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TechnoratiHow the West might find God again
It is assumed that the West turned against religion and then lost interest in marriage and children - but there is evidence that the reverse could also be true.
Western society is increasingly secularised. Therefore people are not marrying and having children. Marriages are breaking up. Only a Christian revival can save the family. Right? Maybe, but in an essay in Policy Review, the journal of the Hoover Institution, research fellow Mary Eberstadt recently explored the intriguing idea that, at least some of the time, things happened the other way around. In this interview with MercatorNet she explains what lies behind her theory.
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MercatorNet: Many people believe the family is in trouble because religion has declined, but you suggest the opposite -- family decline may have led to secularisation. What is the hard evidence for this?
Mary Eberstadt: First, one caveat. My essay, How the West Really Lost God, was not an exhaustive survey of changes in family formation and the simultaneous decline of religion in Europe during the past two centuries. I wish someone would do that kind of survey because it would be invaluable to have. But the interesting fact is that no one has, in part because -- I would argue -- conventional thinking on the subject of how religion declines is entrenched, blinkered, and in the end, stultifying.
The problem for conventional secularisation theory is that it amounts to a one-way street, a one-way description of how religiosity waxes or wanes. That description at its briefest goes something like, "I think, and what I think about religion goes on to determine other things I do," like having a family. But why should we believe that belief dictates practice all of the time -- that people lose faith and then tailor their behaviour accordingly? My essay was an attempt to open this very inquiry -- to ask whether some behaviours, in particular religious practice, might also have an effect on belief, rather than just vice versa.
Survey evidence does bear out one's common sense on this issue. It tells us that many people are driven to church by marrying, or by having children, including people who were not much interested in religion before that.
A second kind of evidence, which I find extremely suggestive, is this: if we take fertility as an indicator, we see that two very dramatic examples from two sides of the European spectrum -- France on one side, and Ireland on the other -- shared a pattern: fertility declined sharply in both before a dramatic fall-off in religious practice.
One could examine many other countries on this point, and again, I wish someone would. I happened to choose these two because they represent opposite sides of the trend: secularism has been a ferocious force in France for centuries now, whereas it has only recently come to Ireland. So I was struck to see the same pattern in each. Maybe it isn't the case, as secularisation theory has it, that people become less religious and then have fewer children. Maybe, as these examples suggest, something about having fewer children makes some people less religious.
MercatorNet:To define the term, what is the natural family?
Mary Eberstadt:The simplest and most elegant definition I have seen comes from constitutional scholar Gerard V. Bradley, who says the natural family is that whose formation can only be imitated by others -- as it is, and increasingly. Anyone can have a mother figure, for example; but each of us has one and only one biological or natural mother. This form of family is based on sexual activity between a man and a woman bound together legally and otherwise that results in biologically related children, who are then raised by those parents -- and in an extended family context, perhaps others. Historically, some version of this "natural family" has been near-ubiquitous, from illiterate tribes in the Amazon rainforest to the civilizations of Mesopotamia and on up to poor, much-maligned, but very clearly in the human majority, Ozzie and Harriet.
MercatorNet: How would family life make people more religious?
Mary Eberstadt: My answers are speculative, but again, they appeal to one's intuitions and general knowledge of the world. In the first place, the sheer act of attempting marriage to one single person for the duration of one's life is heroic, not to say incredible. Perhaps something about that feat in itself puts one in a transcendent state of mind in which other forms of transcendence, especially religious forms, are more appealing and make more sense.
Secondly, that effect is doubly strong when there are children. How many people do you know who have gone back to church or synagogue because of having children? It is so common as to seem unremarkable, but why does it happen? I speculate that children, too, incline people toward the infinite -- in part because the love their parents bear them is too intense for many parents to believe it has a cold, finite end.
Secularisation theorists imagine the individual poring over books in his study and deciding in that way whether God exists or religion is do-able. Maybe some people do settle the question that way, but I believe people generally learn in groups -- beginning with the first social group they encounter, the family. And what people learn in the natural family seems to open them to others, the Other.
MercatorNet: Does this explain why women tend to be more religious than men?
Mary Eberstadt: Now that is a really interesting question, because that difference in religious practice between the two groups is verifiable through survey evidence as well as through walking into just about any Christian church in the West. Yet to my knowledge almost no one has ever asked why that sex difference in religious practice exists.
Well, in this feminist-sensitive day and age, it would be hard to put it down to the relative docility of women, or argue that they are stupider and more easily led than men. For one thing, today's women -- who compete alongside men in practically every field, and who, in contests apart from physical strength, are often said to have the advantage -- are hardly docile and easily led. Second, as a matter of established fact, women are indeed as smart as men; I.Q. is evenly distributed between the sexes. So if women's greater religiosity can't be attributed to factors like these, what else might explain it? I speculate that there might be several other factors at work.
Mothers may tend to be more religious because their act of giving birth is a more immediate participation in creation than men's. Or, perhaps for both mothers and non-mothers there is something about caring for the smallest and most vulnerable beings -- which is still overwhelmingly women's work, since even power mommies employ women to do it -- that makes it easier to believe in a God who stands in a similar all-caring relationship to relatively helpless mortals of every age. Maybe for these kinds of reasons, some or many women are just more religiously attuned -- closer to having perfect spiritual pitch -- than many men.
MercatorNet: In 20 years' time, do you think family life in the West will be stronger or weaker?
Mary Eberstadt: I am sad to say -- speaking as someone familiar with just some of the data on what family break-up does to children, and what it also costs society -- that I think the natural family will be even more battered in the West twenty years hence.
There is a library-full of evidence in America (though not only in America) that children are best off being raised with their biological parents in the home. Children raised with stepparents are at higher risk for a number of behaviours that you'd think we would spare them if we could -- violence, dropping out of school, drugs and drink -- and the list gets more dramatic still if we look at kids raised by one parent rather than two.
Everybody knows this. Kids know it too. I once published an essay called "Eminem is Right", detailing at considerable length what is in the lyrics of rap and rock today and how very much of it concerns family break-up and what that phenomenon is doing to this generation of kids.
So yes, everyone knows this, but polite opinion insists on ignoring it and even subverting this truth. Key opinion leaders do not want to face the facts -- and they are empirical facts -- about what is best for kids, because those facts will make a great many adults, including the kinds of feminists who have agitated for as much mother-child separation as possible, very, very uncomfortable.
And so at present, we see no turning back of the experiments being performed on children in the name of adult liberations: divorce and fatherlessness first and second, and more recently also gay parenting, polyandrous parenting, polygamous parenting, and the purposeful creation of children through sperm donors who are likely anonymous -- with the latter practice aimed purposefully at depriving those children of a usable human past, at least insofar as that past includes a father. The toll will be heavy on at least some of these kids -- by some accounts it already is -- but it will be years before this runs its course.
In a society whose elite has grown so deliberately callous to the needs of children that honest talk about what is best for them is discouraged or even banned in the toniest venues, opting for and defending the natural family will be increasingly difficult.
But there remains one important nugget of good news. For years, secularisation has held that religion is on its way out, inevitably. My thesis in "How the West Really Lost God" challenges what I believe is the critical weakness in that theory -- its inevitability. If changes in family patterns are at least partly responsible for changes in religious belief, rather than always the other way around as secularisation theory holds, then there is nothing inevitable about religion's waning.
One can name any number of factors, and I do in the essay, that might account for upswings in family formation and fertility; certainly, the history of the West is marked by just such demographic and social reversals. So while short-term practices may incline us to pessimism, there is nothing necessarily pushing religion toward extinction -- contrary to what many enlightened people have held for over a century now. And that, I think, should give us hope and courage.
Mary Eberstadt is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, author of Home-Alone America (Penguin, 2004), editor of Why I Turned Right (Simon and Schuster, 2007) and consulting editor to Policy Review. She is married and has four children.
Cherry^-^
Thank you for your insightful comments; I’m very grateful you took the time to intelligently critique my arguments.
First, I’d like to point out that the portrait you’ve given of your family is very nice; however, this bit bothers me a little.
“The first is that a lot of research indicates that mothers and fathers do different kinds of parenting and that each contribution seems to be important to children’s wellbeing.”
One; this statement infers (whether you intended it or not) that a lesbian parenting environment is inferior to a heterosexual one. In short, that’s just false. Two; This “lots of research” has only concluded that children raised by a mother and father do better than a child raised by a single mother or a single father; I’m not aware of a study that’s compared Heterosexual parenting and Homosexual parenting, and found one to be better than the other.
On the subject of Reproductive Technology’s many hurdles/problems… I guess the simplest response is that nothing is perfect or easy. If I could do anything to allow such technology to be used in the future, however, I would.
Your sorrows over the world we live in are well-founded, and I’m just offering my opinion on how we might go about fixing some of them.
Yes, bitchiness might be an issue^^;; But bitchiness isn’t as bad as rape.
Onwards… Jeanine^^
Cute, real cute^^ Well, I looked on this site you put for this elusive ‘evidence’… I only found evidence that a father with many partners and random sexual exploits is bad for a daughter growing up in the sixties^^;; The father was homosexual; but if he were heterosexual, there’s no way this girl’s life would have been any better.
If you really want to convince me and others, show me a book where a happy homosexual family is compared to a happy heterosexual family^^ You won’t find one, because people are scared to find out what they already know; we’re not worse parents.
Have a nice day, all^^
To TLDS cont- You may be aware of Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRAGE) and their critique. If you were able to proceed to procreate with your lesbian partner, that procreation would be participated in by a profit seeking business, various technicians -often male, and others. That would be the reality. And your child, and perhaps many other embryos would be subject to manipulations, freezing and perhaps rejection or experimentation down the track. The Catholic vision sees procreation as an integral part of love making.
On a broader note, your vision of a separate society is sadly attractive. I used to think things were getting better for women. Now I am worried for the future of my daughters. There are still many men who cannot handle capable, assertive or intelligent women. Beyond this, we are increasingly confronted with a naked hatred of women on our streets. The growth of the porn industry and its determination to push its products everywhere creates a hostile environment for girls and women. Men can watch women being humiliated and abused on film in the name of “adult entertainment”. Short of dragging a real naked woman down the street, men can put larger than life sized pictures of same on the back of their vehicle and gesticulate their misogynistic feelings about her with their beer stubbies as they ride down the highway. There are some dark forces in men that need to be kept in check by culture and society. Perhaps it is when society is strongly pro family and pro marriage that men can be their best.
I must say, despite this, I do often enjoy the company of some good men. i have had experience working with mainly men, mixed groups and mainly women. Women are great but can become a little crazy and obsessed with petty details. Most would agree that bitchiness might be an issue. So any alternative lesbian society might have to contend with some negative tendencies.
Hi TLDT - I can relate pretty well to your aspirations for child bearing within the context of a lesbian relationship and culture. My experience tells me that when having babies and rearing children it is very helpful and comforting to have support and contact with other women who really do care about you. I know very well, the aching grief at the prospect of not having children and the desire to hold a baby. I suspect that most women get to this at some stage. However, not being a lesbian, and having embarked on what I hope continues to be a traditional family life, there have been times when I have been blown away by the way my husband has interacted with and loved his children. Totally unlike my father and many other more “old fashioned” dads, he got very involved from day one. My children love him and look forward to him coming home every day. That doesn’t mean he is perfect and yes he has shown some typical male traits that have caused me great distress at different times. (Of course, I am far from perfect too!). Your hopes for a time when you and your female companion can equally contribute biologically to the procreation of a child seem reasonable and good except for two problems. The first is that a lot of research indicates that mothers and fathers do different kinds of parenting and that each contribution seems to be important to children’s wellbeing. Of course, until recently, most children have had to grow up with distant fathers thanks to certain social and economic developments over the last 2 centuries. But psychologists like Steve Biddulph argue cogently about the damage that has done to us. You are right to recognise the importance of avoiding donor gametes in trying to create a child. But fatherlessness may also be a real problem.
The other problem that needs to be considered in this vision of a lesbian procreational future is the harsh reality of the ART/IVF industry and its treatment of women and procreation.
Check this site for evidence that a family that consists of a mother and a father is best for society and children.
Click on resources.
http://www.dawnstefanowicz.com/
HI TLDS: I truly wasn’t humouring you. How patronising that would be. I wanted to engage in the debate with you - without either of us hurling insults. I certainly don’t have better things to do - but different things (that I would rather put off - hoovering?). I’ll contact you direct - but I expect others will still want to air their views on this male/female issue…
Francis, thanks for replying to me^^
Well… I guess you’re right in that ‘Christianity’ part of your answer, in which you state that you intrinsically believe that men and women are complimentary because the bible points that out. Well, that’s a good reason for a mixed-gender society, but… it only applies to Christians. What about someone who doesn’t believe men and women to be complimentary, like me for example? What’s a tangible reason an all-female society would be worse than a mixed-gender one, rather than just a belief that some people have?
But I liked your anecdote about your son^^ That said, though, if it were eight women living together, would you be able to walk through the door, and immediately realize there’s a certain “maleness” missing? I daresay that ultimately, it depends on the women: but under average circumstances, I think it wouldn’t be an uncomfortable difference.
Still, I can’t thank you enough for humoring me^^;; I’m sure you have a lot of better things you could be doing, and I’d just like to thank you for taking time out of your day to talk directly to me. If you’d like to talk outside of mercatornet, I’m reachable at .
Have a nice day, everyone^^
TDDS: you are absolutely right to say that more men are in prison than women. But this does not make them ‘more violent’. They simply direct their aggression outwards - whereas women direct it - generally - against themselves. i.e. there are many more women in mental hospitals than men (at least, that has been the statistical difference in the UK).
As a Christian, I can’t discount the ‘complementary’ aspect as you seem to do. Christians believe that ‘Male and female He created them’ (Genesis). We can’t push this belief under the carpet; it is intrinsic to this debate. Thus I believe an all-female society would be essentially impoverished, lacking the natural balance (as would an all-male society). (My student son is at this moment sharing university accommodation with 8 other men; you only have to go through the door to realize the vital contribution women make to civilization and how woefully obvious is its lack).
D Hall said: “As for them not being a match for training and discipline;why are they still a threat? Training and discipline only work if they are applied.Yeah,let them kill a few more thousand.”
They’re not a significant threat. The threat to us is in our own panic stricken reaction. It’s time to to start acting like adults instead of frightened children. I don’t know where your from but, here in America, those among us who are most ready to use the military are those who chose to stay out of harms way when it was their turn to serve. Bush and Cheney come immediately to mind.
D Hall, who said anything about Ghandi? I didn’t even like the guy.
Francis^^
Um. I didn’t exactly advocate erasing men from the world, now did I? See, I think that might be a bad idea, because… well, as sure as I am that an all-female society would be better than a mixed-gender one, I’m not certain -enough- to advocate an erasure of ‘backup society’. In that way, even if the female society doesn’t quite work out (and I mean if! I still think it will), then we still have that old system to lean on, and the human race is fine.
On your comment that it would be a nightmare… well, yeah, for you^^;; You like guys. We lesbians aren’t saddled with that.
Anyways, it’s not that I have anything against guys personally: I like a lot of guys. Ken Akamatsu, Andrea Boccelli, Matt Groening, David Spade… I’ve got friends who are guys, too^^
No, see, it’s the broader view I have a bit of a problem with. The US Bureau of Justice’s Website (which my name now links to) gives us this nice bit:
“Lifetime chances of a person going to prison are higher for
—men (11.3%) than for women (1.8%)”
Which is basically an oversimplification of something that I guess gets washed away by politically correct society: that men are intrinsically more violent than women. Another bit:
“Women were 6.6% of the State prison inmates in 2001, up from 6% in 1995.”
Which means that 93.4% of State Prison Inmates were male in 2001.
Pretty much, I guess I’m basing my ideal of a female society on the notion that, just maybe, a society where crime has been reduced by 86.8% would be a bit better than the current one.
But I do welcome criticism; It helps me determine what needs fixing. So, what would you say are the worst female characteristics?
That goes for anyone else who’s listening, incidentally. If you can come up with a concrete reason as to why a female society would be intrinsically worse than our current one, by all means, tell me. (none of that ‘men and women are complimentary’, please. Real reasons.)
Have a nice day, all^
To David Page,No ,I am not impressed by these people. I am saying ,however. that what we are seeing is manliness being taken to a caricaturish extreme. As for them not being a match for training and discipline;why are they still a threat? Training and discipline only work if they are applied.Yeah,let them kill a few more thousand.
One need not become a bully to defend oneself or others. Bullies and all sorts of bad people commit evil against others.Not responding in the necessary manner only invites greater attack.Give them an inch, they’ll take a yard. Bullies are only as brave as good people allow them to be.What happens if you stand up to a bully and he thinks you,re bluffing? He’ll push even harder.Will you do
nothing because you,re afraid you’ll “be just like him.”? Or will you show true courage and strength even if doing so means using force? Could Ghandi have stopped Hitler?
In reference to Muslim extremists D hall said: “The males are vicious and the females pop out babies. They see weakness in Western society. Who will defend ?; Effeminate men ?”
D Hall, Are you impressed by these people? I don’t find hysterical fanatics who are shouting death to this and that to be particularly manly. They obviously just want to fit in. I don’t know what your military experience is, but these people are no match for training and discipline.
I find your use of the words ‘emasculate’ and ‘effeminate’ to be curious. Do you emasculate yourself and become effeminate if you choose not to be a bully? When have you ever met a brave bully?
To David Page,You have misconstrued my comments. By misunderstanding or deliberately I cannot say.
There was and is no unfair advantage. It is by nature and/or creation , whichever you choose to believe.
As I pointed out,according to the Bible,the relationship between the sexes had gone awry,nearly from the start.
Because we have been able to advance ourselves out of the “caves”,are we to toss aside the social,spiritual and physiological discipline that got us there ?
Should Western society emasculate itself in the name of some twisted sense of equality ? The Islamic extremists who have declared war on the West ,live in the “old days” which you claim I pine for.
The males are vicious and the females pop out babies. They see weakness in Western society. Who will defend ?; Effeminate men ?
Do we toss women on the front lines to be injured and killed in inordinate numbers ? How would you facilitate this “equal “society you pine for?
To D Hall, I’m sorry you pine for the ‘old days’. There’s no going back. You’re on the wrong side of history. Perhaps if we were still living in caves muscles would mean more.
Male dominance is just as bad for men as it is for women. It weakened us to have an unfair advantage. It made us lazy. It was also morally corrosive. Power corrupts.
Of course most of history has been, in terms of power,an all-male world. Of the two sexes which would dominate? Naturally stronger and more aggressive,obviously it would be the male of the species. Where did all those people,both male and female, come from ? Who carried and gave birth to them ? Who was naturally and obviously endowed with the ability to feed and care for the young ? WOMEN ! That’s what makes them FEMALES in the first place.
It only stands to reason that the male would be protective of the female. The Bible tells us why there has been so much strife between the sexes. As fallen beings we will always fall short of perfection or “the ideal”. We have been blessed with Holy Scripture,a conscience and hope of redemption to guide us. If taken to heart they would serve us far better than Unitarian arcs and pendulums.
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