One of the world’s leading researchers on how to pass religion on to children, Vern Bengtson (1941-2019), walked away from his faith earlier in his life. But in his 60s, this renowned scholar found himself, as C.S. Lewis once said, “surprised by joy” as he walked into an Easter service.
A measure of Bengtson’s life at age 30, 40 or 50 clearly would have missed the full picture entirely. In a similar way, our knowledge today about many important matters in our present-focused society relies on narrow short-term measures, including: snapshot polling numbers, real-time event feedback, consumer satisfaction surveys, and three- to six-week drug trials.
Without broadening our gaze to examine longer-term trajectories over time, it’s easy to get mired in simplistic stories about important matters that don’t turn out to be true. When it comes to religious disaffiliation, those “simple narratives,” according to Brigham Young University researcher Justin Dyer and colleagues, “need to be tempered or discarded by real data figuring out what’s actually going on from a variety of angles.”
The new Wheatley Institute report released last week, “The Tides of Religion: Leaving, Staying, and Returning to Faith,” paints a more nuanced picture of what’s taking place with disaffiliation and reconversion over time. This academic team brings together different expertises in attempting to “take a 30,000-foot view on the issue while sticking to the empirical evidence and avoiding ideologically charged, sweeping narratives.” In the report, they explore the following: “how many are leaving, who is leaving, which faiths are most impacted, the personal and social consequences of disaffiliation, how many people return to faith” (especially in the U.S. context).
“Deconversion can take a variety of forms,” they note, “such as ceasing to identify with a faith altogether (becoming a ‘none’) or reducing the frequency of church attendance while still maintaining some level of religious affiliation or identity.”
The nuance and breadth of this report is significant, especially since an over-reliance on short-term survey snapshots and interviews with those recently estranged from faith can create a distorted picture of disaffiliation in public discourse — one centered on immediate feelings in a way that understates (or ignores entirely) other meaningful changes in lifestyle, attitude and well-being that only show up over time. Here are four patterns that stand out from this report’s broad overview:
1. Those who step away from faith experience profound shifts over time
Some scholars have pushed back on the idea that those stepping away from faith experience any dramatic lifestyle changes. “They’re just doing normal things, right?” remarks Jesse Smith, co-author of a new book on people stepping away from religion. “None of it is crazy. They’re not out at the bars spending hours and hours.” He argues that people disaffected from faith are mostly spending more time with family, hiking, TV or work.
While an immediate, sweeping change in lifestyle may not take place for those who step away from religion, that’s simply not true over time. As people step away from faith, developmental psychologist Sam Hardy tells Deseret News in summarizing available research, “they basically become gradually more like nones.”
“So you might have particular values and behaviors as you’re religious, then you leave, and you kind of move towards where your attitudes and behaviors are similar to people who were never religious. But it takes a while.”
The Wheatley report points to longitudinal analyses indicating that “people who leave faith become less committed to the binding, communitarian moral principles of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and concerns for purity than when they were religious.” That includes certain “prosocial characteristics” correlated with being religious that “gradually weaken as one spends more time outside of faith.”
These scholars do note a “religious residue effect,” where some sacred norms and values continue to influence people’s lives for a time, even after people disaffiliate. For instance, some continue to pray, and data confirms that people who leave faith still give to charities at high rates.
“So the idea that people leave and then all of a sudden, the next weekend, they’re going crazy,” Hardy notes, isn’t right even if the evidence does suggest behaviors and attitudes will eventually “shift.”
2. More people come back to faith more often than has been appreciated
“We don’t know exactly the rates of reconversion,” Hardy emphasizes, although we do know “those numbers tend to be more than people would expect.” Available estimates range from 17.4% to 29% people coming back, depending on the study.
But Loren Marks, co-director of the American Families of Faith project, points out, “that’s just for early adulthood. … We don’t have much high quality whole life data on reconversion” — citing anecdotes of older 60- and 70-year-old temple workers with stories of return. “There are some fascinating pieces here that we’re missing from later life,” which he thinks “offers some hope.”
The best quality data we have are longitudinal studies of people now in their late-40s, observes Deseret News contributor Stephen Cranney, who with Paul Lambert, Wheatley’s Religion Initiative Director, led this report’s development. This raises the possibility that the true number of people who return could be larger, if examined over the whole lifespan.
What’s clear, Hardy says, is that religious identifications and affiliation is “somewhat fluid” for many people. While “1 in 5 is cold comfort” to a parent hoping for a guarantee their child may return to faith, Marks says, “it’s a whole lot better than the 0 out of 5 narrative that social media seems to send. You know, ‘There’s no way in Hades I’m ever coming back.’”
3. Those who come back most often experience family warmth and love
“Many are looking for an answer to the key to reconverting a child,” Marks said. “I wish we had that. But I think the closest that we come is this: Folks that are most likely to return later to the faith are individuals whose parents showed love, respect and patience,” he summarizes, before citing the aforementioned scholar, Bengtson, who says, “in almost every case (where children returned to the family faith) we found that their parents had been patient and supportive — and perhaps more tolerant and open than they had been before the (child’s) departure.”
“The trend toward irreligion often begins before legal adulthood,” the Wheatley report notes. “While young people may leave faith abruptly once they leave home, for many individuals the process starts long before and continues to operate throughout their adolescence.”
The report’s authors highlight that the same family atmosphere that influences whether faith gets into the hearts of children growing up appears to be what makes a difference later on as well: “Several of the factors that promote parent-child religious transmission, including parental religious commitment and a warm parent-child relationship, also play a role in encouraging the eventual return of those who have left religion.”
On one hand, “parents who employ either authoritarian, high-pressure parenting or permissive, low-pressure parenting both tend to have more children who leave their family faith than parents who use a balance of warmth and structure,” the report states. “Those who have poor family relationships are more likely to deconvert.”
But the opposite is also true: For 35 years now, sociologists have appreciated “strong, warm ties with one’s family of origin” as a key factor influencing someone’s return to faith. In a landmark study of religious transmission over three decades and 3,000 individuals, Bengtson and colleagues reported that “the most successful parents in religious transmission showed love, respect, and patience for those children who took a different path in religion; these (children were more likely to have) ... returned.”
Bengtson also warned against “judgment and preaching.” It’s these “strong, loving relationships with parents,” the Wheatley scholars emphasize, that “can foster reconversion.”
“The words that pop up with the successful reconversions are love, respect, and patience,” Marks summarizes from his years of interviewing families. In combination with evidence from a number of different scholars, “that seems to be the most likely on-ramp for the child that’s left.”
“To wrap those into one word, to me, they sound a lot like charity.”
“There appear to be battles that parental charity can win over the long haul that look hopeless today,” Marks reiterates. “Charity doesn’t usually win today or tomorrow or next year,” but there are complex situations “parental charity can win over the long haul that are going to surprise us.”
“Charity never faileth, right?” Dyer adds.
4. Intimacy with God as a decisive factor
In a review of nearly 50 reconversion stories from returning members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I collaborated on with BYU-Idaho researchers Sarah D’Evegnée and Eric D’Evegnée several years ago, the report summarized, “in almost every narrative, the reconversion process focuses on a new or rekindled relationship with God. These intense feelings of unconditional love seemed to offer our narrators permission to believe they could change, that they could rewrite their story.”
“The most important determining factor” across these narratives of return, we found, was “a personal relationship with God.”
“People who had personal spiritual experiences and renewed connections with God are also among those who reconvert,” the Wheatley report notes — quoting Jessica Zurcher and colleagues as well who found in a study of 37 people returning to faith that “none of our participants mentioned specific resources produced by religious organizations as foundational to the resolution of their faith crisis. Rather, participants focused on how their reconnection with God came through intimate, individualized, and spiritual experiences as opposed to larger organizational messages.”
“So your child, who’s coming home who has left the church,” Dyer says, “you probably don’t, you know, give them the latest conference talk or the latest organizational thing.”
“Their reconnection with God came through intimate, individualized, and spiritual experiences.”
— -Jessica Zurcher, et al.
A better direction to explore, he says, might be, “How do I help my child to feel the love of God through whatever kind of conversations or interactions that we might have?”
“How do you help them to have those kinds of personal sorts of religious or spiritual love of God kinds of experiences” may be more helpful, Dyer says, instead of “overt” comments such as “Hey, here’s this article that shows to this person that whatever they’ve been thinking or whatever their faith crisis is, in fact, incorrect.”
