traditional model. But the exceptionalism is only temporary. "Family culture" in America is declining rapidly and that will bring down America's religiosity.8. Why is there a religious gender gap? Why, if the news of God's death is moving through Western society slowly, but ultimately surely, should it be that men in one country after another seem to be getting the news faster than women? Fact: Women believe more fervently in God, they aver that religion is more important in their lives; they pray more often, and by every measure are more religious. Why? Are they mentally inferior to men or more inclined toward magical, superstitious thinking? Are they by nature more docile and easily led? No, and Eberstadt can only speculate. Perhaps women are more religious because the act of participating in creation, i.e., birth, is more immediate for them than for men. Perhaps that fact inclines women to be more humble about their own powers and more open to the possibility of something greater than themselves. In other words, maybe what separates men from women - in the pews - is that women have more hands-on experience of the Family Factor.9. Does availability of the birth control pill in conjunction with the Family Factor play a role in the decline of religiosity? Eberstadt's thesis is brilliant. In the 1950s, the time gap between graduation from high school and the birth of that graduate's first child was 7 years. By the end of the 1960s, this gap - thanks to new birth control technologies - had expanded to 15 years. Since the time between graduation and parenthood had always been one in which young people traditionally turn away from religion and look to other things, this doubling of the time gap was of enormous religious significance. Do the transitive arithmetic. More Pill equals less time in a family. More time in a family equals more time in church. Therefore more Pill equals less God.10. Did the doctrinal reforms of mainline Protestant churches further contribute to the decline of the traditional family? From the beginning, Christianity carried with it a stern moral code concerning divorce and pre-marital sex that was cause for derisive commentary by Romans and others. It was bedrock for 2000 years. It can, of course, be argued that changes to this moral code were a good thing: allowing escape from miserable marriages, ratifying contraception and softening or abandoning church teachings about sexual morality. But this ignores the paradox: the mainline Protestant churches that accepted this "Christian lite" have suffered catastrophic decline and, with it, the volunteerism (the mission and morale) these churches were once noted for. Relaxing the rules inadvertently meant failing to protect and nurture the traditional family upon which the existence of these churches (apparently) rested. More "conservative" churches who resisted the paganism of their own societies have thrived. And there is a further corollary: family illiteracy breeds religious illiteracy. 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. There is increased hostility to Christianity per se when many people live in tacit or open defiance of its moral code. People do not like to be told they are wrong.CONCLUSION IN BRIEF O BEST BELOVEDFAMILY AND RELIGIOUSITY ARE INEXTRIXABLY INTERWOVEN IN A DOUBLE HELIX OF LIFE. YOU CAN'T (EASILY) HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER: MORE FAMILY (THE TRADITIONAL MARRIED SORT), YOU GET MORE GOD; MORE CHILDREN FROM THAT FAMILY, MORE GOD. AND THE CONVERSE, LESS FAMILY, LESS GOD; LESS CHILDREN, LESS GOD.In the Western world, fewer people are having children; fewer people who are having children are able to sustain intact the traditional two-parent home. Over the last half century, marriage has become the "fault line" dividing American classes. Marriage, more and more, is a luxury, a status symbol, to be enjoyed by the uppermost classes alone. And these, not the unwashed lumpenproliteriate, will continue to have their religion....if not their guns.

MY BACKGROUNDFirst, I should share my own family/religious background because I think it's relevant to a book like this. In some ways, I am a person predisposed to agree with Eberstadt's argument and in some ways I'm not.I come from a mixed family. My mom and dad were both previously married before they married each other. I have 1 younger full sister and 3 older half-sisters (1 from my dad's previous marriage, 2 from my mom's previous marriage).I was raised in the Episcopal Church by my mom, quit going to church around 6th grade because my mom got tired of dragging 2 kids to church alone every Sunday, and then didn't really go to church at all between 6th grade and my senior year at Princeton. A year and a half ago, during my senior year at Princeton, I converted to Catholicism and am now a devout Catholic.THINGS I LIKED1. MAIN ARGUMENT IS CONVINCING. I found Eberstadt's main argument quite convincing. Her basic argument is that the decay of traditional marriage/family is the primary engine driving the decline of modern Western Christianity.After documenting that these declines in traditional marriage/family and Christian religious belief/practice are actually occurring, she proposes 2 primary mechanisms for her argument, aided by copious (albeit mostly footnoted) social science research.The first proposed mechanism is that traditional family life is a conduit for the transmission of Christian values and practice. Christianity's strong endorsement of traditional family life, the transcendent experience of conceiving children, the desire for one's children to have religious/moral instruction, etc. are all powerful incentives for married people with children to go to church.The second proposed mechanism is that non-traditional family life and its resulting non-traditional values form a potent barrier to Christian belief/practice. In short, if you or someone you love is having premarital sex, is pro-choice, is having gay sex, etc., these beliefs/behaviors/associations are powerful incentives to either not identify as Christian or to maintain affiliation but not actually practice.I found this argument convincing for several reasons. First, it explains why unmarried people without kids are much less likely to go to church than married people with kids. Second, it explains why religious observance and fertility are so closely related, both on a national level and on a group level. Third, it explains why some nations' religious observance declined later than others. Fourth, it explains why so much started happening around 1960. Fifth, sex and family are emotionally powerful experiences that actually touch people's everyday lives, unlike theories that attribute secularization to the Enlightenment or to the World Wars.2. PROSE IS CLEAR AND EASY TO READ. Eberstadt's prose is clear and easy to read. She also has some nice turns of phrase that I enjoyed, like "a great many people have voted with their pills against having babies."3. WIDE REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE. Eberstadt is well-read and has a good grasp of the social science literature. The work of Mark Regnerus, Rodney Stark, W. Bradford Wilcox, Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, etc. plays a prominent role in her argument. She addressed most of the counter-examples and objections I had.4. GOOD ORGANIZATIONAL FORMAT. I liked the book's organizational format. I liked how she took a chapter to examine whether secularization was actually occurring, that she took a good amount of time to examine the weaknesses of alternate secularization theories, etc.THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE1. NOT ENOUGH DATA IN BODY OF TEXT. My main issue with this book is the same issue I had with Eberstadt's book "Adam and Eve After the Pill": it assumes an audience that is both emotionally receptive to her general message and that has a passing familiarity with the statistics and trends that she cites. This is okay if she is content with this book being read almost entirely by the choir, but if she wants to convince skeptics, she will need to incorporate more statistics/graphs into the actual text instead of simply footnoting them. I think she did this for readability's sake, but I think it was the wrong decision.For instance, one of the points crucial to her case is that well-educated, affluent Americans currently have significantly higher church attendance than poor Americans, and that this is related to the recent marital decay that has devastated America's poor while largely sparing its rich. This is important because it contradicts the theory that modernity/affluence/education inherently lead to greater secularism.This point is hammered home convincingly in Charles Murray's "Coming Apart", and I think Eberstadt would have done well to re-present an abbreviated version of Murray's case for the sake of readers unfamiliar with his work. She does mention the book, and shares a few statistics, but I think they are too few.2. TOO MUCH FOCUS ON THE RULE, NOT ENOUGH ON OUTLIERS. I also think the book focuses too much on the large-scale trends and not enough on the small-scale exceptions. Meaning, she mostly focuses on the overall trends in family formation and religious practice on a national/international scale, and not enough on the groups that have proven resistant to these trends. On the more exotic end, this would include groups like the Amish and Hasidic Jews. On the more mainstream end, this would include groups like Modern Orthodox Jews and the Mormons.Why examine these groups? Because they are Western religious groups that are exposed to the same pressures (invention of contraception, legal abortion, no-fault divorce, etc.), and yet have maintained high marriage rates, high fertility rates, and high religious attendance rates. As such, they are valuable case studies in what a religious group can do to slow or reverse these secularizing trends without waiting for society as a whole to change. This could have fit well into the "Case for Optimism" chapter.3. NEEDS LONGITUDINAL DATA. I think Eberstadt's case would greatly benefit from some longitudinal data tracking church attendance as people go to college, get married, have children, get divorced, etc. If the data shows that people have kids first, THEN resume church attendance (which would fit with everyday experience), that would be powerful evidence for her argument that family decline causes secularization, and not the other way around. I'm not sure how much of this data is currently available, but her case's power is necessarily limited without it. As it currently stands, Eberstadt's case is mostly circumstantial (as she admits), even if it is stronger, on balance, than competing theories of secularization.4. OCCASIONAL OMISSIONS. Eberstadt's discussion of marriage/family breakdown curiously has no discussion of the rising rate of premarital sex and pornography use. She also rarely brings up abortion. These seemed like odd omissions.SUMMARYI enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

In this book the authoress takes the reader on a long ramble through the scenery of European people’s love-hate affair with Christianity.From the cool, verdant countryside of settled Christian practice, up along the flinty assent of the hills of the realignment of Christianity to political and social realities, down the hot, dusty roads of undisguised unbelief, to the Larkinian paradise of sexual liberation, Mary Eberstadt conducts the traveller over a huge selection of sights. In her beachcombing approach she allows the reader to find some curiosity to pick up as they traverse the wide strand after the tide of faith has departed.As to whether it has departed is one surprising question she discusses. Her contention, though, is that it is the demise of the ‘traditional’ family that has been the cause of the loss of the practice of the Christian faith. However, in all that she says about this she does not ask whether the family was essential to Christianity’s original founding.As an example of the family, the Gospels present Mary as being with child before a marriage ceremony has been conducted. There are other siblings, but the overall impression is that Jesus is an only child. Later, Jesus declares that he hasn’t brought domestic peace, but rather ‘a sword’: mother-in-law would be at odds with daughter-in-law. Joseph disappears from the later narrative. Nor would a reader know from the Gospel account that Peter was married.However, what counts against Ms Eberstadt’s argument is that the significant characteristic of Paul’s churches was that they were embedded in Roman civic society. They were structured and organised in the same way as all the other free associations that honeycombed the Roman world. They would have been indistinguishable from all the others. This is demonstrated clearly where Paul instructs his converts not to mistake these church meetings for those of a dining or debating club. These free associations would have established one key feature necessary to allow the subsequent evolution of a free society – trust between strangers.The family was not, therefore, key to the establishment of the church, even though the family is first and last for Jews. One might give a lot to know more of Paul’s sister and nephew, but the Apostle had to suffer the loss of all things to preach his gospel, and it may have been that this diminutive and less-than-handsome man was disowned by his family, at least by his parents. The only thing that distinguished the members of Paul’s ‘clubs’ from the outsiders was the way they lived their lives.Ms Eberstadt provides a summary of the surprising after-effects of the 1930 Lambeth Conference’s decision to approve the use of contraceptives in certain special cases. It is here that the reader may think that she would have been wiser to keep her ammunition for her later book, Primal Screams, where it is deployed with more credibility rather than expend it on what sometimes seems a ludicrous argument. Take for instance the claim in How the West Really Lost God that children ‘drive’ their parents to a belief in God. Children might ‘drive’ their parents to many things, but to God? If only this were so, there might be fewer abortions.As C S Lewis once observed, when Jesus defines a married couple, He doesn’t say that they are two people who are in love, or even that they have gone through a marriage ceremony. For Jesus it is sexual intercourse – ‘one flesh’ – that makes a marriage. This is a complementarian position, one that Rowan Williams is sniffy about in his 1989 address that Ms Eberstadt mentions as being part the subsequent evolution of the Lambeth Conference’s decision.The ‘good sex’ that some Christians in the permissive age believe that God wants for human beings could be more like the ecstasy felt by worshippers in a grove of Ashtaroth. However, according to Christian mystics and contemplatives, a direct experience of the Divine would feel very much like that. Though theirs was an erotic mysticism, at least the Swedenborgian sect's beliefs were closer to the truth than that of the Puritans and moralists. See especially Rowan Williams, The Lion's World, p 55-57, for a carefully textured, delicately handled summation of this. Williams's only error is to stop short at the individual's relation to God. In fact, in terms of the intimacy involved, something with no barriers or reserve in between, an invitation to join the company of heaven would be more like an invitation to join a swinger's club. The exposure involved in the mutual nakedness of lovers in erotic love has a quality exactly like that of the exposure to Divine love.After all, it’s not like the Bible doesn’t have its own sort of literary eroticism, especially in the Song of Solomon. Then there’s the episode in Luke and Matthew with the prostitute. In Matthew she ‘pours’ ointment on Jesus’s head. In other words, she runs her hands through his hair to apply the sticky, perfumed oil. Imagine the rich, heady scent pervading the room, the heightened sensual touch of her lubricated fingers. In Luke she uses the long tresses of her hair to apply the oil to Jesus’s feet. And of course, to do so she would have had to have her head uncovered in the presence of men. These are the techniques of her trade. It’s how she would please a man. If these actions aren’t a sexual experience, I don’t know what is. Yet she is forgiven because she ‘loves much’ (and in the only way that she knows how).St Paul gave sex advice to couples. Sex is a regular part of the Old Testament. No less a figure than Elizabeth Fry registered her disgust at the actions of Sarah, the 'princess', who, after arranging an adultery, evicted a young mother and her infant into conditions that certainly would have killed the child (see Fry's book, The Lady of Shunem). Sarah isn't exonerated by the fact that Jehovah intervened to prevent that tragedy. The 'princess' didn't know He would.Ms Eberstadt quotes John Robinson, the 1960s Bishop of Woolwich, in connection with the substitution of the new ethics for the earlier ‘legalistic’ creed. C S Lewis dubbed Robinson ‘the Bishop of Woolworths’. Yet Robinson's declaration that henceforth nothing would be seen as wrong in itself is a twist on St Paul's preaching that Christians have been freed from the Law. As Paul said, if you have been justified by the law, Christ died in vain. Of course, Paul then found that the Romans interpreted this freedom as the sort they would have been allowed in a holiday granted to them by the emperor, as Nero did in his street party of 64AD (see Dominion, by Tom Holland, pages 79-80).The author writes that the more educated people were in the Victorian age the more religious they were. What cannot be ruled out here, but which she does not acknowledge, is that for some in the new monied classes this religious performance – which included pater reading the Bible to an assembly of the family and all the servants - would have conferred a certain cachet of respectability on the household – virtue signalling in the name of Christ.In asking why anyone should bother about the question of why the West has lost its belief in God, Ms Eberstadt advances the proposition that since the ‘traditional’ family stabilises society in many ways, everyone benefits, even the non-believers. However, if people look to the state to provide solutions for them in just about everything it would not make sense for them to support something like the family that is the greatest obstacle to state power.However, there is a much more pertinent part of this question, Why bother? Why bother with an organisation – the church – and with a religion – Christianity – that were never meant to last for twenty centuries. According to Paul, Christ was to return within the lifetimes of his converts. The churches were only to be a temporary arrangement. The ‘social capital’ that is derived from churchgoing was never something intentional.Many things follow from the fact that Christ’s kingdom didn’t appear on earth in the first century. The scientific outlook on the world that was developed from the Church’s encouragement of the exploration of how the world worked according to fixed laws that were thought of as being created by God and which had been hinted at in the Bible, has led to the development of the Pill and all the consequences for the family and for men that Mary Eberstadt discusses. Christianity brought itself down by lasting too long.Because Christ’s kingdom didn’t appear in the first century, in the succeeding twenty centuries everything and everyone we have ever loved - the golden boys and girls - all, as chimney sweepers, have come to dust. Beauty has been ravaged, not just by the effluxion of time, but by men. All this beauty and youthful vigour has been scoured off the face of the earth as if it were rubbish.To get an impression of what the ‘all’ is, look at postcard photos of beach or street scenes from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras or the 1930s. Consider all the conversations shared in public and in private, all the meals taken together, the time just spent in the company of the beloved – all this lovely togetherness fixed in a simulacrum of eternity in the picture, now dissolved into non-remembrance. A reasonable unbeliever might have thought that a creator God would take more care of the apple of His eye. Does the Divine Love that passes all understanding restore those self-same lost days, as the prophet Joel declares?Consider those born with a genetic or life-limiting condition that effectively excludes them from the marriage market. If marriage and the family were so vital for Christianity and for God, as well as for avoiding the vast catalogue of suffering Mary Eberstadt describes on page 177, any reasonable unbeliever might ask why the Divine Love that passes all understanding will not alter so much as one line of the DNA language – the word - in which these people are written so as to make them eligible for marriage.Instead, they have their whole lives to reflect on what they have missed out on just by being themselves. And being themselves in all its circumstances rests upon the will of the Divine love that passes all understanding. It’s not the case, as you can sometimes hear said rather crudely, that “Sh*t happens, it’s nothing to do with the ‘Man Upstairs’, get over it”, as if God were remote and uninvolved with the world. Hasn’t, according to Christianity, the ‘Man Upstairs’ descended to the parlour? How will we 'get over it' without meeting Him in the parlour?Or consider those born with an intersex condition. Would it be surprising if they were tempted to think that their condition throws back in the face of God the biblical assertion that God made human beings male or female?In response to all this you can of course choose your theodicy from an extensive menu. The theological cookery is cordon bleu - if you have a taste for it. Even Jesus has His own theodicy (see His encounter with the man born blind). All the other theodicies amount to saying that reality cannot be altered, like it or lump it. Though Rowan Williams's meditation on this in The Lion's World sugars this better than others, it still is the case that if you are born blind, that's just the tough luck of the ‘adventure’.It’s not, though, as if Christ’s kingdom couldn’t have come in the first century. In the wilderness temptation the second offer in the order given by Luke that is made to Jesus is one to inaugurate His kingdom, without the Cross (since it would be a gift). Christ’s kingdom on earth would only have brought benefits to mankind. While His refusal of all three offers leaves Him with sole agency, it comes at a terrible cost to Himself and to us.This point could be argued the other way, in the manner that Rowan Williams does in The Lion’s World about Digory, one of C S Lewis’s characters. Inaugurating the kingdom by accepting the Tempter’s offers could have had the effect that would have happened if Digory had taken the apple the wrong way to cure his mother. Yet it remains that this world being the only one that a God of redemptive love could create, that is, one of risk and adventure, means that every lingering disappointment, each example of heart-wrenching anguish, every bud of human hope withered by the ‘adventure and risk’ – the murder of the bride-to-be, the torturing to death of a family by a psychopath, or the beautiful child wrecked by cancer - is one that has its ultimate origin in God’s own character.In these things God is brought face-to-face with the full knowledge of His own Self. Significantly, that fact that in Lewis’s story Digory is given an opportunity to cure his mother a legitimate way, as Lewis would have wished to do with his mother, only underlines the point that such a thing is that possibility of there being ‘another stream’, the existence of which is denied by his stories (see Williams again in The Lion’s World, p62 et seq.).Finally, issue must regrettably be taken with Ms Eberstadt’s summation of why believers think the Christian religion it is worth bothering with (page 194), that is, in 'bothering' with it believers are pursuing ‘an eternal space in the kingdom of God’.St Paul would have had nothing to do with this definition. With the one exception of the grossest sexual misconduct that even the pagans would have deplored, Paul never thought that his converts, even in their ignorance and muddle, were anything other than fully fledged Christians whose salvation was never in doubt. They would have to appear before the judgement seat of Christ, but that had nothing to do with any possibility of rejection.Paul never described the soul as ‘getting to heaven’. In fact, in response to those (who were later to be called the Gnostics) who thought that the resurrection ‘was past already’ – i.e. had already been achieved for the soul, leaving the body on earth – Paul advances his theology of the spiritual body; an idea designed to quell the Greek’s aversion to the physical body. But body it is, insists the Master Salesman who knows the sensibilities of his audience thoroughly.For Paul, the resurrection was the resurrection of the body for the purposes of judgement. (And one might not be surprised that a person born with a bodily deformity would find that having to live with that body for all eternity none too attractive).Overall, this book is special pleading for the family. From a lot of reasonable points about the benefits of such an arrangement of human beings (blood and marriage ties being the most basic form of trust), it becomes weak and, in fact, annoying when these characteristics are pressed too far in the religious direction. One other benefit of the family that could have been mentioned is that in the form of family businesses it created the high street in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.Furthermore, the argument presented in this book is one-sided in that the author never asks why God hasn’t done more to save the family. Or whether He could. Divine selective mutism isn’t a good look. Ms Eberstadt, perhaps like many religious Americans, is possibly rather too cosily at ease in Zion.

This book is an attempt to address a neglected dimension of secularisation in the West. Eberstadt argues persuasively that the erosion of the traditional family has been not only a consequence of secularisation but also a cause. In subsequent chapters, she explains why this view is highly plausible, and then explores the effects of religious belief, and the implications for the future health of Christianity, of 'the family factor'.She concludes, very usefully, by showing why religion contributes to 'social capital' and the common good, and why all of us (religious and secular) have a vested interest in the continued health of religious institutions.The opening chapter explores the issue of whether secularisation even exists in the West and, after examining and largely rejecting the counter-arguments, she then examines, in subsequent chapters, the reasons usually given for the process. She doesn't reject such reasons out of hand,, but highlights one limitation: they are not part of a convincing 'theory of variation'; in other words, the degree of religiosity in the West varies both within and between societies, and conventional explanations do not adequately account for such variation.Eberstadt then shows why 'the family factor' has such an influence on religiosity. As fertility declines, in countries such as France, Britain and, much more recently, Ireland, religious decline accompanies fertility decline. Countries which have smaller and fewer families, such as in Scandinavia, are the most irreligious. As Kaufman has shown, conservative and fundamentalist groups have the largest families, with liberal/secular groups having the smallest/fewest families. The early sixties saw religion in parts of the West in 'free fall' and this is linked to the changing role of women, the ready availability of the pill, with its effects on extra-marital sex, and the withdrawal of the male from the family circle. Liberal Christian churches, she argues, assisted in their own downfall by ignoring 'the family factor'. Over time, for impeccably liberal reasons, they were to accept divorce, contraception and active homosexuality, with the inevitable weakening of the traditional family - and their own support base..The natural family makes Christianity dependent on its vitality, Eberstadt argues, in a number of ways: the transcendent experience of childbirth;, the involvement of children in education and the wider community; the sacrifice of self involved in caring for an ailing family member or making financial sacrifices for those whose adulthood one may never live to see. A particularly relevant point made is that the tremendous growth of non-traditional households in recent decades has led to a constituency hostile to the Christian emphasis on the sanctity of the traditional family, to accompanying Christian sexual ethics, and hence to Christianity itself.What is the future of faith and family in the West? In the two penultimate chapters, Ebenstadt gives the case for optimism and that for pessimism . Finally, she asks: does any of this matter? and replies by showing clear evidence that Christianity is, on balance, a force for good in modern society: believers give more to charity; they live longer and are healthier; they are less likely to be depressed, to commit suicide, to commit crime, to be addicted to alcohol or drugs; and they contribute more to 'social capital' by volunteering for good causes etc. The traditional family, legitimised by Christianity, acts as the original safety net for family members in difficulty, and reduces the need for state intervention and subsides (in 2012, the cost of family breakdown in Britain was estimated at £44 billion). On the other had, even after controlling for income, a range of malfunctioning characteristics are much more likely in 'suboptimal' households (eg. alcohol and drug abuse, mental illness, physical abuse, criminality etc.).Overall, this is an extremely stimulating, readable, systematic and well-informed contribution to the issue of why and to what extent Christianity has declined in the West.

This is a very well argued and challenging book. Can' say I agree with the basis thesis though. Of course it is true that there is a relationship between family breakdown and the breakdown of church life. But the bigger issue is that there is a relationship between family breakdown and institutional breakdown of all kinds. The point about the generation from boomers onwards is that they are deeply suspicious of all institutions and posit "freedom" and the "individual" over and against all of these structures. In other words I think that family breakdown is not so much casual as itself a cause of something else that is going on in our culture. Unfortunately extreme individualism of the kind that we have witnessed in the last 60 years carries the seeds of its own destruction. Self fulfilment becomes selfishness, freedom becomes licentiousness, lack of structure becomes an inability to commit to any relationship and so ultimately to extreme loneliness and existential angst for which the only ultimate solution is suicide dressed up as euthanasia on occasion. Having said that - a great read and some good material.

Tells the story about how we have drifted so far from a good society. We are in troubled waters.

How the West lost the company of God in an earthly garden... Christian Tradition has been lost in the West.