How the West Really Lost Dating 

Editors’ Note: This essay is adapted from a public exchange at Cornell University with Elizabeth Lyon Hall, head of the COLLIS Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, in association with Chesterton House, on April 10, 2025. 

Elizabeth Lyon Hall: I want to consider something that you brought up and have written a lot about in your books: your thesis that a major, and previously ignored, engine of secularization is the breakdown of family. Could you please take us through part of that thesis, and also explore how you see that play out on a college campus? 

Mary Eberstadt: That thesis appears in a book published in 2013 called How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. It was prompted by reading through a big stack of books theorizing about what, exactly, was causing religious decline. Even as scholars had different hypotheses about what was happening, most pointed to a common denominator: something happened around 1963, and suddenly religiosity went over a cliff. (This is all the more striking because religious practice was actually increasing across the West after World War Two—a forgotten fact. Everyone knows about the baby boom, but there was also a religious boom during the same time, from 1945 to 1963.)  

Well, what could that thing circa 1963 be? Some writers said the beginning of rock and roll music. Others said the West entered an authority crisis, or that prosperity had done religion in, or that science had. These were, I thought, overly abstract approaches to the question. What actually happened to the churches after 1963, the book argues, was something far more prosaic, which was the widespread dissemination of the birth control pill and other forms of reliable contraception; which in turn, and in retrospect, led to a lot of family breakup. Families got smaller, families were broken, more and more homes didn’t include dads, etc. 

So religiosity became harder to transmit, because people were no longer living in robust families where, traditionally, faith is taught. There are other factors, of course, like mobility: people are moving around more. This isn’t an effect of the sexual revolution; this is a fact about America. But transience also makes it harder to transmit, and sometimes practice, faith. 

Moreover, once you have a lot of kids living in homes without dads, one idea that’s central to Christianity—God as a benevolent, loving father—becomes harder to understand. Without Dad, there’s not a human link, or example, to contemplate. There’s not an easy way of making that leap from earthly to eternal. That’s not to say it’s impossible. It is to say that a massive psychological change has been afoot. 

Similarly, there’s the fact that Christianity tells its story through a familial lens, that of the Holy Family. It’s about a mother who subordinates herself to God, and a child, and a husband, an adoptive father who raises the child. All of this is harder to make sense of once we’re living in a world where people say things like, “The traditional family is oppressive, and we should just have ‘chosen’ families. You should just be able to pick the people you want to be related to.”  

These radical new ways of being have obstructed both religious belief and the transmission of religious belief on a scale that hadn’t happened before. Again: it wasn’t prosperity, it wasn’t increased education, it wasn’t women going to college. None of those factors that are typically cited actually explain secularization after the 1960s. 

ELH: What ramifications has this had for the way that college students relate to one another? Has this changed the way that college-aged young adults are interacting with each other? 

ME: It’s been a while since I’ve dated, so I’m not the best authority; but yes, I think the trends are very much related, and that the phenomena described in this written work are affecting young people in the here and now, including at Cornell.  

We’re talking about what psychologists and others call “social learning.” And this phrase, when applied to other animals—elephants, dolphins, and the rest—is important. We understand a lot these days about how other animals become what they are, how they learn to be manatees, wolves, and the rest: it comes from watching others of their kind, and learning from observation—especially within their families, because most mammals, in particular, are intensely familial (though not only mammals). This was not well understood before scientists began putting tracking devices on creatures and watching what they did without their knowing it. But it’s fascinating scientific work whose results show that animals aren’t born knowing how to be what they become; they depend on amassing information from their own kind.  

This research is very suggestive for human beings. We know, for example, that when we disrupt the natural habitat of other animals, they become dysfunctional. That’s why elephants aren’t to be found in circuses anymore, because they can’t bear separation from their own, and we can’t bear watching what we now know is suffering on their part. Eventually, human beings have to turn that same mirror onto ourselves. There will soon be very few people left alive who remember life before the Sexual Revolution. But what the record shows is that beginning sometime in the 1960s, life changed radically.  

My thought experiment to you students is: what if, in a way that no one understood at the time, these changes since the 1960s have amounted to a self-inflicted wound on humanity—by reducing the number of people we learn from in the family, and by reducing the number of people who love us unconditionally? You might get mad at your friends, you might get mad at your family, but it’s only your family you expect to love you unconditionally. Weakening these foundational pillars is really, really hurting us.  

Now that might sound abstract, but how does it play out on campus? Almost forty years ago, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom said there was something new about his students: many of them were coming from divorced homes. He said he thought this had changed them. It made it harder for them to commit to anything, in his observation. This is not a moral point. It’s an observation about how we may have altered ourselves, again, unintentionally, by inadvertently dispensing with things that we human animals need.  

Today, many Zoomers are coming to campus as only children, for example. Or as someone who has a sister but not a brother, someone who has a brother but not a sister. Maybe Dad was at home, maybe he wasn’t. We have really reduced the number of people we’re around during what are arguably our most formative years of life. I say “we,” collectively, because few could have intended it to turn out this way.  

But that truth reverberates in the kind of panic and tension that I hear when students talk about things like dating. There’s a bewilderment that just wasn’t there before, back when people had more experience with the opposite sex, back when parents took a less laissez-faire approach to courtship and the rest. Obviously, social media and the internet contribute, but they aren’t the prime movers behind this romantic anxiety among young people. The root cause may just be lack of experience: not knowing as much about other people of all generations.  

You can get to middle age now without ever having held a baby. Nobody thinks it’s remarkable, but it is. We are very different people from those who came before us, because of our deficits in social learning. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.