It's not a conspiracy that things fall apart in this world—it is just entropy driven by the force of our sin. We see it everywhere; we walk among the ruins: family, marriage, faith, education and so on. But this decline doesn't happen in a vacuum. For years now, scholars have tried to understand and explain our culture's “slouching toward Gomorrah,” as Robert Bork put it.
Mary Eberstadt's (Senior Fellow, Ethics & Public Policy Center) book, How the West Really Lost God, livens up the prosaic statistics we've read and heard repeatedly, injecting fresh insight and humility into the conversation about secularization theories. But unlike other works, it goes beyond the critique of these theories to a thesis which should move this important conversation forward: Family has just as much influence on religious beliefs and practices, as faith has on family formation and value. Moreover, the decline and fracturing of the family has fed the decline of religion, and Christianity in particular. Eberstadt's succinct statement: “family illiteracy breeds religious illiteracy,” should in my opinion become a driving force and the rallying cry for family oriented institutions. A force driving us to breathe deep and dive back into pouring ourselves into the war for the soul of the family in our nation.
Read the rest of the book review at The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission