Ask 10,000 people what or who had the most positive influence on their religious faith, and the most likely answer for every age group - men and women, boys and girls, is "my mother."
That - which traditional sentiment always has assumed - is among the findings of one of the largest, most comprehensive studies ever made of faith and its development among Americans.A full report of the 3 1/2-year study won't be disclosed until a national conference March 24-27 in St. Louis, but some of its conclusions are being circulated and discussed.
While it turned up numerous previously indicated conditions, some of them, when laid out in hard, overwhelming statistics, come as a bit of a shock.
One of these is that only a third of U.S. Protestants have what is termed an "integrated faith" that embraces both basic beliefs and their practical implications in life.
Another somewhat surprising conclusion is that what matters most in building mature faith is not the commonly emphasized classes for the young - important as they are - but adult Christian education.
Further, this most important stage of learning is found to be widely neglected in the churches.
The huge, landmark study, involving completion of 374-question questionnaires by 10,000 church people bringing out information never available before about beliefs and values, was made by the Search Institute of Minneapolis.
It was sponsored by six mainline Protestant denominations through a grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.
Titled "Effective Christian Education: A National Study of Protestant Congregations," the project also probed the methods, programs and activities of congregations in conducting educational work.
In addition, trained observers visited 54 congregations with exceptionally strong educational programs to examine and describe the techniques that are getting results.
Peter Benson, president of the institute that made the study, said it found "that faith is not particulary well-developed" in many church members, and programs to develop it are "less than effective."
"Unless this issue is faced head-on in the early '90s, members will increasingly drop away or seek spiritual nurture elsewhere," he writes in The Lutheran, organ of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
It and other denominations involved in the study have been declining in membership for about 20 years.
The others are the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
In the study, faith was examined in two basic dimensions, one called "vertical," involving personal relationship to God, and the other "horizontal," involving active commitment to social service and justice.
About a third of church members scored low on both dimensions, reflecting an "undeveloped faith" both in belief and in translating it into action.
Another third showed a one-dimensional faith, usually holding firm beliefs but not seeking much application in life.
Only a third were found to have a balance of both dimensions, a mature "integrated faith."
"For many, faith lies dormant, waiting for nudges, inspirations, revelations and personal experiences to help it develop," Benson writes. "It is private and quiet, more in the head than the heart and hands and feet, uncomfortable in its dormancy but afraid to let go."
Despite the two-thirds found with one-dimensional or undeveloped faith, the study found that the proportion of those with a mature, integrated faith increases with age, from youth onward.
Also women were found to have a higher faith level than men.
Benson and Carolyn H. Eklin, the institute's director of survey services, said one reason church members rarely named Christian education as significantly influencing them is that, in a year's time, they average a total of no more than 11 to 20 hours in educational efforts.