Mary Eberstadt, “How the West Really Lost God” (Templeton Press, 2013)

New Books in Sociology · Sep 7, 2013 · 51m

There are a lot of theories that attempt to explain how Westerns came to leave their churches in great numbers. Some focus on ideas, particularly the idea that believing in God made no sense because the evidence for the existence of God is (so it’s said) very thin. Proponents of this theory believe that once religious people reasoned their way to irreligion. According to Mary Eberstadt, reason may account for some “secularization,” but hardly accounts for very much of it. In How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (Templeton Press, 2013), she proposes that Westerns “lost…