The Sexual Revolution and the Decline of Religion Go Hand in Hand

In conversation with Ryan Anderson, Mary Eberstadt discusses the connections among secularization, the sexual revolution, and identity politics—which is the subject of her most recent book, Primal Screams:

Data of all kinds confirm that religious practice, particularly among Christians, shows a steep decline across the West beginning around 1963. This is just as the sexual revolution takes off in earnest—and . . . the connections between these two phenomena are not just coincidental dots on a graph; they are legion, and deep.

One of the revolution’s consequences is the atomization and shrinking of the family via unprecedented rates of divorce, cohabitation, abortion, and fatherlessness—all of which have continued to transform the United States and other Western societies for almost six decades. Familial atomization in turn has made religious practice more onerous for all kinds of reasons: from the logistical issues presented by broken homes, to more metaphysical quandaries—like the difficulty of understanding God as a benevolent father, in a world where many people have no idea what a benevolent father even is.

We moderns have bought into a seductive secular story—namely, that we’re smarter and more sophisticated than the people who came before us; that we’ve outgrown antiquities like God and church and a transcendent code by which to live. This kind of self-flattering tale blinds us to the possibility that in some critical areas, the opposite may be true.

Yes, in many ways, the world has progressed both morally and materially. At the same time, people today are more unknowing about certain elemental matters than any of the generations that preceded us. As families continue to shrink and crumble, fewer and fewer understand what a robust kinship network even looks like. . . . Similarly, as many people fall away from religious practice, they lose working knowledge of profound themes like sin and redemption, as well as other concepts essential to understanding Western history and civilization.

Read more at Public Discourse

More about: American society, Decline of religion, Family, Sexual revolution

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society