Pop Culture and the Church

Over time, I have become more and more dissatisfied with what I see in the modern evangelical church scene. One of the issues I struggle with is its desire to be relevant. It has embraced a sort of evangelical pop culture. This has led to some tragic developments.

We all know there’s something incongruous about an older woman trying to dress like she’s still a ‘hot young thing’. We find it troubling when an older man has not developed gravitas but acts like a clown. I wonder if the same applies to the Church of God.

As a child, I grew up going to church with my parents. Things were formal. People wore their Sunday best. The minister wore a suit. There were periods of silence and reflection. We sang hymns – songs that were sometimes hundreds of years old. The old organ had a few bad notes, and the organists were often no virtuosos, but my heart soared as all around me sung with gusto lyrics millions around the world for centuries had sung. Communion felt like a very solemn and reverent occasion. The period of quiet while it took place seemed to last forever. I felt a sense of awe. This time and place was special, and I was a part of something that stretched millennia. There were jarring moments in the service. A responsive reading for instance, where I, even as a small boy participated with children through to octagenarians. I sat with my parents and felt part of the great body of Christ.

Now, when I attend my church the atmosphere is completely different. The preachers are attired in semi-casual. The vibe is friendly. The language is simple, and the service leaders remind me of over-enthusiastic energiser bunnies trying to drum up enthusiasm in the congregation. Everything is apparently ‘super exciting’. There is no time for reflection, for any moments when there is no speaking from the front are filled in with music. The Lord’s Supper is conducted at break-neck speed. We sing a constantly changing repertoire of modern evangelopop, mostly with banal lyrics set to mind-numbingly boring music. The musicians are more gifted than the ones in my childhood, but I feel unmoved. Nor it seems are many of the people around me, for the singing seems half-hearted aside from the odd young woman raising her hands. I feel like a spectator of a slick performance. My children are taken out mid-way through service so that they can be taught in an ‘age-appropriate’ manner, which by the sounds of it involves low expectations, ill-disciplined children and fun. I feel vaguely uneasy about this and wonder how this is connecting my children culturally to our forefathers in the faith.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot my church is doing right. They love God’s Word. They care for the lost. And in the trends I mentioned above, they are far better than many other evangelical churches. I’ve been in one evangelical church where we sang a song with exceptionally trite lyrics while we were encouraged by the song leaders to jump around with our finger-pointing in the air until we (actually I point-blank refused) had done a complete 360. This was repeated. Multiple times. On the opposite extreme, we have other more formal and traditional churches. Often the gospel is absent in the sermons (thank goodness for the liturgy of the Anglican church in these cases), and the youngest members are in their 50s. They are dying churches. So yes, better a church that is living, preaching the gospel and growing.

True, relevance is important. We want people to understand the good news of Christ. However, have we overbalanced? I am not sure that we have understood the importance of difference and tradition. The Church is meant to be a light in a dark world. Darkness and light are polar opposites. Shouldn’t it be a slightly jarring exercise coming into the light? We all know the experience of being blinded when coming out into the sunshine after being in a dark room. Church ought to be that light. It ought to be different.

The Church has seen popular culture and attempted to model it in a ‘sanctified’ way. But this is a mistake. In his book Future Men, Douglas Wilson comments on Pop Culture. “Pop culture is a disposable culture for those who agree to consume it. But because cultures are meant to be handed down to subsequent generations, because cultures are meant to be preserved, a consumable culture is really an anti-culture.” Why on earth would the Church want to copy this anti-culture? We have a rich and vast heritage. One that has been bought with blood. Why would we want to toss this out the window for what is cheap and tacky for the sake of relevance?

Christianity should change and shape culture, not be moulded by it. From my experience, it all seems to be going the other way in evangelical churches. We are shaped by our informal culture into informal services of worship. We are shaped by a culture that cannot bear silence and reflection, so we eject any silence and reflection from our meetings. We are shaped by a culture that separates families, so we eject our young from worshipping with us. We are shaped by a culture that embraces egalitarianism, so we want our leaders to be on our level regular guys, and we despise anything that would make us feel awe because that would remind us that we are dust. We are shaped by a culture that despises the old and embraces novelty, so we throw out tradition and the treasures of the past. And we will have nothing to pass on to our children because we have taught them to do the same. One only prays they don’t toss out the gospel when they toss out our ‘anti-culture’ pop evangelicalism.

Feminism Hurts Women

It is no accident that feminists have succeeded in getting women treated “equally” with men, and now that women are no longer singled out for honor, the men around them just go with their lusts. The results have not been at all favorable for women. After decades of established feminism, the end result is that far more women, in their relationships with men, are treated like dirt.

Future Men p136 – Douglas Wilson

Cultural Appropriation is Stupid.

So some poor woman is in trouble for posting about giving her husband a didgeridoo for Father’s Day. Apparently she is guilty of the sin of ‘cultural appropriation’. And indeed, it is not the first time this ‘influencer’ has been found wanting in this area of modern morality, for earlier in the year she was forced to apologise for the awful sin of wearing her hair in two braids. Let’s put aside our opinions on her taste in gifts for a moment and focus on the charge of cultural appropriation.

A stick with a hole in it

How can this be cultural appropriation? It’s a glorified stick with a hole through it. What kid has not played with something similar in their childhood? How can any culture own that? And who’s to say that the Australian aborigines did not in the deep dark recesses of time appropriate it from another culture? Furthermore, how can aboriginal culture claim special rights and privileges over this particular stick with a hole in it, when other cultures have more sophisticated sticks with multiple holes in them as part of their cultural heritage. These have the advantage of being more pleasant on the ears and versatile – being tuned and all. The didgeridoo is hardly the pinnacle of woodwind instruments. It’s an extremely limited albeit interesting instrument. There’s a reason you don’t listen to Mozart’s Concerto for the Didgeridoo in D minor, and let’s just say that it’s not only because Mozart didn’t know about them.

A stick with multiple holes in it

As a connoisseur of human folly, I find there is something delightfully ironic about the way these things play out. Often we have a – shall we say ‘person of colour’ bemoaning the fact that some trinket from their culture has been inappropriately used. How do they bemoan this great sin? Usually while they appropriate the world wide web, an invention of a Westerner, using electricity appropriated from Western civilization, living in countries that because of Western culture have spawned freedom of speech and democratic rights for citizens. But of course, that is totally different. Delicious irony!

It’s pure folly. Were all non-Mesopotamian cultures wrong to appropriate the use of the wheel from them? What about non-Chinese cultures and their use of gunpowder and fireworks? Was it wrong for non-Germans to use the printing press and play or manufacture clarinets? Should all non-Americans hang their heads in shame when they use a lightbulb?

The fact is that cultures and civilizations grow stronger by learning from the strengths of each other. That is why cultures that were geographically more remote, were historically more backward. They lacked the opportunity to learn from other cultures. The New Zealand Maori, despite their cleverness in many areas, including warfare and navigation, because of their geographical remoteness were quite primitive when they encountered the British. They had no wheel, nor did they have iron. Naturally they were very keen to appropriate much of the cultural treasure of the British – particularly guns. Had Australian aboriginal culture been in closer geographical proximity to other music making cultures, I think we can safely assume their didgeridoo would have evolved to become a more sophisticated instrument.

If cultural appropriation had never occurred, we would all be living in squalor and absolute poverty. Our lives would be short, our houses and clothes basic, and our time would be spent finding food to survive. So thank goodness for cultural appropriation!

Cultures who shrilly charge others with cultural appropriation are just acting like a bratty three year old kid at a party who refuses to share his toys. Hardly likely to engender respect or love.

Structural Racism in New Zealand Science?

In our previous post, we noted that racism has become the issue of our day. In fact, claims of racism are ubiquitous. One phrase that I keep hearing is structural racism or systemic racism. This is racism within the structure of our societies. Apparently it’s a thing here in New Zealand too. I came across a classic case on the Herald website recently. The headline was ‘Structural racism’: Woeful Maori, Pasifika representation in NZ science.

The lead paragraph outlines the fact that Maori and Pasifika students are under-represented at the country’s universities and Crown Research Institutes. According to some, this highlights structural racism in New Zealand science.

Dangerous and Simplistic Assumption

Now to me, it is not immediately clear that this disparity is necessarily a result of racism. I for one do not look at NBA basketball league and think to myself there is structural racism that is resulting in Asian Americans being ‘severely under-represented’ in the NBA. I guess it’s possible, but it seems to me that we shouldn’t first assume racism without any evidence for that fact. Perhaps there are other reasons for this disparity other than race. Nor do I look at the number of females involved in working on oil rigs and assume that there is some kind of sexism involved that prevents them from working in this environment. Disparities do not necessarily indicate nefarious discrimination or a system that has some kind of explicit or even implicit bias against a particular group. To assume that they do is lazy research.

Thomas Sowell

To assume structural racism is the reason for underrepresentation of Maori and Pasifika scientists is an example of what Thomas Sowell describes as the “invincible fallacy” in his book Discrimination and Disparities. It’s an invincible fallacy because academics and others find it convenient to believe and therefore will not look for evidence that might disprove their theories of racism. In the end, for these kinds of academics, the disparity is the evidence of racism. There is no need to look further. They simply assume the problem lies where the data is collected.

The Treaty of Waitangi

The Treaty of Waitangi

Further to this, Dr Tara McAllister, the lead researcher in this study also argues that universities and CRIs are not meeting their obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. At this point, I can only suggest that Dr McAllister is dishonest, or she is not overly familiar with the Treaty of Waitangi. Which obligations are universities and CRIs not meeting? Article one of the Treaty speaks of chiefs ceding sovereignty to the Queen of England. Article 2 guarantees Maori the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties so long as they wish to retain possession. Article 3 imparts to all Maori the rights and privileges of British subjects. As such, it is absolute nonsense to suggest that the treaty speaks to this issue at all. This is part of an extremely disturbing trend I have noticed in which people with an axe to grind try to use the Treaty as a weapon to enact societal change.

Why might these disparities exist?

An important question we might like to ask is, “Should we expect to see equal numbers of different ethnicities in all lines of work?” The simple answer is no. Let me outline three reasons these disparities might exist other than racism.

1. Different Groups and Different Cultures have different values

It should come as no surprise to thinking people that different cultures have different systems of values. Since this is the case, we should expect to see this work itself out in the life choices people make.

Let me give you an example that is not so much to do with race. Conservative Christians believe that the role of wife and mother is extremely important, and thus, you will find higher incidences of home makers amongst this group of women than among say secular women who tend to place a high degree of value on career.

Now let’s move to an example to do with ethnicity. Let’s consider what might be thought of as a positive case of over representation of Pasifika people: the All Blacks. Now clearly Pacific Island men are over-represented in the All Blacks. And at the same time, take Asian men. We could say they are conspicuously under-represented in the team. Is this a result of racism against Asian men? Or is it perhaps a difference in culture? Just travel around Auckland on Saturday and look at the children playing sports like rugby or rugby league. Or perhaps ask a tutoring service what their statistics are for ethnicities or a teacher on the ethnicities of parents who are regularly asking for more homework for their children. This will paint a picture. What’s valuable to one culture is less significant to another.

And to expect different cultures, with their differing value systems to produce outcomes that are similar is wildly naïve. Why would you expect Asian men to be represented at their percentage in the population of New Zealand in the All Blacks?

As a student, I attended a large South Auckland high school. The difference in approach from various cultural groups was obvious. Many of the Pasifika and Maori students attended a multi-day Pasifika festival that often took them out of classes for dance practices, not to mention rehearsals after school or in lunch times. Obviously I am not denigrating this, I am just pointing out that this was a priority for a particular cultural group. It was not a priority of students from other cultures. Will these priorities play out in areas of strength and weakness? Without doubt.

2. Under-representation is the Flip Side of Overrepresentation

Here I make an assumption that we are all happy to see Pacific Island men overrepresented at the highest level of rugby. This is something to be celebrated. However, if we logically think about that, that necessitates them being underrepresented in another area. Even someone who has no strong background in maths should be able to see this.

Now it seems absurd to me to expect Pacific Island men to be over-represented only in things we celebrate and under-represented in things we don’t celebrate. Because if that were the case, another ethnic group would have to be under-represented in something we celebrate and over represented in something we don’t. And we’d be left with exactly the same problem.

3. Disparities are a result of freedom and choice

Disparities exist because people make choices. Individuals are all blessed by God with their own unique personalities, and abilities. In addition to this, individuals all choose to use their time differently. This is part of what it means to be human and made in God’s image. God has made us able to make choices to a far greater degree than any of the rest of his creation. The choices we make are real, and have real consequences.

As we pointed out earlier, different values lead to different choices. Even Dr McAllister’s research points to this. She notes that universities do have diversity and equity programmes in place, but they aren’t having much effect. According to Dr McAllister, “these policies haven’t resulted in any real increases in the total percentage of Māori and Pasifika academics.” It sounds like the universities are willing to have a diverse workforce in science, but in spite of this, there has not really been an increase in Maori and Pasifika representation in science. Why? Because people make choices. Nevertheless, Dr McAllister lays the blame at the feet of our universities and Crown Research Institutes, saying that there is “quantitative evidence that universities and CRIs in New Zealand are failing to build a sustainable Maori and Pacific scientific workforce.”

She seems to me to have the cart before the horse. As we have seen, it seems they are trying to be welcoming and diverse. But really, is it the job of universities and Crown Research Institutes to discriminate to ensure Maori and Pacific are represented at levels consistent with their proportion of the population if that is not something they seem to be choosing? Would we expect the NBA to ensure that Asian Americans are drafted into the league at the same rate as their proportion of the population?

Can we ever remove disparities?

If we are to remove disparities, we must have a state that ultimately controls everyone and everything to set up the ‘perfect utopia’ of each group being accurately represented in every area of life. And that means all disciplines, not just the lucrative and desirable ones. However, this would fail to be a utopia, because we would have to remove choice from the mix and determine everybody’s choices and outcomes for them to ensure equity in all fields. Sounds like a dystopian hell to me!

The Blind Who Claim to See

Racism has become the number one issue of our times. It’s seen everywhere. But for all that, it’s often those who seem most sensitive to racism, that are most ignorant of it in themselves. It’s the blind who claim to see. Here’s a classic case.

In the Dominion Posts’ editorial from August 16, Judith Collin’s “It’s ok to be white” comment is described as a dog whistle. In other words, it’s a coded phrase that is designed to attract racists to her side while not attracting much attention from ordinary people. Naturally, the unbiased Dominion Post sees these racists as coming from ACT and other minor parties of the right. Racists only come from that side of the political spectrum you see.

Hilariously, they then obliviously continued their moral posturing without noticing the irony. “These are attitudes that should have stayed in the past. Compared with the new leadership, the younger, browner duo of Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett looked much more like New Zealand in the 21st century.”

So racism should have stayed in the past, but it seems it remains in the present. It’s the old chestnut. I’m not a racist, “but“. In this case, it is, I’m not a racist, but I’d prefer our politicians to be younger and browner than old and white.

Now before I get attacked as a closet racist or some such nonsense, I actually liked Simon Bridges and thought he was doing a reasonable job as opposition leader. But for me, the colour of someone’s skin is irrelevant to whether they can do the job well or not. When media is so focussed on skin colour and ‘diversity’ in political parties, I worry. What an absolutely trivial thing to focus on.

Furthermore, as a father of young lighter-skinned New Zealanders, I do not like the implications that they aren’t the ‘look’ of 21st century New Zealand. They have just as much right to be a part of the future look of New Zealand as New Zealand kids of other hues. I hope they will be judged not on their skin tone, but on their character and competence.

Blasphemy and the New god Tolerance

Cancel culture. Outrage. Twitter mob. Disinvited. Doxing. This is the world we now live in. One false move and you could be history. The mob could be unleashed and your family and workplace targeted. So what do you do? You shut up and make sure to the best of your ability you don’t say certain things out loud, or at least not outside of certain ‘safe’ acquaintances.

Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay 

Blasphemy is not a common word these days. But amongst religious people, some knowledge of the concept still exists. When I was growing up, I was taught never to say, “Oh my God!” as an exclamation, and “Jesus Christ!” would have certainly been frowned upon. Not so much today.

What you can or can’t say tells you a lot about the faith of a people. Refusal to say God’s name in an irreverent manner, or to use Jesus as a swear word, indicates an acknowledgement of the worth and value of God and his Son Christ. It is to acknowledge that God exists and that He is special and deserving of reverence and awe. Further, it is an acknowledgement that God rules through his Son Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and that that Son will judge every human being for every idle word they have spoken.

Despite the word blasphemy having fallen from common use, we still have the concept in our modern world. We now use the term ‘hate speech’. This is speech that offends our modern sensibilities. What counts as blasphemy indicates the object of a society’s worship. Yes, modern though we be, our society still worships. So what do the new blasphemies tell us? They tell us we have replaced the Lord of all with a new false god whose name is Tolerance.

And the strange thing about this new god is that unlike the LORD God, Tolerance’s rules are endless and onerous. One thing we can no longer safely say is “men aren’t women“! This is modern blasphemy. Thou shalt not deny that gender is a social construct, for Tolerance thy god shall not hold him/her/zir/xer guiltless who denies this.

But Tolerance is a difficult god to serve. One can know where one stands with the LORD God. He at least is the same yesterday, today and forever. Tolerance, on the other hand, is fickle. Fifteen years ago, it was permissible, and even redundant to state ‘men aren’t women’. Today it is evil. And unfortunately for his/her/zirs/xyrs servants, Tolerance’s changes in morality are retroactively applied. Woe betide any servant of Tolerance whose past behaviour, despite being morally acceptable at the time, is found in the future to be sinful. They shall never enter his/her/zirs/xyrs rest. One cannot go to Tolerance’s throne of grace and apply for mercy because there is no throne of grace, only judgment in our time of need.

It’s a strange thing that our god Tolerance is not very patient with our failures. In fact, he/she/xe/ze seems rather intolerant.

Cultural Blindspots and Chronological Snobbery

We all have cultural blindspots. It cannot be helped. There are certain things that each age and culture takes for granted. Unquestioned assumptions that rule us. In a previous post, we saw Elizabeth Bartholet’s unquestioned assumption that the State has the right to shape the thinking of children. In addition, we are hampered by what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery – the assumption that everything now is better than before. It’s often only as we confront another culture that we start to question our beliefs and even identify our blindspots.

Photo by Özgür Akman

As Christians, we must always be on the lookout for these cultural blindspots. They may be hiding explicitly anti-Christian ways of thinking or living. One way of doing this is to study History, in particular church history. As we read widely from different time periods, we get a feel for the worldviews and thinking of different ages. C.S. Lewis regarded this as very important. He encouraged people to read one old book for every new one!

It’s natural for us to fall into the trap chronological snobbery. We think we are better than our forebears. Clearly we are in some ways, notably technological ability. Yet even this rests on the discoveries of those who preceded us. But our superiority here causes us to assume our whole way of life is better. That is, if we think about it at all. But the same sinful nature that afflicted those who came before also afflicts us. People often will point to issues like slavery, or the treatment of women in past ages to show that we are superior to those who came before us.

Not at all. We just see these particular issues clearly because they are not cultural blindspots for us. Revisit our times in a history book 500 years hence, and there will be a whole new list of atrocities and sins not least of them, in my opinion, being abortion that our descendants will note, but we are on the whole largely blind to.

Maybe, just maybe, many of our patterns of life are not better than our forebears.

Art and the Bible

Untitled by Cy Twombly
“Untitled”

I have always been very sceptical of what is often referred to as ‘modern art’. How can Cy Twombly’s “Untitled” be compared to the “Mona Lisa” or “The Hay Wain”? Being artistically challenged doesn’t, I hope, stop me from being able to appreciate true talent. Twombly’s painting honestly looks like something I could achieve myself, despite my artistic limits not extending much further than stick figures. However, I doubt I could demand the 46 million USD it sold for. It does seem that some of what parades itself as art is pretentious and over-priced rubbish. And yet at the same time, decent young artists can find it difficult to break into the art world and be noticed.

To stimulate my thinking on the subject of art I read Art and the Bible by Francis Schaeffer. The first essay deals with Art in the Bible. Schaeffer begins by arguing that evangelicals can be so concerned with seeing souls saved that they can forget that Christ is Lord of the whole man, body and soul. God made the whole man, and in Christ, the whole man is redeemed. For Schaeffer, the Lordship of Christ involves everything – total culture, and that includes the area of creativity. Indeed, one of the ways we image God is in the area of creativity. So he spends quite a bit of time detailing God’s interest in beauty, and the variety of art that is mentioned in Scripture.

In the second half of the book, Schaeffer gives 11 perspectives which he thinks are helpful in evaluating art. There is plenty here that is food for thought. Of note is his fifth perspective, the four standards of judgment: technical excellence, validity, intellectual content and the world view that is expressed, and the integration of content and vehicle. So, for example, we might be able to praise a work for its technical excellence, but critique the worldview that it espouses. Christians can often be tripped up on this point!

Another extremely interesting point is perspective 2: art forms add strength to the world view. Schaeffer argues that art can heighten the impact and effect of an idea even if it is false. Thus, “if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art it can be far more destructive and devastating than if it is expressed in poor art or prosaic statement. I think this explains that feeling a Christian might sometimes have in a movie, where one wants a character to leave their spouse, or otherwise commit or get away with what is forbidden in God’s Word. Art is powerful.

Another interesting perspective from which to evaluate art is ‘normal definitions, normal syntax’. What Schaeffer means here is that an element of art is communication. Some art (poetry, painting plays) can bend the rules of language and grammar or symbolism so much that communication is lost. He writes, “Totally abstract art stands in an undefined relationship with the viewer, for the viewer is completely alienated from the painter.”

I was also interested by the point he made regarding non-Christian artists who are able to produce art according to a Christian worldview. His explanation for this was that when a large number of people in society are Christians, they can bring a kind of Christian consensus, and non-Christians can write or paint within and out of this contextual framework. This was clearly the case in Christendom, where although individual artists might not necessarily have been Christians, they lived and breathed a Christian context in a way which we no longer do.

For Schaeffer, we never look at just one piece of art, we look at it in the context of the body of an artist’s work. He encourages Christian artists to produce art within the context of their time, place and culture, and reminds us that Christian art should have two themes. One, which he calls the minor theme is associated with the fall. We are in a sinful world, and outside of God there is a lack of meaning and purpose, and even within God’s family, there is suffering and sin to deal with. But the major theme of Christian work, which we could call redemption, is meaning and purpose in both metaphysics and morality.

How The West Lost God

I have had my eye on this book for some time, and when a friend kindly gave me money to purchase a book, I snapped this up quick smart. The central thesis of the book is that just as religious decline leads to a decline in the family, so too, the decline in the two-parent nuclear family contributes to the decline of the church. Eberstadt describes family and faith as ’the invisible double helix of society – two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.’

In the first chapter, Eberstadt turns her attention to whether there has been a decline in Christianity in the West. There are some who argue this decline is itself an illusion. Although I didn’t need convincing of this fact, she argues fairly convincingly that there really has been a decline.

Eberstadt moves on to outline the conventional views regarding how the West lost God. The first view she investigates is that people stopped needing the imaginary comforts of religion. She spends time reviewing this theory but dismisses it because the demands of Christianity do not make it some crutch that makes life easier.

The second view she deals with is that Science, the Enlightenment and rationalism caused secularization. This is an extremely widely held view, but it just doesn’t fit the evidence. Christianity does not wax and wane in the way this theory predicts it should. Interestingly, in this section of the book, she highlights some interesting research on education and faith. The Enlightenment theory teaches us to expect that the more educated and wealthy people are, the less likely they are to have faith in God. This is precisely the opposite of what we see in a number of cases, and ‘contrary to popular belief, literacy and money do not drive secularism.’

Next, she moves onto the theory that the two world wars caused secularization. This is the view of Peter Hitchens in “Rage Against God”. While admitting this theory is not totally wrong, she highlights the fact that nations with disproportionate burdens of wartime all experienced a decline – Switzerland along with Germany and Great Britain. Furthermore, she wonders why later generations have not returned to the faith since they have known nothing by postwar prosperity. The next theory she addresses is that material progress caused us to realise we didn’t need God any more. But this theory is contradicted by the fact that religion seems to increase as the social ladder is climbed as mentioned earlier. Furthermore, faith has existed with great wealth throughout the ages. Why should this change now?

It seems that the believers of the secularization theory assumed faith was on its way out. They didn’t believe religion could wax as well as wane. It clearly has and does, so a theory is needed that can take this into account. This leads Eberstadt to explore the circumstantial evidence for her theory in chapter 3. She points out that sociologists have assumed that secularization and human development impact negatively human fertility rates. But this is an assumption. Perhaps the relationship goes the other way.

She notes that married people with children are more likely to go to church and be religious than single people. But why is this? Does faith drive family, or does family drive faith? Again she points to a link between faith and fertility. Those who are religious tend to have more children than those who are not. Eberstadt argues that instead of this being a one way street with faith driving family, at least some of the time, family drives faith, and sometimes this makes better sense of the facts.

Next, in chapter 4, Eberstadt moves on to consider some snapshots in the demographic record. Here she shows that family decline accompanies religious decline. Secondly, she notes that the trends of industrialization and urbanization mesh nicely with the decline of the family and faith. Both of these trends led to family decline, which in turn caused people to reject faith. The third piece of data she points to is the clear link between the most irreligious parts of the West and those that have the smallest, weakest and fewest natural families. A final and most interesting piece of evidence she investigates is the link between ‘family boomlets’ and ‘religious boomlets’. One example she highlights is the post-war mini religious boom, which overlay the better known post-war baby boom.

In chapter 5, she demonstrates how her theory answers the problems that the current theories of secularization have been unable to answer. It answers the problem of ‘American exceptionalism’. Why is America so religious, despite being one of the most advanced nations on earth? In America, there are more families following the traditional model, more marriages, and more children per woman than there are in Europe. According to Eberstadt, it also explains the male/female religious gender gap. She speculates that perhaps ‘women who are mothers tend to be more religious because the act of participating in creation, i.e., birth, is more immediate for them than that of men. Perhaps that fact inclines women “to be more open to the possibility of something greater than themselves.” The family factor also helps explain why 1960s was a pivotal year in secularization. The birth control pill approval changed relations between the sexes – and thus altered the natural family. Extramarital sex became much easier, and that has had a seismic impact on family formation and strength.

The Church has not helped, and according to Eberstadt has participated in its own downfall by ignoring the family factor. Here she explores reformist efforts in the church which made divorce more acceptable and allowed contraception and homosexuality. She sees these efforts as undermining the very thing the church relies on – strong families.

Chapter 7 ties all that she has written together. She points out that the experience of the natural family drives some people to religion. In addition, the Christian story is itself told through the prism of the family – without family, it makes less sense. For instance, God himself is described as our Heavenly Father. But for those who have not had a dedicated and loving father, this makes little sense. Moreover, the Christian code ‘becomes a lightning rod for criticism’. None of us like to be told that the way we do things is wrong. In an age of non-traditional and anti-traditional families, more and more people will take offence at the Christian message and its teachings on the family.

The book concludes with two chapters on the future. The first is a case for pessimism. Here we see that fewer people are getting married and having children. Fewer of those who are having children sustain a two-parent home. This is bound to negatively impact the church. But in chapter 9, we are presented the case for optimism. In essence, great catastrophes often lead to religious revival. The situation of the Western world, might be the decline necessary for faith to rise from the ashes. Secure and wealthy societies have been able to bankroll the decline of the family, but this might not be able to go on indefinitely.