- The religion decline isn't individuals drifting away — each new generation enters adulthood less faithful than the last.
- Families are the single most important determinant of whether faith is carried forward by children into adulthood.
- Parents need to both talk about and model their faith, while talking too little creates a bigger risk than saying too much.
Religious activity in the U.S. has been dropping now for more than 30 years, with attendance down at worship services and fewer people claiming to even have a faith tradition. Numerous reports have heralded the rise of the “nones.”
That’s especially true among younger Americans, according to a new report titled “Passing the Torch: How Faith Moves Across Generations” from Communio and the Institute for Family Studies. The report looks at how faith traditions and beliefs pass from generation to generation.
The family sits firmly at the center of that process, playing a big role in whether children carry faith into their adulthood, write study authors Jesse Smith, an assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society at Ohio State University, and Jane Lankes Smith, a research scientist at the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University.
Though the decrease in religiosity since the 1990s is often noted among younger people, the report says that “research shows most of this decline is intergenerational. That is, rather than people becoming less religious over their adult lives, each new generation enters adulthood less faithful than the last one.” The report also notes that it can become “an avalanche over time as the most devout generations disappear and are replaced by more secular ones.”
And while it is a matter of personal choice, it’s not an inconsequential one, impacting quality of life and one’s connections to a broader community, as well as personal health and well-being, according to some who have studied the issue.
“For believers, the value of faith needs no explanation,” J.P. De Gance, president and CEO of Communio, a nonprofit ministry that’s dedicated to helping others spread the gospel, told the Deseret News. Yet, even for a secular audience, faith has far-reaching importance on society. For adults who worship regularly, there is less depression, lower anxiety, less loneliness, and a greater sense of purpose and life satisfaction. For adolescents who worship, research shows that when they become young adults they have higher life satisfaction, lower drug use, less depression, and less criminal or delinquent acts.
De Gance added that from a public health perspective, the many benefits give faith “far greater importance than many medical or mental health interventions.”
Religious belief, affiliation and activity are really needed right now, “especially today in a world where we’re seeing record numbers of young adults report things like anxiety, depression and unhappiness,” said Brad Wilcox, senior fellow and director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, among other affiliations.
“All those kinds of emotional problems are much lower in young adults who are connected to a religious community. I think we’ve got to be figuring out ways to increase the connections that our young adults have with religious traditions,” he said.
Wilcox called it helpful for parents who are religious to “think about what are some things that we can do with our kids to maximize the odds that they religiously move into young adulthood.”
He said connection to a religious community helps people be a better version of themselves. According to Wilcox, they are more likely to be volunteers and are by nature more charitable, as well as more engaged in their local communities. They tend to be more honest and trustworthy.
“There’s a prosocial dimension to religion that is well-documented,” he said.
About the research
The report’s findings were based on four different national datasets, which taken together included roughly 62,000 American adults who were raised in Christian homes:
The Global Flourishing Study (GFS) is a large multi-nation study that tracks faith, well-being and social issues.
Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships has examined faith transmission, the health of marriages and church engagement including those in thousands of American households. That study asked about things like family dinner dynamics, daily prayer and how stable and healthy relationships are.
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescents to Adult Health has followed a nationally representative group of adolescents into their 30s and even early 40s, providing lifecycle data. It also showed that the faith routines the children had and the quality of the parental relationship directly predicted whether children would attend religious services as adults.
Another long-term study, the National Study of Youth and Religion, was created to look at the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. kids as they transition into adulthood.
How to pass on faith
Home — and what children see there — is at the heart of sharing faith. The report says parents often make the mistake of not talking about their faith enough, noting that efforts to transmit faith to their children “are more often undermined not by parents laying it on too thick, but by taking too light a touch. The relevance of Christianity in modern life isn’t affirmed by the larger culture and if kids aren’t taught why and how faith matters, they are likely to assume that it does not.”
Modeling one’s faith is also extremely important and has greater impact than youth groups, Sunday school classes or other religious programs, per the report. “When faith is embedded in everyday routines through conversation, ritual and visible commitment, children are more likely to internalize it as part of their enduring identity.”
Fathers in the study didn’t tend to see themselves as the major player in faith formation, but strong father-child relationships increased weekly church attendance in adulthood by 58%, while a very good relationship with mothers provided 65% higher odds. Great relationships with both mom and dad increased the odds to 76%, the study found.
Intergenerational faith transmission is also stronger in the research when children witness higher relationship and marital quality between their parents. The study found a direct correlation.
And faith can be a multigenerational gift to families, per the report, which said that if adult children regularly discuss religion with their mom and dad, they’re also more apt to do the same with their own children.
Step by step
The report contains separate advice for parents and for clergy on how to build or strengthen faith in children. It’s a family-first enterprise, with the religious congregation doing its part as backup.
It’s a list with lots of suggestions for what it actually looks like. But broadly, the advice is to:
- Be your children’s faith role model.
- Make having a strong marriage and parent-child relationships priorities.
- Work together — both fathers and mothers — on faith formation.
- Make religion an ordinary part of family life.
- Talk about faith regularly within the family.
The report concludes that “there is no substitute for steady prayer and trust in the grace of God.”