After the Revolution: How the West really lost God

After the cataclysms of the First and Second World Wars and the Holocaust came a sweeping revolution that blew an entire civilizational framework of morality to smithereens in just a few decades. Today, in 2020, entire generations live in utter ignorance of all that previous generations took for granted. They think differently, believe different things, and understand everything around them in ways that would be as foreign to their forebears as their views would be to those in the not-so-distant past. How did we get from there to here? It is one of the most interesting and important historical questions that face us. The chasm of time between those who lived the same lives as their ancestors, generation after generation, and those who live in the eternal, godless present is growing—and soon memories of that past world will fade entirely.

To answer this question, I called Mary Eberstadt, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Sexual Revolution. Her books Adam and Eve After the Pill, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, and It’s Dangerous to Believe are essential primers on the revolution that changed everything, and she is widely recognized as one of America’s leading cultural critics. In fact, Eberstadt believes that the prevailing theories of how the West lost God are almost entirely wrong. To challenge them, she published her response, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, in 2013.

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