National Catholic Reporter Review: How the West Really Lost God, Part 1 _Michael Sean Winters_ (http://ncronline.org/authors/michael-sean-winters) | July 2, 2013 Mary Eberstadt has written an important book. How the West Really Lost God is also a frustrating book. While Eberstadt's central thesis is provocative and causes us to think about secularization in new and interesting ways, the book also evidences a disturbing trend in academia in which professors, like MSNBC or Fox News anchors, only speak with people who already agree with them. The result is a book that could have been better if Eberstadt had thought to allow herself to be challenged, rather than confirmed, in her biases. The central thesis of the book is simply stated and immediately recognizable as a significant contribution to the discussion of secularization: "[This book's] argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship. It also is plausible -- and, I will argue, appears to be true -- that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline." (Emphasis in original) In short, while many scholars have agreed that lower levels of religiosity result in smaller families, Eberstadt wonders if the causal relationship between family life and religion is not a two-way street, or a "double-helix," as she suggests, in which it is the experience of family life itself that invites greater levels of religious devotion in Western culture. Before presenting her argument in its full expression, Eberstadt considers other theses about the causes of secularization. She does so for the most part critically but sympathetically. The tour of contemporary literature on secularization that Eberstadt brings the reader on spans several chapters and is well worth the time in part because she is never dismissive of others' findings and tries, with varying degrees of success, to address the issues these other theorists raise. For example, she acknowledges the insight of British sociologist Grace Davie that even while Europeans today are less religiously observant than their forebears, they still pay taxes to fund their churches, tend to identify as Christians no matter whether they attend church services, and seem to like the values Christianity proposes, even if they can't or don't live up to those values. And Europeans, like many Americans, insist they are spiritual even if they are not religious. But Eberstadt also cautions that such observations do not obstruct the brute fact that in Europe, religion has declined, not merely morphed, and that much of the morphing involves the abandonment of key Christian ideas in favor of "nebulous forms of 'spirituality' " that lead Eberstadt to bracing questions: "How many doctrinal particulars can be jettisoned before any given individual can fairly be called un- or even anti-Christian, un- or antireligious? At what point would St. Paul, say, find this modern syncretic 'Christianity' altogether unrecognizable?" Eberstadt confronts the secularization theory that "people stopped needing the imaginary comforts of religion," a meme that is especially popular with atheists old and new. She acknowledges that the Christian religion promises eternal life and that "the promise of more life is a weighty consolation" and therefore attractive. "But that attractiveness," she writes, "... is outweighed by something that those who think along these lines have not thought to emphasize, because it undermines their argument, namely, the heavy stings attached to that same offer of ultimate salvation, as verified by a quick checklist of Judeo-Christianity's other and profoundly burdensome claims on those same individuals." Here, the reader begins to get suspicious. The observation Eberstadt makes is spot-on, but there is no such thing as "Judeo-Christianity" outside of conservative political talking points, and the word "checklist" betrays a strange, and uniquely modern, understanding of the nature of faith claims. The suspicions only grow when, a few pages later, Eberstadt confronts the thesis that Christianity has weakened in the West because of our growing prosperity, what she deems the "fat-and-happy argument." She notes that sociological data actually demonstrate that people who are wealthier tend to be more, not less, religiously observant. She also notes that Christianity did just fine amidst the opulence of ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence and in many of today's wealthy U.S. suburbs. And she notes that religious observance in the U.S. remains significantly higher than in Europe despite our comparative levels of material prosperity. All of this is undeniably true. It is also undeniably true that the Gospel is good news for the poor, and so perhaps at a deeper cultural level, our wealthy ears have trouble hearing it anymore or twist it to make it more palatable. The other night, I watched the movie "Auntie Mame," in which Dwight Babcock of the Knickerbocker bank pledges to "make a decent, God-fearing Christian out of this boy [young Patrick] if I have to break every bone in his body." Babcock was, of course, a bigot, a banker, and mean to boot. Yet, for how many people, such as the fictional Babcock, is religion a sign of social propriety covering a multitude of sins, with little or nothing to do with the Gospel? Eberstadt's biases unfortunately are found throughout the book and they obscure, not help, her core thesis. For example, she writes on page 16, "Alternatively, as the state has expanded to take on duties once shouldered instead by those nearest and dearest, the incentives to do the hard work of keeping a family together have increasingly elicited the tacit response, why bother? ... In this way, once can argue, the expanded social welfare state competes with the family as the dominant protector of the individual -- in the process undercutting the power of the family itself." Here is standard neo-con fare, but it involves a leap in logic and an ignorance of history. The causal connection between the growth of the welfare state and the decline in family life is asserted, not proven. And the welfare state was not intended to destroy the family, but to meet needs that actual families were incapable of meeting. Certainly the vast advances in modern medicine would be out of reach for most family budgets, and not every family has a doctor capable of performing heart surgery, or a team of nurses to help with recuperation. On pages 109ff, Eberstadt examines historical studies of the decline of the family and religiosity in 18th-century France and 19th-century Britain. These studies illustrate the link between family and religion, to be sure, but they undercut one of the dominant memes of the book, that everything went to hell in the 1960s. On page 131, she titles a subsection thus: "The Family Factor helps explain something that comes up repeatedly in the scholarly literature, which is the mystery of why 1960 or thereabouts is such a pivotal year in secularization." So between p. 109 and p. 131, the earlier centuries are forgotten? Surely those earlier studies of earlier centuries should invite a bit of scholarly humility before making assertions about the uniqueness of the present moment. The most problematic, and unfortunately emblematic, of Eberstadt's chapters is chapter 6, in which she blames doctrinal laxness in mainstream Protestantism for creating "Assisted Religious Suicide." I am no fan of mainstream Protestantism, to be sure, but it is as obvious to me as day that the problem with religion in America, a problem that attaches to Eberstadt as much as to mainstream Protestantism, is that it reduces religion to ethics. For the left, the reduction boils down into social justice. For the right, it boils down into sexual Jansenism. In both cases, what was lost long before the 1960s was the idea that the Christian religion is fundamentally about a series of outrageous claims about the supernatural, based upon the revelation of Jesus Christ. This had to be set aside as a consequence of the Reformation, which was not a secular event. In America, the necessity of living in a pluralist society has forced religion into this role of an ethical authority since the Founding. When preachers stopped preaching the empty tomb of Jesus Christ, that is when the laity, who came seeking the living, found themselves amongst the dead. -------------- Review: How the West Really Lost God, Part 2 _Michael Sean Winters_ (http://ncronline.org/authors/michael-sean-winters) | July 3, 2013 As I related yesterday, Eberstadt spends fully half the book examining alternate theories of secularization, critically but sympathetically for the most part, but her treatment of the subject is uneven. And, having set the table so unevenly, one is not surprised to find that the entrée is served before the soup, or that the pasta needs salt. It is in Chapter 7 that Eberstadt lays out her central thesis, which, as explained yesterday, is this: [This book’s] argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship. It also is plausible – and, I will argue, appears to be true that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline. This is an important insight, not least because no one has made the argument previously. Determining causality in broad sociological trends is always difficult, and Eberstadt is at pains not to overstate her case. But, she need not hold back. She notes that for many people, the experience of childbirth itself is an experience that tends to lead a mother and father to think in more transcendent terms. People use words like “transcendent,” and “ethereal,” and “ magical” to describe the event. (N.B. My dear, departed mother was not one of them. Having been awake through the birth of my sister, when it came time for me to be born she instructed the doctor, “Knock me out at the first pain and wake me up when the hairdresser shows.”) Eberstadt notes that the primordial familial relationship is a central theme in humanity’s artistic record, and how violations of the norms of family life make for the best tragedies, from Medea to Lear to Michelangelo’s Pieta, which captures what for most people is the most horrific of human events, the death of a child. “Thus does a complementary religious anthropology begin to emerge, grounded on the primal fact that the mother-child and father-child bond, as no other, appears to push at least some people toward an intensity of purposeful connection with the divine that they might never otherwise have experienced,” she writes. Perhaps the most compelling section of the book is found on pp 160ff., in which Eberstadt points out that the link between familial and religious decline might have a lot to do with the fact that the Christian story is itself brought to us in familial garb. “Like it or not, the Judeo-Christian tradition has anthropomorphized the Deity in one particular way: by analogy to a wise, protective, loving, ever-present male parent. The fact that many children, in an age of broken or unformed natural families, do not associate those adjectives with their male biological parent makes for elemental, ongoing confusion and heartache among some of the subjects of the Marquardt/Glenn study [which she had previously cited].” In these same pages she also makes the obvious, but often overlooked, point that “People do not like to be told that they are wrong, or that those whom they love have done wrong.” Surely, the cult of self-esteem can, and should, always and everywhere be exposed as a profoundly anti-Christian project. The Gospel call to chastity may stir some hearts and the Gospel call to charity may stir others, but if the Gospel call is robbed of the call to repentance, it is no longer the Christian Gospel. I do wish Eberstadt had spent more time on the effects of urbanization on the family, which she acknowledges far too briefly. This, as well as the emergence of a spread-eagle capitalism that accompanied urbanization, is a bigger part of this tale than Eberstadt lets on. Having stated her thesis, the frustrations with Eberstadt’s crimped moral compass and predictable neo-con asides, only mount. For example, on page 170 she cites Charles Murray (always a dangerous proposition) and W. Bradford Wilcox in their work correlating economic well-being with traditional family structures. No one can doubt the link, but here Eberstadt’s praiseworthy willingness to see causation as a two-way street ceases: She moves on to the horrible social consequences of the phenomenon without pausing to think that maybe poverty, and the pathologies that accompany it, may cause family break-ups to be more frequent. On page 172, Eberstadt makes the case that “the spread of non-traditional families further weakens the traditional family in another way: because nontraditional and antitraditional families encourage skepticism and even mockery of the notion that the traditional family is a legitimate norm.” I suspect that the mockery is confined to the professoriate, who tend to inflate the importance of their analysis in any event. But, Eberstadt’s very next sentence demonstrates her neo-con bias in all its unchristian vigor: “Some do so inadvertently – as when, say, the sheer volume of fatherless homes leads people to treat all families with moral equivalence for the sake of politesse.” Really? I find that “for the sake of politesse” comment very ugly. Might it not be that many people approach such tragic phenomenon as fatherless homes with a strong sense of compassion and are not willing to kick a fatherless family when they are down, still less to prove a point? I note in passing that on page 173 Eberstadt writes that the fundamental story of Christianity is “the creation of the Son of God as man,” which happens to be a heresy. “Genitum, not factum,” as the Creed says. Eberstadt correctly notes the plight of the black family in America, and the controversy surrounding the Moynihan Report back in 1965, and how the situation has only gotten worse since then. She is correct, indeed, that this is a huge societal problem. But, black Americans also continue to register the highest rates of religiosity in the country. At the very least, Eberstadt needed to stop the gloom-and-doom scenario for a moment and wrestle with this fact. There is something prim, and as I say, crimped about Eberstadt’s view of the Christian faith. She writes, “The point of being a Christian is to save one’s soul and to get to heaven. Many tests and requirements might be involved along one’s earthly path to that ultimate goal – good works, attendance in church, the practicing of virtues and the resisting of vices, and so.” Not a word about love. This is the neo-con problem, and a large part of the reason for religious decline. The face of Christianity in America is too often a scolding, finger-wagging prelate or minister or, in Eberstadt’s case, intellectual. Or our understanding of Christianity is too wedded to a set of neo-con understandings (“politesse”!) that lack natural, let alone supernatural, empathy. Not once in this important book does Eberstadt really come close to the heart of Christianity and its social relevance which was captured, as well as by anyone, in Balthasar’s observation: Only love is credible. This is the secret of Pope Francis, is it not? In word and gesture, he reminds us that God loves us by showing that he loves us. I suspect that in the fight with secularism, it will be the image of Pope Francis next week, acquiring the smell of the sheep when he visits Lampedusa and communes with the immigrants there, many of them non-Catholics, it is that image for which secularism has no answer. I do not know Eberstadt, so I do not know what she and her friends at the Ethics and Public Policy Center really think of Pope Francis. But, if they are not made uncomfortable by him, they are not paying attention. He makes me uncomfortable every day, uncomfortable and excited to be a Catholic. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
