Mary Eberstadt
Much of my work during the past 15 years has been aimed at trying to understand what is happening to our country beneath the surface of the news cycle and other distractions. Books including Primal Screams and How the West Really Lost God have explored questions such as “What’s causing secularization? What’s causing something obviously related to secularization—widespread family breakdown? Why are so many of today’s kids suffering so? Why are ancient religious moral teachings under attack, and what should be done about that?”REF Necessary though this work has been, and continues to be, it enters into dark territory. One cannot tackle questions like those without also talking about cultural decline, familial collapse, and other signs of a civilization trending downward.

Yet it is no paradox to observe that decline and revival often go hand in hand. Social dissolution repeatedly gives rise by virtue of its very toll to reform and correction. That truth is not only comforting, but apt. To shut oneself off from national politics for a moment, and to focus on developments elsewhere around the country, is to encounter something welcome and unforeseen. In some unexpected corners of the culture, signals of moral progress are flashing at a steady rate—signals that will certainly guide America and Christianity into the future.

This essay examines six such signs in detail. To sound the inevitable caveat: The existence of these signs does not mean that Christian or conservative triumphalism is in order. Nor does their existence mean that today’s re-paganization, as I named it seven years ago, will reverse in the lifetimes of anyone reading this.REF Maybe it will not. Maybe man is indeed somewhere on the road to what Pope Benedict XVI famously predicted in 1969, a “smaller, holier Church.”REF But even a smaller, holier Church—or, for that matter, a larger,  » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/beyond-jeremiads-signs-cultural-revival-circa-2025