Does family inspire faith or does faith inspire family?

According to the latest survey on Religion and Public Life from the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who identify as religious has declined from 78% in 2007 to 65% in 2019; a decline of approximately one percent per year, with no sign of slowing down. A recent Gallup poll revealed that the number of Catholics age 21-29 who are weekly churchgoers declined from 73% in 1955 to 25% in 2017. Clearly, something is wrong. 

There is another statistic that closely follows this: the American divorce rate. In fact, these statistics move almost in tandem until about 1990, when the divorce rate began to decline. However, this wasn’t because fewer couples were splitting up, but because more people were choosing to get married later in life, or not at all. The Pew study further reveals that only 58% of children under 18 reside with a married set of biological parents. Observing the same time-period, the United States birth rates have plunged from 105 births per 1,000 women in 1950, to 59 per 1,000 in 2018. 

The question then becomes whether these two facts—the decline of religious practice and the decline of the traditional family—are related. In her book, How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt argues that “...family and faith are the invisible double helix of society... whose strength and momentum depend on one another.” It’s hard to have one without the other.

There is the argument that the decline of traditional religious practice is supplanted by other forms of nontraditional “solo” religions or “lite” religion such as the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a religion that offers comfort while asking nothing in return but some kind of generalized trust in a god or the universe. Eberstadt doesn’t dispute these claims but rather observes that while a longing for the transcendent and supernatural seems to be a human universal, a belief in the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic faiths is not. A faith in the God of Abraham and in Jesus Christ are transmitted by other means.

So why and how did the West begin to lose its belief in God? Eberstadt goes through a number of the usual explanations given by careful observers, from advances in science, to increasing material prosperity, to the dramatic impact of the First and Second World Wars, but she focuses in on one observation that has gone largely unremarked: that religion and family are two sides of the same coin.

“What you decide to do about your family... whether to have one, whether to marry, how many children you will have: all these are strong predictors of how much time you do (or do not) spend in church... where there is more marriage, there is more religion; where there is less, ditto.”

The thesis statement of Eberstadt’s book is this: family is the driving force behind faith, not the other way around. The usual explanation goes in reverse, saying people are raised in a faith that emphasizes the importance of family life and live their lives accordingly. Eberstadt provides convincing evidence that—in a majority of cases—families drive people towards a strong faith:

“That is the element of doubt that I want to instill here—that conventional sociology of religion—has missed something important about the very nature of religious transmission, (that) the family is not merely a consequence of religious belief. It can also be a conduit to it.” 

However, sociology is a notoriously tricky field in which to make accurate predictions, despite Eberstadt’s careful research. As humorist P.J. O’Rourke said, “Folks do lots of stuff, we don’t know why, test on Friday.” How the West Really Lost God concludes with a strong case for both optimism and pessimism, providing a look at trends that could push society in either direction, which all of us would be wise to take into account. 

We can take comfort knowing that the most important thing that we as individuals and as a society can do if we are concerned about the direction of society is to listen to the words of the prophet Micah. He said, “...what does the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” Or as St. Theresa of Calcutta put it: “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”