Mary Eberstadt | How the West Really Lost God

[Music] thank you [Music] well good evening distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen I'm Deanna Glenn from The Ramsey Center for Western Civilization where I'm the academic director and it's my great pleasure to extend a warm welcome to you all I convey sincerest apologies from our chairman The Honorable John Howard and our CEO Professor Simon Haynes both of whom are overseas and an apology from The Honorable Tony Abbott who was here briefly it is my special pleasure to welcome our guest speaker Mary everstat and her husband Nicholas epistat I acknowledge the presence this evening of Ramsey Center board member Mr Joe de brune who is also a director and Trustee of Campion college and former chairman and The Honorable John Anderson former deputy Prime Minister of Australia Campion college is a co-sponsor this evening and I'm pleased to acknowledge Dr Paul Morrissey president and Dr Stephen mcinerney who is the director of the Campion center for the study of the western tradition I also acknowledge Dr Michael Casey director of the PM Glenn Institute at the Australian Catholic University as the main organizers of Mary's tour Al Ramsey benefactor the late Mr Paul Ramsey was a highly successful businessman and philanthropist who was passionate about creating an enduring Legacy that would benefit Australian Society particularly through the promotion of study programs and discussion about the long Continuum of Western Civilization across a wide range of disciplines and art forms I'm delighted now to hand over to Dr Paul Morrissey who will introduce our guest speaker and facilitate the formal proceedings Dr Morrissey was appointed president of Campion College in 2015. he holds a licenteat in sacred theology at the lateran University in Rome and completed his Doctorate at the Catholic University Catholic Institute in Sydney he taught systematic and moral theology at the University of Notre Dame for eight years and has published numerous papers in New Black Friars Nova at veteran logos and solidarity he also comments regularly on education especially on the importance of the liberal arts and classical education please join me in welcoming Dr Paul Morrissey foreign thanks so much Deanna for that that welcome and it is great to host this evening with our very good friends and may I say fellow Travelers uh at the Ramsey Center it's it's wonderful to have this event together and it's my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker this evening Mary erbastat holds the Panola chair in Christian culture at the Catholic information center in Washington DC and is a senior research fellow fellow at the faith and reason Institute she is also may I add an international course advisor at Campion College Mary is an influential public intellectual and the author of several books including Primal screams how the sexual Revolution created identity politics How the West really lost God and Adam and Eve after the pill her next book Adam and Eve after the pill Revisited will be published by Ignatius press in early 2023 with a forward by Cardinal George Powell Mrs erbastat's writing has appeared in many magazines and journals and the books have been translated into many languages her 2010 novel The Loser letters about a young woman in rehab struggling with atheism was adapted for stage and premiered at the Catholic University in America in fall 2017. during the Reagan Administration Mary was Speech writer to Secretary of Secretary of State George Schultz and a Special Assistant to Ambassador Jean j kpatrick at the United Nations Mrs irvastat and her husband Nicholas have four children and her work could be found on a website maryobastat.com her lecture this evening is how the West really lost God please join me in welcoming Maria Bassett foreign thank you president Morrissey and thank you distinguished guests it's been an honor and a lot of fun to return to Sydney today thanks to Campion college and the Ramsey Center this is Nixon my first time in Australia and we are deeply grateful to all of you for your fellowship your hospitality and your Mutual commitment to helping discern does shifting ground beneath the modern West our subject tonight begins in understanding some statistics on belief and unbelief in the latest Australian census these up-to-date numbers offer a window through which to view one of the greatest social experiments in history that experiment has been ongoing in the western tradition for centuries now it is known to some as Matthew Arnold's low receding Roar of religious faith two others it is the process of what is called secularization or the seeding to non-religious authorities of territories once considered to be gods and only gods and although this experiment matters rather obviously to religious believers it also matters to Western citizens of all Stripes as secularization affects us all now the fact of Western religious decline is nothing new even so judging by the 2021 Australian census secularization is now Galloping at a pace that even the most prescient observers might not have foreseen in 2021 just under 44 percent of Australians called themselves Christian in the census 50 years ago in 1971 fully 86 percent still called themselves Christians so from 86 percent in 1971 to just under 44 today in effect the percentage of the Australian population calling itself Christian has been cut in half in 50 years and Australia is hardly alone to the contrary every society in the west exhibits the same growing indifference to organized religion in the United States founded in large part by Protestant religious refugees some 68 percent of the population pardon me 63 percent of the population now calls itself Christian forecasters expect that number to fall below 50 in a few more decades in the U.S as in Australia the category none of the above is the fastest growing religious subset of all and as for the United Kingdom although the number of people calling themselves Christian still hovers around 50 percent only 27 percent of Britain's report that they actually believe in a god so this list too could go on but let us cut instead to the question raised by this trend what has happened here how have societies that once feared God come to Dear God what is causing secularization that question has been a preoccupation in some of my work for quite a while one result was a book published around 10 years ago called How the West really lost God that book proposes an answer to the question about secularization that runs counter to the standard answers proposed so far so tonight I would like to revisit its thesis with new evidence from Australia and elsewhere and I would like to do so in three parts the first part will explain the alternative theory of secularization delivered in How the West really lost God the second part we'll examine three contributing forces to secularization that have become even more apparent since the book was published in closing we will consider some hopeful news for if this analysis is correct then despite the fact that much ails Us in the west today one big and perhaps unexpected finding looks to be right the so-called inevitability thesis of religious decline is wrong the idea that the Epitaph has been written once and for all for religiosity in the west is wrong and to Believers looking for a way out of what looks like a permanent spiral of decline the news that this is not permanent should be welcome and encouraging as I hope to show further on but first back to that opening question what causes secularization this is on the surface a simple inquiry it is only three words long and it seems as if the Towering apparatus of modern sociology with its metrics and spreadsheets Etc ought to be able to answer it handily and yet the question is not simple at all evidence from all over shows that Humanity generally speaking is theotropic people across cultures lean toward God or gods Humanity across languages and time bends towards some kind of belief in Transcendence some understanding that material reality is not the totality of reality so what makes Western men and women so different from all those who came before How the West really lost God approaches this question first by inspecting the prevailing theories of secularization and finding them insufficient in other words to understand secularization we must first understand what has not happened here so begin with what is probably the most common theory for why people stop going to church many observers scholarly and non-scholarly alike hold to one version or another of what might be called the dominant theory of religious decline that is the idea that material Prosperity drives out God many have come to believe that religion is Marx's famous opiate of the masses a consolation prize for the poor and backward and we hear this reiterated constantly now if this conventional account of secularization were sound if it correctly predicted who was religious then we would expect that the poorer and less educated people are the more religious they would be but the fact is that these stereotypes are not correct one can find two many cases in which the opposite correlations obtain consider in passing just three examples one is the record on religiosity in London between the 1870s and 1914. in a book called class and religion in the late Victorian City British historian Hugh MacLeod documents that among anglicans in London during those decades the number of worshipers Rises at first gradually and then steeply with every step up the social ladder the poorest districts had the lowest rates of church attendance those with large upper middle class populations had the highest British historian Callum G Brown makes the same point about religiosity during those years contrary to stereotype he wrote the working class were irreligious and the middle classes were the church-going bastions of civil morality the same pattern describes the United States today in a book called American Grace sociologist Robert D Putnam and David E Campbell offer similar statistical evidence even during the 1960s they show as decline started to accelerate those at the upper end of the socio-economic ladder LED those on the lower end in church attendance as the authors observe and this is a quote this trend is clearly contrary to any idea that religion is nowadays providing Solace to the disinherited and dispossessed or that higher education subverts religion unquote so as these counterfactuals show and I'd like to name one more because it's important that is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the Mormons in America and around the world exhibit the same pattern religious participation increases as income and education go up so as these show prosperity and education do not necessarily drive out God and I was interested to find on the way over here reading a book by the former Anglican Bishop Bruce Wilson in The Written in the 1980s the same Trend he wrote the more educated Australians had a higher rate of church attendance than the less educated so if material Prosperity does not drive people away from church what does How the West really lost God takes up several other theories and found these two Limited in their explanatory power not untrue but limited yes as some have observed the horrendous effects of the two World Wars of the 20th century caused many around the world to question religious faith yes to point back earlier in time industrialization and then Mass Mobility loosened the ties to religious institutions in which faith is practiced and transmitted yes absolutely yes at least in the United States the clerical sex scandals of the 2000s and Beyond gave people who were already on the fence a rationalization for leaving Christianity behind for good but neither these nor other going theories explain the dramatic fact agreed to by almost all analysts of Western religious decline something happened in the early to mid 1960s that accelerated secularization as never before except for a handful of thinkers who argue that religious decline is not happening everyone else looking at this puzzle sees the same thing belief and practice across the West enters steep decline between 1963 and 1966. why the argument of how the West really lost God is that the scholarly literature on secularization has missed something crucial that is the symbiotic irreducible relationship between the vibrancy of the churches on the one hand and the vibrancy of the family on the other what is commonly supposed is that people who are religious are more likely to have families and more likely to have large families simply because religion tells them to do so but how the West really lost God turns this notion upside down it argues and I believe proves that something about living in families and participating in the Signature Events of families birth death self-sacrifice among them is a big part of what drives people to church In Sum the book argues the social atomization and family implosion that followed the widespread adoption of the birth control pill have not been neutral forces for the churches they have instead become the engines of secularization in our time to put the point another way one that should give heart particularly to the Believers Among Us Western Christianity is in Decline for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with the truth value of religious belief it is not Prosperity that makes God harder to see it is not science it's the increasing absence of familial figures who serve to sharpen the human vision of the Divine as a matter of anecdote many people report that they are never closer to belief than when they're in a delivery room for example or sitting by a death bed history affirms that there is more than anecdote at work here to study timelines as you can see in How the West really lost God is to see that religious vibrancy and family vibrancy go hand in hand conversely so do religious Decline and family decline when you see one expect the other conversely not living in a family removes the strongest possible incentive that many people have for searching out a transcendental framework how can we expect today's post-revolutionary Young to take up church when many on account of shrinking and absent families will reach middle age without ever having held a baby or cared for an elderly relative or attended a funeral the statistical record of the past decade appears to bear this thesis out given the continuing upheaval of the family and the move to postpone creating new families How the West really lost God would have predicted more none of the aboves Among Us not fewer and that's what we have so now let's move on to part two of this discussion considering certain forces propelling secularization that have come into sharper View one highly significant social fact has gone almost entirely unnoticed that is the relationship between the well-documented decline in Christian Church going especially among Millennials and the simultaneous rise of a toxic public force on campuses Across the Western World this force is now known as cancel culture I originally called it the new intolerance and cancel culture one here again sociological attention to this aspect of secularization is overdue this connection between the rise in unbelief among 20-somethings and the rise of punitive anti-christian codes is obviously more than a coincidence for it is well known and documented by social science that many students not only in America but elsewhere lose their religion in college now an atheist or other non-believer might propose that this happens because College is where people learn uh higher reasoning and higher reasoning drives out the Superstition of faith that kind of answer would make perfect sense except that it's refuted by the facts as we have already seen better educated people are actually more likely than those with less education to be found in church the more the more likely Dynamic is that thanks to cancel culture the social and other costs of being a known believer on campus and elsewhere Mount by the year and students and other young people take note thus intimidation in higher education multiplied over many years and campuses and countries is an unseen engine of secularization the new intolerance gives intimidated people even those raised in a faith one more reason not to go to church and from New York to Paris to Sydney to Buenos Aires it is already doing that it is worth wondering aloud about this at a time when the social costs for religious belief are rising and when some students faced with hostility abandon their faith not because they've thought through all the problems of theology but simply because they are scared in other words build up the counterculture second secularization continues to be driven by the fact that people are marrying later and having children later if they have children at all the median age of marriage by 2022 it is over 28 years of age for women and for men it is over 30 for the first time this too interferes with the possibility of hearing the sacred from time immemorial mothers and fathers have regarded the creation of new life as the Zenith of their own lives as human beings the human patrimony reflects this primordial fact our civilizations art and literature are Unthinkable apart from Elemental ties of family and children but today and especially since the sexual Revolution the very idea of children has been slowly but radically transformed yesterday's blessing has become today's optional burden a third force behind secularization remains as unavoidable as it was 10 years ago Christian teaching is on a permanent collision course with the sexual Revolution in effect we are running the experiment run in evangelized ancient Rome only in reverse then Christianity spread with extraordinary speed now re-paganization is doing the same the non-marital lives made possible by today's Technologies are drawing consumer-minded people out of the church and into the re-paganizing culture consider a little statistical proof in 2021 when polled about why they were leaving Catholicism 64 percent of Italian respondents said that they disagreed with the church's position on social issues now which issues do you suppose were objects of dispute here feeding the hungry caring for the poor or the rest of the social justice agenda to which Christians are ordered no of course not here as elsewhere social issues equals one cause only sexual expression unimpeded by a disapproving religious Authority we need to understand that fundamental point it has both negative and positive implications on the negative side it means that Christianity faces an uphill climb of a kind that it never has before and there is no end of the clever self-delusion in which men and women will indulge to convince themselves that the post-revolutionary order is the only legitimate order they will be aided in that effort by others who long for the so-called culture wars to be over who are tired of being told they are on the wrong side of history and who yearn to be liked in all the better places and those others also include some within the churches understandable though all the pressure for capitulation may be it nevertheless defeats the purpose of human thriving animal science shows us that when other animals are radically separated from their families they become dysfunctional famous experiments on deprivation among rhesus monkeys proved as much animals that can't not bond to one another and learn from one another become confused and enraged and destructive and in fact that's why there's Rising awareness of Animal Welfare around the world because science has demonstrated that non-human animals have fascinating intricate societies of their own particularly familial societies we need to apply that kind of insight to homo sapiens for for six decades now Humanity has been running a disruptive experiment on our own kind we have absorbed messages inimical to our well-being such as that families are problematic and negotiable that having Offspring either does not matter or that reproduction may even be a bad thing or that we should choose the people who are nearest and dearest to us the notion of chosen families in Vogue in the United States at least just as we can choose to end the lives of our fetuses our grandparents and others who are smaller and weaker if that is what we decide these messages are not only potentially disastrous they are disastrous in practice today's ongoing experiment in fractured non-family living has given rise to the crisis of loneliness that is omnipresent in the materially rich nations of the West Pope Francis himself has drawn attention to this it is surely behind the heavy use of psychotropic drugs for depression and many other ailments that are now at record levels among the Young it is also responsible for increases in crime truancy behavioral trouble and other consequences of homes without protective adults most violent criminals come from broken homes all social scientists therapists and others in Authority know this and every time I write about these Trends I get private messages from therapists judges lawyers and others saying we know this is true and nobody can say it out loud so now for part three which is the brighter side of all this because there is a brighter side we need to understand it is not science that is driving people away from church it is not resistance to the Beatitudes as the defeat of Communism ought to have taught us there is no such thing as history with a capital h to the contrary the decline of Faith particularly Christian faith is not foreordained this point is not well understood but it brings us to an important and I think irrefutable bit of evidence against this kind of historicism far from showing a steady decline throughout the 20th century religiosity was actually on a marked upswing during the 15 or so years following World War II right up until the invention of the birth control pill in fact the World War II was followed by a religious boom not only in the United States but across the West very much including Australia New Zealand Canada Western Europe and other territories trending towards secularization today that boom was also was pan-western in scope and it applied to the vanquished as well as to the Victorious the neutral as well as to the others the economically devastated as well as to the prosperous and in the public realm the rhetoric of leaders was pro-christian in a way that today strikes us as unbelievable Christianity's vibrancy was also affirmed by its commercial clout witness the extraordinary popularity of Christian themes in mid-century Hollywood blockbusters that is not to say the 1950s were a golden era Christians do not believe in Golden eras it is instead to say that the religious boom of the immediate post-war era in and of itself refutes the notion that Christian decline is inevitable religion waxes and wanes in the world strong one moment weaker the next and the course of its waxing and waning depends on what marriage and family are doing at the same time because those years of religiosity were of course the same years of the marriage boom followed by the baby boom across the West this way of looking at things should not only comfort Believers but also brace them for the struggles present and to come secularization does not only mean emptying churches secularization as we have come to see amounts to net losses for human beings in the forums of Primal social Association deep bonds for people to live and die for we do not need fewer people in our lives in a civilization plagued by loneliness we need more more to learn from more to love more for whom to sacrifice and for that reason the political and social turmoil within our Western societies today tells us something important it amounts to implicit Vindication for core teachings of Christianity the church teaches that the family is sacred the dominant secular Creed says it is optional at best and a hot House of pathologies at worst Christianity says we are brothers and sisters with eternal Destinies in the cosmos secularism says we are random collections of molecules to be tolerated or disposed of however the strongest in our society to see fit I submit that in this struggle between two visions of how to live important new proof has been added to the Ledger the divisiveness of our politics the shattering of firm identities among the young the other problems mentioned earlier about mental illness these are not just car crashes that we should pass by these are signs they amount to proof all their own that living without God is not improving Western societies it is instead tearing some people apart and making many others unhappy we need to honor that fact the troubled voices of our age do not rage in vain they bear a message however unwittingly for the rest of us and in closing one final thought about hope ever since Friedrich Nietzsche put forward the metaphor of the death of God that notion has ruled the collective Western consciousness many Believers themselves have absorbed that historicist message that they are a dwindling minority on the wrong side even so the conclusion from tonight's discussion of Australia's latest census numbers and the rest should give us heart they show that nothing about modern Christian decline proves that Nietzsche got it right the central fact witnessed in the west by more and more people especially since the 1960s is not the death of God it is instead that Western Humanity has grown increasingly hard of hearing because of post-revolutionary changes quarantined from their own kind by repeated acts of human to subtraction and familial subtraction many have moved far from the accustomed audible range of the sacred but this isolation pressing as it is not a permanent feature of The Human Condition as the costs of today's atomization mount so will wider understanding of its roots and as has happened from the very beginning at least some of the suffering atomized themselves will come to long for a better way some already are they will come to wonder whether something thought lost can still be found after all and like converts throughout history some will find their way in the job for the rest of us is to understand what really ails them and to open the door where we can thank you very much for your attention thank you thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation

Views: 74,456

Keywords: Maryeberstadt, Christianity, god, church, religiondeclineintheus, identitypolitics, sexualrevolution

Id: oKn-sAWGLyE

Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022