HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 6
6 Assisted Religious Suicide: How Some Churches Participated in Their Own Downfall by Ignoring the Family Factor
- From the acceptance of w to the okaying of contraception to the embrace of active homosexuality today, these realities have been the engines driving most changes in Christian doctrine.
- La domanda. Did the doctrinal changes and reforms of modern Protestantism specifically further contribute to the weakening of family bonds in the West?
- As the historian Roderick Phillips puts it in Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce: “The Reformation…represented a sharp break in the direction of divorce doctrines and policies... Reformers, led notably by Martin Luther and John Calvin, rejected not just the Roman Catholic church’s doctrine of marital indissolubility but virtually all aspects of its marriage doctrine.”2
- In the United States, Phillips reports, Anglican churches soon were relaxing the strictest restrictions,
- artificial contraception went on to be sanctioned by some prominent members of the Anglican Communion not only as an option but in fact as the better moral choice
- “In a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts
- The exception, of course, was the Catholic Church, whose issuance of Humanae Vitae in 1968 both famously and infamously affirmed the traditional moral code by upholding the ban on birth control.
- In research published in 2005 in Christian Century, three sociologists (Andrew Greeley, Michael Hout, and Melissa Wilde) argued that “simple demographics” between 1900 and 1975 explained around three-quarters of the decline in mainline churches (Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist
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