How the West really lost God

In this essay in Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt explores a theory about "How the West Really Lost God":

[W]hat secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they do -- including such elemental personal decisions as whether they marry and have children or not.10 Implied here is a striking, albeit widely assumed, view of how one social phenenomenon powers another: that religious believers are more likely to produce families because religious belief somehow comes first.

And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces -- modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families -- only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization -- and not as a theoretical exercise, but rather because compelling empirical evidence suggests an alternative account of what Nietzsche's madman really saw in the "tombs" (read, the churches and cathedrals) of Europe.

In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.

UPDATE:  On this matter, as on so many others, Lisa Schiltz was way ahead of me.  Here's her June 9 post on the same essay.  Thanks to Elizabeth Brown for the tip.