How the West Really Lost God Quotes

“Like the waning of Christianity, the waning of the traditional family means that all of us in the modern West lead lives our ancestors could not have imagined. We are less fettered than they in innumerable ways; we are perhaps the freest people in the history of all humanity. At the same time, we are also more deprived of the consolations of tight bonds of family and faith known to most of the men and women coming before us—and this fact, it will be argued, has had wider repercussions than have yet been understood.”
― Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization

“If family decline didn’t exist, reality TV would have to invent it.”
― Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization

“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. One compelling statement of that case has been offered by social scientist and journalist Stanley Kurtz, who locates just such a widespread transmutation in today’s passionate embrace of political liberalism—what Kurtz calls the “collective defense of the individual’s sacred rights”—by many Western people.63 “A certain form of liberalism,” he argues, “now functions for a substantial number of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing world-view that answers the big questions about life, dignifies daily exertions with higher significance, and provides a rationale”
― Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization

“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.”
― Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization