What came first, secular Europe or small families?

Mary Eberstadt has fascinating piece in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review called "How the West Really Lost God", suggesting a different explanation for the securalization of the Western world than the one posited by Ross Douthat in the Atlantic article Michael P. recently posted ("a symbolic statement against the religious right").  It's a really rich essay, and my synopsis below won't do justice to the depth of her arguments, but here's the basic outline.

She challenges a particular step in the "conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe" -- namely the assumption 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."  Most particularly, she argues that "many Western European Christians did not just stop having chldren 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."

Her arguments are fascinating, beginning with demographic arguments such as, for example, the argument that the widespread use of birth control  in France brought down the total fertility rate to 3.25 per thousand (the same as the Netherlands in the early 1960s) as early as the 1880's!

She rejects the simple counterargument that religious people have more children because of things like the Catholic Church's prohibition against birth control.  That doesn't explain the relatively higher birth rates among Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, or Mormons, none of whom are subject to theological injunctions against birth control (or even, in some cases, against abortion). 

She explores some possible explanations about what it might be about the experience of families that would incline people toward religion -- such as the transcendence of the experience of birth ("the sequence of events culminating in birth is nearly universally interpreted as a moment of communion with something larger than oneself, larger even than oneself and the infant"); the primal connection between parents and children; the intimate connection with another generation that is "literally death-defying -- another feature that might make it easier for those living in families to make related transcendental leaps of the religious variety." 

She makes the interesting suggestion that women's more immediate experience of the act of birth could help explain another puzzling aspect of secularization trends.  She says her theory "ties up another theoretical loose end that should be troubling to the secularizationists, despite having no apparent standing in their discussion.  That is the well-known fact -- one that is curiously unmentioned in the latest vogue of atheism as well -- that women as a whole are more observant than men. . . .If news of God's death is moving throught society slowly but surely, why should it be that one sex in one country and culture after another seems to be getting the news faster than the other?"

She ends with some speculation about what it might mean for the fate of religiosity in the advanced West if she's right.  Noting that fluctuations in birth rates are common (compare the birth rate in the U.S. during the Depression with the rate a few decades later, in the Baby Boom), she suggests that people might start getting seriously worried about the collapse of the social security system and begin appreciating the value of children as sources of support in old age, or that society as a whole might start really heeding the lessons that are causing marriage and childbirth rates to rise among more affluent educated American women, or that perhaps family-friendly political reforms such as "restoration of public education, meaningful tuition tax credit, innovations in home-school networks" could influence family size.

I encourage you to read the full piece.  It's really fascinating.  Here's a final excerpt:

.  .  .  it appears that the natural family as a whole has been the human symphony through which God has historically been heard by many people — not the prophets, not the philosophers, but a great many of the rest. That is why the conventional story of secularization seems to be missing something: because it makes its cases by and to atomized individuals without reference to the totality of family and children through which many people derive their deepest opinions and impressions of life — including religious opinions and impressions.