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diggHow 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.
Francis Phillips said: “I believe civilization rests on both sexes, sharing their gifts in a complementary way. A society of women only would be a nightmare; all the worst female characteristics would come to the fore. The same would be true of an all-male world.”
Most of history has been, in terms of power, an all male world. Of course an equal society, were the sexes compliment one another, is the ideal. If the pendulum swings occasionally too far, well, thats what pendulums do. The goal is equality and freedom. As an Abolitionist, probably Unitarian, once said, ‘The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward Justice’.
For TLDS: don’t apologise for thinking my review boring; it matters not a jot. What matters is the kind of biotechnological world we are inventing for ourselves, that Mundy maps out. This is an urgent matter that requires a sober and courteous dialogue because it is a radical re-arrangement of the fundamental law of life i.e. that a child is born from the sexual relationship of a man and a woman. To tamper with this is a huge matter with consequences that we know not what.
My use of ‘Brave New World’ was as a metaphor for this radical reinvention of biological/human society.
Further, why do you object to men?? They are 50% of the human race - no better, nor worse than womankind. You will not agree with me, but I believe civilization rests on both sexes, sharing their gifts in a complementary way. A society of women only would be a nightmare; all the worst female characteristics would come to the fore. The same would be true of an all-male world. What is wrong with peaceful co-existence, whether in marriage - not for everyone, obviously - or in friendship?
First, I’ll say this^^ I don’t -usually- do this, ‘this’ being ‘carry out arguments in the middle of a public posting area’. But I’ve received such delicious comments that I feel there is nothing else to do but respond to them^^
Firstly, I address Francis Phillips^^ (glad to hear you’re using at least some version of my name^^)
Everything Conceivable, I’ve heard of that… You reviewed that, right? I think I read some, but… I apoligize if I’m being impolite, but it was a bit boring for my tastes, so I didn’t get very far.
And what are you mentioning Brave New World for? I’m not advocating Soma or any of that other stuff; I’m saying two women should be able to raise and love their -own- child. That’s about as complicated as it gets in my POV.
Now for D Hall^^ Well… I’m finding it increasingly difficult to reply to you logically^^ If I were a less intelligent person, I’m sure we’d be having a swear-fight about now. But you seem close to having one all by yourself^^;;
What kind of being, you ask? A fully functioning, human girl^^ With two mothers^-^
You mention the Nazis and Soviet Union; but… you’ve got zero -anything- to link them to me. See, in literature, we call that a Red Herring: look it up.
And^^ As long as lesbian children are ‘bolstered’ by heterosexual society, they’ll be fine? I’ll throw out one of my little ideas^^
It’s a society in which there are no men at all. All the women are lesbians, and not the whore-kind on the internet, the -real- kind. And they can all have and love daughters of their own, and live out their lives separate from men and heterosexuality. It makes my heart beat faster just thinking of it, but you probably wouldn’t like such a society^^;;
And let me tell you: nothing you or anyone else could say would convince me that this society is not what’s best for humankind.
So for now, reassure yourself with the false hope that such a society will never be ~_^
Have a nice day, everyone^-^
Francis, you’ve got to be careful of dictionaries. You and your friends would always be welcome in our church. The only criterion for membership is that you can’t be mean. When I first asked them what I had to believe to become a member they said “nothing”.
I said “I’m in”.
All my life when I was involved in something I was proud of, the Unitarians were there too. I finally joined them.
To respond to David Page: I must remember not to consult a dictionary when I want a definition of Unitarianism in future. On the basis of your description, an atheist friend of mine would feel very comfortable alongside the 80% Freethinking-Unitarians.
All my other friends: fellow Christians, some Muslims, a Stalinist, a lapsed Jew, a lapsed Catholic (or two), a Humanist, a Jungian etc, are also deeply committed to building a better world, so perhaps we could call ourselves ‘Sympathisers to the 80r;s?’
For us Christians, of course, personal salvation and building a better world are indissolubly linked.
Nietzsche never said a truer word. I often think the loneliness he must have experienced drove him mad. Thank God for a personal God - whom we meet in Christ: The Way, the Truth and the Life.
To follow on D Hall’s comment, I suggest that TLDS reads ‘Everything Conceivable’ by Lisa Mundy, published by Princeton University Press. Mundy (a non-believer) details all the technological practices (so far) that can ‘construct’ a child: surrogate wombs, eggs bought over the internet (from poverty-stricken East European women), sperm banks, multiple pregnancies that require selective ‘deletions’, unknown numbers of half-brothers and sisters, secrecy about genetic parentage etc etc. She does not mention cloning a child from 2 women, but this will come, inevitably. Huxley’s Brave New World strikes me as a deeply unhappy world - especially for the children.
Francis, belief in one God was the original meaning of Unitarianism. I would bet that no more than 20% of New England Unitarians even consider themselves to be Christian. It just doesn’t come up. We believe that some religions have common beliefs but separate purpose (personal salvation). Unitarians have separate beliefs but common purpose (build a better world). Our refusal to agree with one another on matters religious will prevent us from falling into the trap of Utopianism.
Nietzsche said ‘you will not know loneliness until you experience life without a personal God’. I agree with him completely. I don’t agree with Nietzsche on much, but I believe that his quest for truth was honest and relentless.
Truth doesn’t set you free, the quest for it does. If I were to accept someone else’s truth, as I have often been tempted to do, it would be an act of cowardice. I would hate myself in the morning.
I chose MacIntyre at random, as he is a wellknown philosopher - and philosophers use their reason to an exceptional degree, teasing out the meaning (and implications) of words like ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ etc.
Left to ourselves we can pull such words in all kinds of directions e.g feminists want the ‘freedom’ to ‘choose’ an abortion as their ‘right’. This directly conflicts with the ‘freedom’ of a foetus to have the ‘right’ to life. Who is right in this situation and who is wrong?
I think David Page said he was a Unitarian? That’s his choice - to believe that God is one Person. Why is that more free than my choice to believe that God is a Trinity - 3 Persons in one God?
As a Christian I believe Christ’s words: ‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.’ Without truth, freedom is illusory.
I am free to believe that Shakespeare is a boring, old-fashioned, pompous moraliser. But if I thought that I would be wrong, shallow and ignorant. It does not belittle or restrict me to accept the wiser thoughts of great literary critics on Shakespeare; it frees me to enjoy his poetry more. To ‘think for oneself’ always means thinking within some tradition, some context, under some influence or other.
Hello TLDS,I knew you were referring to something more than one biological mother specifally.Going beyond that “security blanket” is an excuse to use children in forceing society give undue respect to one`s chosen lifestyle. As for fertility research,where dores it end? What kind of being will be produced by such procedures?
That’s if such things can be done. This is called “eugenics”. It’s playing GOD. This is why the West may not find God again.We’ve given up our humanity to be like God. Genesis,chapter 3.
As for other systems of families,I believe “gay” and “lesbian” households with children are just “playing house”. As long as thet`re bolstered by a “heterosexual’ society,they can seem to do well.If any old gathering of people can be considered a family proper,what kind of identity will we have in a few generations? It sounds like nazi Germany and the Soviet Union rolled into one.
And no,I won`t lay off.
Francis Phillips said: “So Catholics, all one billion of them, who adhere to dogmatic beliefs, have surrendered their critical intelligence and capacity for making moral choices?”
Yes, Francis, thats exactly what I’m saying. Catholics, Muslims, Marxists, Fascists, Liberals, Fundamentalists of all stripes and anyone else who chooses not to make their own choices. Why would I be impressed by a man, Alasdair MacIntyre to be precise, who was a Marxist and is now a Catholic? When is he going to start thinking for himself? Doesn’t he trust himself?
The great ‘sin’ of mankind is this running away from freedom, this abdication of responsibility, this choosing to let others choose for us that causes so much strife in the world. Me included. I know right from wrong. I always have. I’m not always strong enough to choose it.
D Hall^^
It seems I’ve thrown ambiguity upon myself once again^^;; For that, I apologize profusely. No, what I meant was…
[“each of us has one and only one biological or natural mother”
I’ve said this already, but.. you aren’t going to have that security blanket forever.]
See, when I said that… I wasn’t referring to that one biological mother, specifically, being a security blanket^^;; What I mean was… Christians can frequently accuse lesbian relationships as being unnatural for the sole reason that they don’t produce children. Their ‘security blanket’ is that there is only -one- biological mother^^ But, fertility research continuing at the pace it’s been, we may have a method to conceive a child from two women very soon^^
-That’s- what I meant when I was talking about the lack of security blanket. Sorry if I was unclear^^
And, as for the latter remark, about your thoughts on maternal instinct…
I’m just going to laugh at you^^;;
Egotistical and self serving? Looks like I’m not the only one making a few errors in my posts^^ I think you have me confused with -you-.
The way I see it, it’s rather self-serving and egotistical to be bashing another system of family that, quite frankly, you know nothing about and will never be a part of. So lay off, please^-^
Have a nice day, all^^
Having just read the Mercator article on same-sex parenting by Dale O’Leary, on which David Page has commented, I recognise where his remarks are coming from. Why does DP cast a slur on Patricia Morgan’s profession by putting quote marks around ‘sociologist’? Here in the UK she is highly regarded as an entirely mainstream professional sociologist. As she often writes for the conservative thinktank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, she is not liked by Left-wingers and progressives - but that does not make her wrong. She is not a quack like Kinsey, whose ‘research’ definitely requires quote marks.
I myself think it is too early in this massive social experiment to call it successful. We must wait some years. Heterosexual parenting has been the norm since civilization began. To say that same-sex parenting - around for perhaps 20 years - is just as good, seems somewhat premature to me.
So Catholics, all one billion of them, who adhere to dogmatic beliefs, have surrendered their critical intelligence and capacity for making moral choices? That sounds a dogmatic remark to me. Tell it to Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most widely-read philosophers of the 20th century, once a Marxist, a Trotskyite, an Aristotelian and now a Catholic.
Children raised by same sex couples in America do at least as well as children raised by heterosexual couples. You should compare just children raised by gay couples with just those raised by straight couples to get a true picture. What did Disraili say? (Lies, damnable lies and statistics?)
As far as dogma is concerned, all dogma means is a set of beliefs, practices, and principles. What acceptance of dogma implies is someone who has stopped critical thinking. It also implies someone who has stopped making moral choices, someone who allows others to make those moral choices for him.
I will not quarrel with those statistics of marriage failure. They are similar over here in the UK. I am tempted to paraphrase GK Chesterton and say that it is not that marriage has been tried and found wanting but that modern couples have not properly tried it.
However, the empirical facts (the author’s phrase) remain overwhelming: on every count children from traditional marriages do better than those in alternative situations.
In the UK the Tory Party has at last recognised that the breakdown of our society has much to do with marriage and family breakdown. Ordinary people know this too; that is why the poll ratings for the Tories have gone up - so much so that the Labour Party has (reluctantly)agreed that traditional marriage should be privileged above the alternatives, with special tax incentives etc.
About dogmatism: it has often struck me that people are never so dogmatic as when they have rejected God.
Francis Phillips said: “Evidence shows that when the family make-up includes step-parents, single parents, same-sex parents etc, it is less stable than the traditional model.
So you cannot so easily separate ‘make-up’ and ‘stability’ as liberals like to do.”
The divorce rate among ‘traditional’ families in America approaches 50%. We don’t yet know what the rate will be with gay marriages. I’m from Massachusetts, so I’ll let you know.
On the subject of my supposed prejudice against dogmatic religions, I always followed the precept of leaving them alone if they left me alone. In America these religions have jumped into the political fray. They have every right to do this, but they don’t have the right not to be examined and criticized.
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