Abstract
A surprising number of Americans today are anxious to portray Europe as a civilization in terminal decline, swamped by secularism, antinomianism, anti-Semitism, political correctness, Muslims and other horrors. They think the entire welfare state project has collapsed, and that ‘Eurabia’ is both morally and economically bankrupt.
Such tales tell us a lot more about a certain kind of white American Judaeo-Christian mindset than about Europe. Anxious and self-referential, they turn Europe into a dark symbol at the heart of a cautionary tale about what will happen to the USA if it departs from an imagined ideal. Although Eberstadt’s tract is a million miles away from the hysterical rabble-rousing chauvinism of a Donald Trump, it employs the same strategy of dystopian projection for the sake of cultural defence. Situated in the long American tradition of what it is candid enough to describe as ‘armchair cultural criticism’, it accepts the myths and half-truths about European decay, and sounds the alarm to fellow Americans.
At the heart of the book lie two topics which are guaranteed to lead to argument: religion and the family. Each touches the core of personal identity, and we all have a noisy opinion. Eberstadt has the courage not only to take them both on. She argues that they are intimately related, and that decline of one involves decline of the other. Such decay is, in her view, a state of fallenness into which first Europe and now America may be sleepwalking.
To make her argument, Eberstadt deals directly and rather deftly with the vast body of literature on secularization. In keeping with the current trend, she refuses to treat secularization as a blanket process of religious decline and narrows her task to explain why a particular kind of religion – Christianity – is declining in the West (sadly she is vague about what kind of Christianity and which areas of the West). Her contribution is to suggest that such secularization should be explained in terms of the coterminous decline of the ‘traditional’ heterosexual nuclear family (also ill-defined). Although others before her have noticed the correlation, and sometimes suggested that secularization leads to family decline, the argument here is that the decline of the family also leads to the decline of Christianity.
The book falters when Eberstadt tries to prove this thesis. She offers the implausible hypothesis that those who don’t experience a loving father can’t worship the Christian God, and the much more plausible one that those who don’t live in nuclear families are likely to the offended by the churches’ teaching, but she offers no evidence.
So Eberstadt is right that the family is changing and correct to suggest that this has very important implications for the churches, but she undermines her case by assuming some sort of unchanging ‘Christian family’. Social history knocked this idea on the head a long time ago. The sort of family Eberstadt seems to have in mind is the one we see in Norman Rockwell paintings and Coca Cola adverts rather than real life, and it has only a family resemblance (no pun intended) to what ‘Christian’ families looked like in antique, medieval or early modern times.
In all these respects the closely related work of historian Callum Brown on changing gender roles and secularization shows why, even though armchair cultural criticism like Eberstadt’s can be readable and suggestive, it is no substitute for worked-through argument based on evidence.