Year: 2013

Julia Shaw praises Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God, especially the book’s rejection of “traditional narratives about secularization” that “see world-historical events or broad intellectual movements as silver bullets killing God.” Instead, Eberstadt connects the decline of the family to our loss of faith:

Family life is not an outcome of belief but a conduit to religious faith. Eberstadt compares learning religion to learning a language. She argues that “trying to believe without a community of believers is like trying to work out a language for oneself.” Eberstadt’s theory explains the communal way in which individuals “think and behave about things religious—not one by one and all on their own, but rather mediated through the elemental connections of husband, wife, child, aunt, great-grandfather and the rest.”

Her theory is unique. Most secularization narratives ignore the family’s role in religious formation or see familial decline as a result of secularization: people stopped believing in God and then they stopped having families. But Eberstadt turns this simple, direct relationship on its head.

Jordan Hylden isn’t so sure, arguing that Eberstadt’s focus on our domestic arrangements offers too narrow an explanation for such sweeping changes:

[T]he church all too often allied itself with fading political regimes, discrediting it in the eyes of many. The First World War’s senseless violence shattered for a generation the old Christendom synthesis of church and state, and Europe’s churches have never been the same. The church held on in America, since the war did not shatter us like it did the Europeans, and because our churches were not in any case allied so tightly with the state. But the 1960s began to change that, as the civil rights movement and Vietnam began to topple the confidence of many in the American Establishment, and insofar as the “mainline” churches were viewed as part of the status quo. The American social imagination split in two, and ever since then has been characterized by culture wars, with most of religion on the conservative side.

By not telling this story, Eberstadt has left out the lion’s share of “how the West really lost God.” No doubt, her “family factor” played its part, and she is at her most convincing when she shows how family decline was part of a broader trend toward modern individualism. She never claims that family decline is solely responsible, but she claims far too much for it. It is an odd story of Western secularization that leaves to one side most of what Western culture has thought and imagined in its common life about God.

Jen Polleck Michel hesitates at George Saunders’s recent appeal to kindness:

When he fleshes out his vision of human kindness, he seizes on an example from the parent-child relationship: “If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit… YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.” We are selfish, Saunders says, to want for ourselves. We should abandon desire in favor of love.

This is a fond and familiar heresy: that desire is to be blamed for all moral ills. In his book, The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton compares the Buddhist and Christian solutions to the treachery of desire. Buddha proposed we get rid of desire altogether. He considered it a contagion. But Chesterton defended desire, arguing that the gospel did not obligate us to give up on our desires, but rather, to judge their nature: “I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones.”

In a similar vein, C.S. Lewis takes issue with the idea of unselfishness, in The Weight of Glory:

I submit that this notion [of unselfishness] has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is not part of the Christian faith . . . The negative ideal of unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.

For the greater part of my Christian life, I have failed to understand what Chesterton and Lewis are saying and what the Bible so clearly defends: desire is not evil. A thousand times and more I have hung myself on the accusation of selfishness, living with the burden of be kind, advice that would subtly seek to obligate me to the whole of humanity and will to find me guilty whenever I cannot appease their demands.

Recently, the State Department announced the creation of a new Office for Religious Engagement, which will focus on reaching out to “faith-based organizations and religious institutions around the world to strengthen U.S. development and diplomacy and advance America’s interests and values.” Linda Woodhead casts a skeptical glance at that last phrase, hoping it doesn’t imply that there’s “only one possible model of religious freedom” based on U.S.-style separation of church and state. She holds up Europe as a counter-example:

Europe’s historical entanglement with religion is deep and ancient. In fact, the very idea of “Europe” is a product of Christianity’s attempt to bring unity to this region under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, the rise of European nation states in the early modern period is bound up with the contemporaneous creation of national churches. In other words, in the form in which we know them today European states and churches birthed one another. Only in combination did they have the economic, bureaucratic, and cultural capacity to create unified territorial polities.

The result of this symbiotic relation is that it’s impossible for European countries to make religion purely private without engaging in some of the merciless coercion exercised by those communist countries which attempted—with only partial success—to achieve such an end. Imagine the actual costs and consequences of withdrawing state-support from Christian educational foundations given that in many countries they include a significant proportion of primary and secondary schools as well as universities and colleges—even in France, the EU country with the nearest to a state-church separation.

She suggests “going with the grain of existing arrangements” in the countries we work with to avoid doing more harm than good:

Socio-religious ecologies are just that. They are highly complex systems with path-dependent possibilities which have been laid down over centuries (many more centuries in most parts of the world than in the U.S.). When you look beyond the surface, what appears to be unfreedom on a crude index often turns out to work very differently in context and practice. Rash interventions almost always have unintended, often irreversible, consequences.