How the West Really Lost God
Hoover Institution Policy Review, June-July 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
The secularization theory is the idea that as people become more educated
and more prosperous, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion's
premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.
Secularization theory assumes that religious belief comes ontologically
first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they
do, such as whether they marry and have children or not.
European Christians did not just stop having children and families because
they became secular. At least some of the time, they also became secular
because they stopped having children and families.
What sort of
demographic patterns would we expect to see if it were true that family
decline were contributing to religious decline?
1. We would expect to
find declines in fertility and family formation in Western Europe for some
time before secularization became a social norm. The sustained fall in
birthrate that characterizes Western Europe today began at different times
in different countries, but it started earlier almost everywhere than is
widely understood. In France, the decline started in the late eighteenth
century. In Britain, the decline started a century later. In Ireland it
began in the twentieth century. But European fertility in general dropped
well before the dramatic demise of religious practice seen today.
If the decline of the family powered the decline in belief, one would expect
to find that more religious countries were those where the birthrate was
highest, and less religious ones were those registering an earlier decline.
If this theory is correct, the persistence of the natural family kept
religiosity alive in some places even as its decline elsewhere was helping
to extinguish it. In France, people generally stopped having babies much
sooner than they did elsewhere, and their religiosity declined earlier too.
In Ireland, the change in public religiosity has been most dramatic just in
the past generation. Essentially, the Irish stopped having babies and
families, and shortly afterward stopped going to church.
3. Once we
allow that family decline is at least partly responsible for religious
decline, we can explain the difference in religiosity between Europe and the
United States. If changes in marrying and having babies and families are
helping to drive changes in religiosity, then American exceptionalism is
explained by the fact that there are more families following the traditional
model in America than in Europe. Differences in fertility rates within the
United States track differences in religiosity.
The axiom that
religion is dictating family size is riddled with logical problems. It is
commonly assumed, for example, that religious Catholics have larger families
because of the prohibition against birth control. But Evangelical
Christians, who do not similarly have theological injunctions against birth
control as such, have a higher fertility rate than other groups. Orthodox
Jews in America have far more children than secular Jews, even though
orthodox Judaism also allows contraception within marriage. Mormons have a
high rate of natural family formation too. Even Catholics are not enjoined
to have all the children that they can.
In sum, here is evidence that
things work the other way, not only that religious people are inclined
toward the family, but also that something about the family inclines people
The phenomenology of what birth does to parents
is routinely experienced as transcendental. The sequence of events
culminating in birth is nearly universally interpreted as a moment of
communion with something larger than oneself. It is why the story of Jesus
is so universal in its tragic appeal.
A religious anthropology is
grounded on the primal fact that the parent-child bond pushes people toward
an intensity of purpose they might never otherwise have experienced. Birth
is not the only familial experience that has this transcendental effect. In
binding those alive to relatives both past and yet to come, family is
In sum, secularization theory appears to
present an incomplete version of how human beings actually come to think and
behave about things religious — not one by one and all on their own, but
rather mediated through the elemental connections of husband, wife, child,
aunt, great-grandfather, and the rest.
The proposed religious
anthropology ties up another loose end, the fact that women as a whole are
more observant than men. Perhaps the act of participating in birth inclines
women to be more humble about their own powers and more religiously attuned.
Or perhaps there is something about caring for the smallest and most
vulnerable beings that makes it easier to believe in a God who stands in a
similar caring relationship to relatively helpless mortals of every age.
The majority of people learn religion in communities, beginning with the
community of the family. With that connection now broken in formerly
Christian Western Europe and other parts of the West, a great many people in
their current peer group lean the secularist way. But that ending does not
prove that religion is over. It proves that one kind of human community is
If people come to religious practice because of their
experience of the natural family rather than vice versa, then a very
different verdict about the fate of religiosity in the advanced West
For there is nothing fixed or inevitable about
today’s low birth rates or low marriage rates or notions about the
desirability of the natural family. All these measures of family vitality
have fluctuated throughout history, sometimes radically so. Even the nations
of Western Europe all experienced a baby boom within living memory.
One can imagine the personal decisions about families changing for various
reasons. For example, if the state can no longer be counted on to help
support the elderly, then young men and women might choose to have children
to rely on in old age. Children do best when they grow up with married,
biological parents in the home. Children who do not enjoy that advantage are
at higher risk for a large number of problems. In the United States, parents
in some areas often make decisions about family size based on what it costs
to send children to a good school.
In the religious anthropology
proposed here, there is nothing inevitable about the decline of the natural
family or religion. But historically, many people have heard God through the
human symphony of the natural family.
AR I find the argument
persuasive and important. A dialog on this basis is well worth pursuing
The Cold War Pope
Hoover Institution, Policy Review, December 1, 2010
Edited by Andy Ross
The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II
The Victory of Freedom, the
Last Years, the Legacy
By George Weigel
Doubleday. 590 pages
Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II, has the biographer he
deserved. Ten years ago, George Weigel's first volume, Witness to Hope: The
Biography of Pope John Paul II, chronicled Karol Wojtyla's early life and
the first 22 years of his papacy. The second volume sheds light on Wojtyla's
forty-year struggle against communism.
Wojtyla was nineteen in 1939
when the Red Army invaded Poland and the country was divided between Germany
and the Soviet Union. Wojtyla began study for the priesthood in a
clandestine seminary program that was under surveillance by the Gestapo.
His appearance in the police files grew apace. By 1963, the files of the
Polish security service were full of warning flags about Wojtyla. In 1973
and 1974, Polish prosecutors three times considered arresting Wojtyla and
charging him with sedition. In one Polish report: "Despite his seemingly
conciliatory and flexible nature, Wojtyla is a very dangerous ideological
Communist kingpins saw a mortal threat to the regimes they
were defending and to the profound lies about human beings on which those
regimes were built. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was almost alone in the West in
grasping immediately the historical significance of Wojtyla's election:
"It's a miracle! It's the first positive event since World War I, and it's
going to change the face of the world!"
Weigel reports that this pope
went on pilgrimages to 129 different countries, visited 1,022 cities outside
Rome and delivered 3,288 prepared addresses, held 1,164 general audiences
attended by millions of people, and had some 1,600 meetings with heads of
state and other political figures. There is also his intellectual legacy
within the Church itself via a prodigious outpouring of encyclicals,
apostolic letters, catacheses, and other documents, including a 1994
bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope.
Wherever he was, John
Paul II's Christian message remained the same. Weigel cites as Wojtyla's
indispensible inner core the Catholic understanding of metanoia, or complete
turning to God and losing of self. Weigel:
That the most visible man
in the history of the world should have been a man living in late modernity
was not a surprise. That the most visible man in history was one who
understood himself primarily as a Christian disciple and evangelist — that
was one of the great surprises of late modernity.
AR Fascinating the a pope
should loom so large in history — the Christian arc of the Divine Comedy
seems to be made visible again.