What is the Real Reason for the Decline of Christianity in America?

The number of people who call themselves Christians is in decline in North America and Europe. 

Secular intellectuals look on this with delight and then give a number of reasons for the decline, none of which are the most important reason.  Secularists argue that when people get richer they no longer need God and religion declines. But social science and history disagree. In America poor people are less likely to be Christian than wealthier people. And places like China and South Korea had a massive turning to Christ while experiencing massive economic growth.  Secularists argue that as people get better educated they become less religious. This is part of their general trope that only stupid people are Christians. But highest levels of church attendance are found in middle and upper middle levels of education. Someone with a Batchelor’s degree is more like to be in church on Sunday than a high school dropout. Some say clergy scandals have harmed religion and they surely have. But the decline in worship attendance began sixty years ago, long before the recent spate of clergy failure. And some argue that two world wars in the last century contributed to religious decline but after World War 2 there was a boom in religious observance almost everywhere. The greatest expansion of Christianity in all of history occurred from the end of WW2 to the present. 

But as one insightful observer said, “none of these hypotheses explains a dramatic fact agreed to by almost all analysts of Western religious decline: Something happened in the early to mid 1960s that accelerated secularization as had no other force in time….Belief and practice across the West went over a cliff between 1963 and 1966. Why?” 

That observer is Mary Eberstadt who I have cited many times in my videos. She has a contrarian view that is powerful and persuasive. She says religion declines when people stop having children. Public intellectuals often argue that religious belief begins to decline and this is followed by less emphasis on family and people having fewer children. Mrs. Eberstadt says it’s the other way around. People have fewer children and this contributes to a lessening of religious faith. 

Mary Eberstadt has written for many years on the importance of family life and the consequences of its decline. She is well known for her views on secularization and I think she is spot on. Secular commentators do not understand the decline of religious faith in the West. She is right. The decline of the family—produced by the sexual revolution—is the primary culprit.

She states, “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.”

There is something about having children that drives people toward God. I think I understand that. When you have children you realize quickly that you need help. There is no institution in our society that helps more than churches. Do you trust public schools with your kids? How about their peers? What about Hollywood and social media? The church stands as a friend of the family. All these others are the enemies of parents.

Many factors have caused the decline in family formation.

1.    In the West for several centuries we have been conducting an experiment: Mrs. Eberstadt states, “At its most sweeping, this experiment amounts to doing what most human beings before us have not done, which is to live as purely material entities, without reference to a transcendent realm.” God, faith, the spiritual dimension has been removed from our culture.

2.    People are rich. When people get rich they stop having children.

3.    Intimidation in higher education, multiplied over many years and campuses, has become another unseen catalyst of secularization and is an attack on the family.

4.    People are not educated in their cultural heritage. Again, according to Eberstadt, “America’s young live in societies whose first principles are unintelligible apart from the Testaments both Old and New. We downplay the role of community….How can today’s postrevolutionary young be expected to take up Christianity when many, on account of shrinking and absent families, will reach middle age without ever having held a baby, cared for an elderly relative, sacrificed sleepless nights for others, or attended a funeral?”

5.    Mrs. Eberstadt says that sexually we are re-paganizing. We are returning to the morals of ancient Rome, the morality Christianity challenged in the first place. If people want to live sexually dissolute lives Christianity gets in the way. Hence, the appeal of secular paganism. “The promise of sex without consequences may be the strongest collective temptation humanity has ever faced.”

6.    People are marrying later. “This delay of entry into adulthood, too, interferes with the possibility of apprehending 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.” I used to tell my male students. TV commercials tell you that your life is a never ending beer commercial. Almighty God commands you to use your youth for good on behalf of others.

What are the consequences of this family catastrophe: 

Again, let me allow Mary Eberstadt to address this issue: “Today’s ongoing experiment in fractured nonfamilial living has given rise to the crisis of loneliness that is omnipresent in the materially rich nations of the West. It is surely behind the record-breaking use of psychotropic drugs, licit and illicit, especially among the young. It is demonstrably responsible for increases in other substance abuse, crime, truancy, and related malign consequences.”

Our fellow citizens are living decidedly inferior lives. Christianity and neo-paganism have two very different views of the purpose of mankind upon the earth. Christianity teaches that we are “co-participants in the sacred act of creation. Today’s neo-paganism says that men and women should put career first, and marriage and the joys of children second, if at all. Christianity says that men and women are brothers and sisters on earth, cooperators in a divine plan, with unique eternal destinies in the cosmos. The secularist creed says that they are random collections of molecules, tolerated or disposed of however the strongest in Western societies see fit. Christianity says that the family is sacred, period — beyond the state and earthly power of any kind, designed by nothing [less than God Himself]. Neo-paganism shrugs and moves on — exactly as if the minimizing and fraying of primordial human bonds, earthly and otherwise, were not the chief source of social disintegration.”

The dissipation of our youth, the violence, the rioting, the cancelling out of views you don’t agree with: All this is a cry for help. A cry for meaning. A cry for hope.  I love the old story about a man walking along a cliff’s edge by the ocean on a stormy night. He lost his footing and went over the edge but managed to grab a branch that was sticking out of the cliff. The man began to yell, “I there anyone up there?” Then he heard a voice, “I am here.” The man yelled, Who is it.?” The voice said, “This is the Lord.” The man cried out, “Lord what should I do?” The voice said, “Let go of the branch.” The man paused for a moment and then said,  “Is there anyone else up there?” The people of our world are crying out for help but they hesitate to seek it in the one place it can be found.

One thing that should comfort Christians:  “Western Christianity is in decline for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth value of religious belief. It is not prosperity or sophistication or science that makes God harder for today’s people to see. It is the increasing absence of family members who, by their actions in the family community, sharpen human apprehension of the divine.”

I was in one of those long security lines at the airport. I was behind a woman who was wrestling two young children. I asked her if I could hold some of her carry-ons. She thanked me profusely. I said, “No problem young lady. You are doing the Lord’s work.” And I meant it. Young mothers and fathers raising children are doing the Lord’s work. It's hard, tedious, often thankless. But your heavenly father will honor it. As it says in Gal. 6:9: Be not weary in well-doing for in due season you shall reap if you faint not. Don’t be discouraged. You are part of the answer.

Thank you for listening….

More: See my video, Why Rich People Have Stopped Having Children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI4hV-nZyk

Mary Eberstadt: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/30/secularization-revisited-theres-hope-for-faith/