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.
The Dish 