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<\/a>Editors\u2019 Note<\/em><\/strong>:\u00a0This article is part of the\u00a0Patheos Public Square\u00a0<\/a>on the Future of Faith in America: Mormonism<\/a>. Read other perspectives here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Increasingly secular since the 1960s, Europe is also collapsing demographically, with fewer marriages, more divorces, and fewer children. Each European generation is smaller than its predecessor. The notion of \u201cMy Big Fat Greek Wedding\u201d is largely myth today; most young Greek children have neither brothers nor sisters, aunts nor uncles. Almost half of all Swedish households today have only one occupant.<\/p>\n The relationship between increasing secularism and decreasing marriage and birth rates was noticed long ago, and was understood as a causal one: Secular people tend to marry later, if at all, and to have smaller families. In other words, religious decline precedes demographic decline.<\/p>\n However, in her important book How the West Really Lost God<\/em><\/a>, Mary Eberstadt argues that the undermining of the family undermines religion, too.<\/p>\n As she expresses it, \u201cfamily and faith are the invisible double helix of society\u2014two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.\u201d Religious values are first taught in the home, and the home is where religious practice is modeled for the next generation.<\/p>\n And it works the other way, too: A married man with children is more than twice as likely to attend church as an unmarried man without children. Children, Eberstadt argues, \u201cdrive parents to church\u201d as those parents seek help and support in child rearing. In other words, family fuels faith in this respect, rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n \u201cVibrant families and vibrant religions go hand in hand,\u201d Eberstadt argues. \u201cConversely, not having a wedding ring or a nursery means that one is less likely to be found in church.\u201d<\/p>\n But American marriage and birth rates have dropped, too; they simply lag a bit behind Europe\u2019s.<\/p>\n Not coincidentally, I think, recently-released Pew Foundation survey data suggest that the Christian share of the American population declined sharply between 2007 and 2014, from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent, while the unaffiliated\u2014the \u201cnones,\u201d defined as atheistic, agnostic, or \u201cnothing in particular\u201d\u2014grew dramatically during that same period, from 16.1 percent to 22.8 percent, and their surge was especially noticeable among younger adults.<\/p>\n Some seek to credit the \u201cNew Atheists\u201d for this, but, though they\u2019ve played a role, it\u2019s probably not a central one: The description of the \u201cnones\u201d as either atheistic, agnostic, or \u201cnothing in particular\u201d obscures an important distinction.\u00a0 Many of the \u201cnones\u201d aren\u2019t unbelievers so much as non-joiners or \u201cdroppers out,\u201d religiously inclined to what\u2019s been called \u201ccafeteria Christianity\u201d or (by Christian Smith) \u201cmoral therapeutic deism.\u201d<\/p>\n In America as in Europe, they\u2019re delaying or even foregoing marriage.\u00a0 Such books as Robert Bellah\u2019s Habits of the Heart<\/em> (1985) and Robert Putnam\u2019s Bowling Alone<\/em> (2000), have chronicled an increasing American predilection for autonomy, even rootlessness.\u00a0 And this affects more than churches and family formation.\u00a0 The PTA, for instance, has dropped to less than half of its 1960 membership.\u00a0 Rotary Clubs and the Knights Templar are substantially down, and aging.\u00a0 The Masons are at their lowest point in a century, and the Elks are down 50 percent since 1980.<\/p>\n This is the European and American environment in which Mormonism must operate today.\u00a0 And, though they lack behind their American peers and even further behind their European counterparts, Mormon youth, too, are delaying marriage.\u00a0 (I speak to two of the three cultural regions that I know best; Mormonism scarcely exists in the third one, the Arab\/Islamic world.)<\/p>\n Growing up in the fifties and sixties, it was easy to assume that American society respected Latter-day Saints. They might be out on the theological fringe, but American civic religion was pretty much on their side.\u00a0 At least theoretically, Americans seemed to honor ideals of faithful heterosexual marriage, with fathers taking the lead and mothers caring for children.\u00a0 Society was, in other words, largely in sync with, and supportive of, fundamental practical Mormon values. In fact, Mormons<\/a> seemed quintessentially American\u2014which, in the postwar era of the Pax Americana<\/em>, benefited their church not only in the United States but in Europe and Japan.<\/p>\n Today, though, Mormonism and Western society seem to be parting ways in crucial respects.\u00a0 The most powerful engines of popular attitude-formation and elite opinion in America and Europe are typically amused by, when not altogether contemptuous toward, conservative Christianity\u2014which, in the sense relevant here, includes the Latter-day Saints. \u00a0Mormonism seems socially retrograde and corporate in an era when such things aren\u2019t appreciated. Mormonism\u2019s patriarchal orientation, for example, is, putting it mildly, out of fashion in fashionable circles.\u00a0 Its emphasis on heterosexual marriage is seen as hateful, its insistence on fidelity within marriage as somewhat quaint, and its requirement of chastity outside of marriage as transparently ridiculous.\u00a0 (The tax-exempt status and accreditation of its flagship college, Brigham Young University, will almost certainly be challenged in the near term over its so-called \u201cHonor Code\u201d\u2014on the analogy of what has happened, in the Canadian context, to Trinity Western University, which has a closely analogous \u201ccode.\u201d)<\/p>\n Young minds are particularly sensitive to peer pressure and fashions, and, consequently, it\u2019s unsurprising that the relatively sudden collapse of social support for core Mormon values seems disproportionately to affect the younger generation. \u00a0That generation is also exceptionally \u201cwired,\u201d and has therefore been hit with an onslaught of attacks based on Mormon history<\/a> for which traditional Church instruction has left them woefully unprepared.\u00a0 And, in a sense, because the details of its history aren\u2019t safely lost in, say, the biblical past, Mormonism is more vulnerable to such attacks than most other, older, religious traditions.<\/p>\n Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, has repeatedly warned that the Church is never more than a generation from extinction, so everything hinges on how well and how widely the faith is transmitted.<\/p>\n The way in which the Church responds to this challenge will determine much about its future over the next five, twenty, and hundred years.\u00a0 I believe that Mormonism can prosper if it draws deeply from its own well, which brims with radical materials\u2014radical in every sense\u2014that Latter-day Saints haven\u2019t even begun to adequately deploy.\u00a0 I agree, for example, with the Catholic theologian Stephen Webb, in his book Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n