HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt intro e cap 1

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt intro e cap 1

• Introduction
• one of the most interesting questions in all the modern world. It is this: How and why has Christianity really come to decline in important parts of the West?
• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose parable of the madman in the marketplace foretelling the death of God
• Problem. How much did the Enlightenment and rationalism and scientific thinking have to do with this enormous transformation
• Tesi. Its argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship. It also is plausible—and, I will argue, appears to be true—that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline.
• consistent with the historical fact that family decline and Christian decline have gone hand in hand
• the decline of the family has also put more pressure on those same welfare states that are already stretched beyond their fiscal limits
• Crisi della famiglia e previdenza. The fact that sustaining these welfare states has in effect become a Ponzi scheme
• Bilancio nazionale. older citizens, for example, have less incentive to repay debt
• the incentives to do the hard work of keeping a family together have increasingly elicited the tacit response, why bother? After all—or so it seemed for a while, at least, though we now know otherwise—the pension remains the same. In this way, one can argue, the expanded welfare state competes with the family as the dominant protector of the individual—in the process undercutting the power of the family itself.
• Circolo vizioso. In other words, family change has been an engine fueling statism—and statism in turn has been an engine fueling family decline.... the chicken-or-egg question
• what the “Family Factor” means to signal is a new idea. It is that the causal relationship between family and religion—specifically, the religion of Christianity—is not just a one-way, but actually a two-way street.
• The process of secularization, I will argue, has not been properly understood because it has neglected to take into account this “Family Factor”—meaning the active effect that participation in the family itself appears to have on religious belief and practice.... family has been an important, indeed irreplaceable, transmission belt for religious belief
• What this book means to impress is that family and faith are 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. That is one way of stating the thesis here.
• 1 Does Secularization Even Exist?
• according to some theorists, the notion of decline is itself an illusion
• Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart recently put it, “Secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history”—an observation issuing not from critics of the theory, but from two of its leading representatives.
• Contrarians in this debate believe that other scholars and especially secular scholars have misread the empirical evidence
• Since the jihadist attacks of 9 /11 especially, many have remarked upon religion’s unexpected resiliency in the world
• these observations are all footnotes to sociologist Peter Berger’s famous observation of 1990 that “the assumption we live in a secularized world is false”
• To many observers, the demise of the Communist governments served as a proxy of sorts for the endurance of God.... Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John Paul II, became so integral to the struggle against Communism that some historians would later give him great credit for the thing’s ultimate implosion;
• Robert Royal has put it, “Three centuries of debunking, skepticism, criticism, revolution, and scorn by some among us have not produced the expected demise of religion and are now contributing to its renewal.”
• Peter Berger: pointing in particular to American religiosity which is anomalous by the standards of Western Europe,
• To all this one might add that on the stage of the world—as opposed to just that of the European Continent—Christianity has lately spread to many more millions. In 1900 there were roughly ten million African Christians... John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s
• Una via di mezzo. As contrarian theorists rightly point out, modernity is not causing religion always and everywhere to collapse—but that is different from addressing the question of whether Christianity specifically has collapsed in parts of the West, and if so, why.
• . “The West hasn’t really lost God, because the idea of secularization depends in turn on the idea of a prior ‘golden age’ of belief. In fact, though, people were no more believing or pious in the past than they are today. Therefore, there has been no religious decline.”
• Consider, Chadwick observes, the sharp increase in illegitimate births in Toulouse, France, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries... Hence, illegitimacy may arguably be used as one possible proxy for the influence of Christian belief on personal practice...
• another outstanding sociologist of religion, American Rodney Stark, exuberantly compiles several pages of empirical and historical evidence testifying to what he calls “the nonexistence of an Age of Faith in European history... to primary sources indicating that not only the mass of men and women, but also many of the clergy, were plumb ignorant of the rituals and even basic prayers of the church; and so on.
• Stark also notes, as have others, that some empirical evidence about churchgoing in fact affirms rather the opposite point: namely, that later centuries of Christians were in fact more pious than previous ones
• Roger Finke discuss a new paradigm to counter the secularization thesis: rational choice theory... That theory has in turn given rise to a great debate continuing into the present over the reasons why people might rationally choose religious belief...
• The specific argument against a Christian “golden age” goes only so far toward refuting the agnosticism and secularism of the present. The evidence accumulated by these critics, interesting and at times ingenious, does mitigate the more simpleminded paradigms of secularization; but it does not refute the claim that Christianity has declined measurably in some of its former Western strongholds.
• Steve Bruce, has sensibly pointed out, “Nothing in the secularization paradigm requires…a ‘golden Age of Faith.’ It merely requires that our ancestors be patently more religious than we are... “Can we really believe,” he asks, “that people whose lives were organized by the calendar of the Church, whose art, music and literature were almost entirely religious, who were taught the basic prayers, who regularly attended church services, and for whom the priest was the most powerful person after their temporal lord, were untouched by religious beliefs and values?...
• Una conferma di btuce viene da.. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580.23 This heavily documented study advances an account of the English Reformation that is profoundly subversive of received wisdom. Duffy argues that contrary to the widely accepted story line—according to which the Reformation breathed new life into what had become a decaying and discredited Catholic Church that had lost the support of the common people—the weight of evidence proves something very different: that “late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people
• one simple way of measuring religious loyalty: attendance... Raphaël Franck and Laurence R. Iannaccone: “the ISSP data unequivocally show that church attendance decreased in the West during the twentieth century” ... the welfare state itself caused the decline in religiosity—are items to which we will return.
• Nor is the United States, for all its vaunted religiosity relative to Western Europe, exempt from the slide in attendance. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell write in their important 2010 study of religion, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, “independent streams of evidence suggest that Americans have become somewhat less observant religiously over the last half century.
• The matter of attendance is also obviously connected to another point demonstrating decline: observance of church rules.... As is often pointed out, the church is nothing if not a collection of sinners. But are they sinners who fall short of the rules that they believe in—or people who don’t believe they are bound by those same rules at all?
• .
• In his influential book called The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000, for example, British historian Callum G. Brown assembles a formidable barrage of statistical information to make just this point about the decline of Christianity there, ranging from the decline in church marriages and baptisms to changing attitudes toward all aspects of sexual behavior
• If “secularization” is not the name for the replacement of a Christian ethos with an ethos that explicitly rejects Christian thinking, then what do we call that phenomenon?
• Critici della secolarizzazione riformulano: " The West hasn’t really lost God, because human nature itself does not change; it remains theotropic, or leaning toward the transcendent, and it always will.”... Somewhat ironically perhaps, these key points made by Greeley and other thinkers who stress the theotropic nature of human beings have lately acquired increasing force from a quite opposite quarter fascinated by this same durability of religion: i.e., nonbelieving evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists
• “The universal propensity toward religious beliefs,” echoes evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, “is a genuine scientific puzzle.”... some sort of “God gene”
• Another, related problem with settling for the notion that “human beings are born theotropic, and therefore will turn to God eventually,” is this: if that is so, then certain societies in the world today that are notably nontheotropic loom as large question marks over the theory.
• One final fact that points to secularization as a real phenomenon is that the leaders of Christian denominations themselves—from the Continent on across to the New World—see the diminishment of their flocks as an enormous problem. Both Pope benedict... Benedict has further spoken openly of the “de-Christianization of Europe
• Conclusione: To put the matter another way, to say that secularization theory has problems is not to say that secularization hasn’t happened.
• Altra contestazione: . “Secularization theory is mistaken, because what people call ‘secularization’ is really the death of Protestant Christianity; the Catholic Church isn’t in the same straits.”
• Pentecostalism or evangelicalism, both of which are on the rise outside the West and retain healthy numbers of adherents within it.
• Dean M. Kelly, an American legal scholar and defender of religious freedom who was also an executive with the National Council of Churches. His influential book called Why Conservative Churches Are Growing remains the template for understanding which churches are prospering
• Laurence R. Iannaccone, who deployed rational choice theory to demonstrate “Why Strict Churches Are Strong
• Joseph Bottum has observed in an seminal essay summarizing the American Protestant religious scene: The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time
• Perchè il cattolicesimo mn è in salute: In Italy, among other countries, for example, most people when asked in surveys will identify themselves as Catholics. But how many are Catholic in anything but name only?
• Attendance numbers suggest that a great many Italians (among other Catholics) either do not believe that threat, or fail to act on it if they do believe it.
• I giovani italiani: “They clearly go to church less, believe in God less, pray less, trust the Church less, identify themselves as Catholic less, and say that being Italian does not mean being Catholic.
• “Catholic” Italy does not appear terribly different from the rest of the god-forsaken Continent.
• One final reason to believe that the decline of Christianity involves the decline of Catholicism and not just Protestantism, is this: fertility rates
• Cosa concedere: ...it appears true that the Protestants have gone secular first
• Altra contestazione: . “Secularization theory is mistaken, because the world is not really growing less religious; it is diversifying spiritually instead.”... It is an idea closely associated with professor of philosophy Charles Taylor, whose previously mentioned opus A Secular Age
• There is also the wider fact that politics more generally operates for some people as a secular religion—especially politics dictated by a worldview professing to cover all aspects of life, such as Marxism.
• Grace Davie, who has coined the phrase “believing without belonging
• churches continue to perform vital public functions, even as their numbers shrink; that Europeans, including in Scandinavia, pay taxes to keep their churches going
• Eric Kaufmann points out in his fascinating 2011 book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, there are problems with equating spiritual diversity with traditional religion....People drawn to what are now considered to be “alternative” forms of spirituality are “inspired by earthly desires for health, meaning and wellbeing rather than a connection to the supernatural.... problems with using New Age beliefs as evidence of religious revival
• the critics of secularization theory have drawn attention to the same problem at the heart of this book—the felt need for a “theory of variation,” as Stark has put it. What has gone missing, again, is a persuasive explanation of why Christianity has thrived in some places and times and not others.
• Il problema non è secolarizzazione sì o no ma avere una teoria dei cambiamenti. È quelka che si intende offrire nei cap seguenti

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