Rhetoric Race and Religion
This weekend, NPR’s Scott Simon invited Mary Eberstadt, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, to discuss what lies ahead for the Catholic Church under Pope Francis. Eberstadt used the opportunity to promote the thesis of her forthcoming book,How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization.
Despite its title, Eberstadt’s book—and her interview with Simon—peddled a well-worn idea. As Eberstadt herself put it,
Over time, the churches that have tried to lighten up the Christian moral code and put forth sort of a kindler, gentler version of Christianity as they see it, have not done well. They have not done well demographically and they haven’t done well financially. Churches that stick to orthodoxy do better over time because in part it’s only those churches that tend to create families that can be of size and carry on the Christian tradition.
This harkens back to Dean Kelley’s 1972 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which argued that liberal denominations were losing a battle of ideas to stricter, more conservative communions.
The new twist here is Eberstadt’s argument that “orthodox” churches are winning not by directly drawing converts from liberal churches, but through the sheer power of birth rates.
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