Does the demise of the natural family signal the end of Christianity in the West?

How the West Really Lost God: 

A New Theory of Secularization

by C. R. Wiley

How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt

We can hope that Western civilization is in the early stages of awakening from a bad dream. Mary Eberstadt’s new book may help with that. It is more a stirring nudge than a blaring alarm—in part because it is an accessible work of social science, not a moral treatise. Throughout, she reassures us that she is just looking for the truth—the truth being amoral and merely factual in this case. Apart from my own doubts about the possibility or desirability of knowing facts as such, anyone who favors life over death, or meaning over the void, cannot help but feel a moral stirring.

Her thesis, which she labels the “Family Factor,” is straightforward: As goes the natural family, so goes religion, especially Christianity. She uses the double helix structure of DNA to illustrate this interdependency. DNA’s structure is like a twisted ladder, whose two side rails are linked by rungs of biochemical information. Similarly, religion and the natural family are “the double helix of society.” Religion directs biological reproduction towards meaningful social and spiritual ends. Without it, family life loses its connection to those ends. But without the natural family, religion loses an important support. In a world with central heating and agribusiness, the natural family is the last direct connection most people have to a natural order. With its demise, traditional religion loses an important justification for its sacrifices.

It is Eberstadt’s contention that the natural family fell first. This is the real reason the West lost God.

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