Andrew Klavan provides a stirring apology of Christianity at City Journal. He critiques those who think materialism is all we need and those who act “as if there were a God” but cannot bring themselves to belief. Klavan echoes G.K. Chesterton that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
As religion has declined, so has the other difficult institution of marriage, its closely intertwined institution of restraint. Seth D. Kaplan tells the story of one initiative that seeks to save the double helix of society. The effort has succeeded to shrink the rate of divorce in Jacksonville, Florida, but not yet to increase marriage. Kaplan makes clear that needed policy reforms are necessary, but “would do little to challenge the social dynamics that play an outsized role in the marriage crisis.”
The marriage crisis is just one manifestation that, as Klavan states,
[The] West may not be heading for disaster as much as it is living in the midst of one, a comfortable and prosperous disaster to which our default atheism makes us blind, a dystopia in which we are increasingly happy and increasingly savage at the same time.