The clearest example of the thesis on how family nurtures faith is in vocations.

The Family Fell First then Faith Followed

by Austin Ruse

The clearest example of the thesis on how family nurtures faith is in vocations. In the olden days larger intact families produced priests. That’s one reason the seminaries bulged back in the baby boom, also why there was something of a religious revival after the Second World War.
But today’s two-child, one-child, no-child, broken-up, broken-down, single-mother, absent-father disasters pretending to be families simply do not produce priests. Today’s disaster families don’t even produce many Church-goers to speak of let alone vocations to religious life.

In her new book How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt advances the novel idea that the rise of secularism and the decline of religion started with a disruption in the family, that it is the larger intact family that creates religious folk and not the other way around. I gave her central argument short shrift a few weeks ago, so I am back with a closer look.

Traditional secular theory explains that among other things industrialization and urbanization killed religious faith. Eberstadt explains there is an intermediate step between them and the decline of faith.

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