The great puzzle of secularization has been missing a critical piece: the family

How the West Really Lost God: 

An Interview with Mary Eberstadt

by Gerald J. Russello

Editor’s note: This interview of Mary Eberstadt, conducted by Gerald J. Russello, was first published July 21, 2013 in The University Bookman under the title “Faith and Family: A Two Way Street” and is reprinted with permission. Eberstadt is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C.

Q: Thanks for joining us. Tell us the thesis of your new book.

A: How the West Really Lost God opens with a review of the conventional arguments for Western secularization and observes that those arguments don’t adequately explain the decline of Christianity in certain parts of the Western world. If that’s correct—if, pace the new atheists and other secular thinkers, material progress and education and rationalism alone have not caused secularization—then what has?

My book argues that the great puzzle of secularization has been missing a critical piece: the family, and the ways in which changes to the Western family have in turn affected Western Christianity. For reasons that are laid out in several chapters, I believe that these two institutions are best understood as a double helix—that each is only as strong as the other at a given moment in history, and that each requires the other to reproduce.

This is a new way of understanding what’s been happening out there, a firm departure from the standard post-Enlightenment secular script about what Nietzsche and others have called the death of God. Under the influence of that script, many people seem to have decided that religious decline is simply inevitable. But that’s not what the record shows.

Q: Your book helpfully analyzes the varied effects that modernity has had in different parts of the world. You note that modernity and loss of religion need not always go together. In your view then, what caused the secularization of Europe?

A: Western Europe is more secular than the United States, and Scandinavia in turn is the most secular territory of all. So let’s consider Scandinavia as one petri dish for the book’s theory. Who pioneered the unmarried Western family and its close ally, the welfare state (whose arguably critical role in secularization is also part of this picture)? Scandinavia. What is arguably the most atomized place in the Western world today, as measured by, say, the number of people who don’t even live in a family at all? Scandinavia again. Almost half of Swedish households are now singletons, for instance.

I believe these trends aren’t occurring in a vacuum. Scandinavia is an excellent case in point of the book’s thesis: religious decline and family decline—as measured by proxies like fertility, marriage, divorce, and cohabitation—go hand in hand. They’re causally related.

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