What Eberstadt gets right

The truth in her article is all in this paragraph:

Does the relaxing of dogma drive people from church, or does the decline in attendance push leaders to relax dogma? As with the previous discussion of dissent, we do not really need to know the answer in all its causal complexity. All we really need to know—as the brilliant convert and teacher Monsignor Ronald Knox observed in an essay some eighty years ago, “The Decline of Dogma and the Decline of Church Membership”—is that “the evacuation of the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit” have been going on side by side for as long as Christianity Lite has been attempted. As with doctrinal dissent, it seems, where one appears, the other is sure to follow.

The central argument for what Eberstadt calls Christianity lite was always that it would draw more people in. Its proponents argued that they would save Christianity form extinction. In practice, this approach has been an abject failure. Funnily, even as it fails, some proponents argue that we need to move all the faster. That is the thing we need to keep reminding proponents of Christianity Lite of: hey guys, you failed and failed by your own standards.

The fate and effectiveness of Catholic sexual teachings is another subject for another day.