BYU professors David Dollahite and Loren Marks began their academic work on religion and family life in the mid-1990s, around the time one leading scholar called religion “the anti-tenure topic.” A respected colleague who found their initial research interesting predicted, nevertheless, that Dollahite’s and Marks’ work would never see the light of day.
Almost 30 years, 170 scholarly publications, 180 academic presentations and 300 research students later, Dollahite and Marks have not only managed to achieve tenure but also lead the American Families of Faith Project, a research treasure trove involving interviews and observational involvement with hundreds of religious families — Asian Christians, Evangelicals, Muslims, mainline Protestants, Latter-day Saints, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and families from various branches of Judaism.
The research reveals fascinating commonalities in how successful families live out their faith, but the most compelling insights may be those dealing with the complexities of “high-demand religion,” a term that emerged in the 1970s as an academic term more benign than “cult,” but which still carries a pejorative undertone.
What is ‘high-demand religion’?
What, exactly, is “high demand” may lie in the eye of the beholder. Is it the Ten Commandments’ injunctions against Sabbath-breaking and stealing, or Jesus’ teachings of radical love and forgiveness and complete personal surrender?
Or is “high demand” more akin to icky religion made famous in novels and movies, like the fanatical mother in Stephen King’s “Carrie” or 19th-century British literature’s Mr. Brocklehurst spouting Bible verses to justify neglect and extremism?
What it means to be deeply religious, as many of those interviewed for the Families of Faith project would call themselves, is a complicated question. While devoutness at unhealthy levels can involve restriction, fear and isolation from the world, ardent religious practice can also bring undeniable gifts. Correlations between religiosity and well-being have been confirmed by medical, psychological and social science research since the early 1990s.
Furthermore, high religious commitment correlates strongly with high benefits across domains — with marginal commitment not demonstrating the same rewards. However, taking faith seriously, Dollahite and Marks’ research confirms, doesn’t mean becoming overzealous. Those wanting to cultivate the gifts and avoid the pitfalls of high demand, their research finds, balance wholeheartedness with flexibility.
Common practices
While negative fictional or cinematic tropes of religious fervor offer cautionary tales for the devout, positive depictions, like those in the award-winning film “Tender Mercies,” offer insight into living faith with nuance and joy along with the obligations: hymn singing during chores, acknowledging suffering and mystery, and participating in joyful rituals like baptism.
Dollahite observes three practices common to the highly religious families they interviewed: sincere prayer (in various forms), regular church attendance (of whatever sort) and the study of sacred texts (from various traditions), adding that successful families worship together “with joyfulness and with sensitivity to family members’ feelings, preferences, and schedules.”
When well transmitted, each religious tradition brings out particular strengths in their adherents, observes Dollahite: Catholics and Orthodox are particularly good at confessing, Protestants at focusing on Jesus, Jewish families at sacred rituals, Latter-day Saints at commitment to marriage and family. Marks was particularly impressed with generous Muslim donations during Ramadan to help the poor.
Why go all in?
While some may still see these as “high-demand” practices, Marks and Dollahite highlight their benefits to relational and emotional well-being. For example:
- Religious practices like prayer and scripture study help couples handle marital conflict through feeling connected and directed by God.
- The process of repentance and confession brings psychological and relational benefits to religious families. Forgiveness is a particularly helpful attitude which religious families tend to value and cultivate.
- Other dispositions common among the highly religious include hopefulness, gratitude and humility, all of which contribute to strong relationships and mental wellness.
Secular families can and do embrace these virtues, but religious devotion tends to cultivate them in powerful ways. After interviewing “exemplary” married couples and families referred by clergy, Marks said that even the “best of the best” told them they would have divorced without God.
A majority of these same couples struggled their first several years of marriage to turn two me-first people into a we-first marriage. “A great marriage is not won with a single vow,” Marks adds, highlighting relationship benefits connected with “years of growth, effort, sacrifice, and religious devotion.”
Even religious obligations like sexual fidelity, viewed in popular culture today as repressive and outdated, show up in multiple Families of Faith studies as highly beneficial, with sexual boundaries creating a protective function in Christian, Jewish and Muslim families.
“Highly religious couples are significantly more likely to be sexually faithful to their spouse,” Dollahite observes, highlighting the “strong sense of trust and safety” this provides a relationship.
Transmitting devotion to the next generation
Highly religious practices benefit youth as well, as multiple studies have shown, with weekly church attendance and prayer linked to lower rates of depression, substance abuse and risky sexual behavior and higher rates of happiness, service and forgiveness among young adults.
Yet interviews with diverse religious families show that some kinds of faith transmission are more effective than others. Youth who experience close bonds with their parents tend to embrace their faith of origin and show greater willingness to sacrifice their time, money and selfish tendencies for others.
Marks encourages parents to exemplify religious ideals rather than preach them. “There is a distinct and unique power in listening with love,” he observes. Interviewed youth describe the impact of parents willing to hear them out in youth-centered conversation (versus “parent-centered”), a difficult and humbling lesson that Marks recognizes as “hard for most of us parents to internalize.”
The ideal, these studies have found, involves finding a difficult balance between firmness and flexibility. “Parents who want to promote positive religious/spiritual development,” Dollahite and Marks write, “should find ways to live with this tension — one that involves dedication to religious obligations along with respect for the children’s interests, agency, and schedules.”
High-demand risks
The term “deeply religious” may not bring to everyone’s mind hope, forgiveness, gratitude, relational richness and fidelity. Some might picture a situation akin to Martin Luther’s descent into scrupulosity, or religious obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which his excessive daily confessions, obsession with sin, constant religious rituals and spiritual agony made life, as Luther described it, “hellish.”
The risks of high religiosity becoming linked with mental health challenges like OCD, scrupulosity or perfectionism, Dollahite says, are real: “People can become religiously extreme and harm their marital and family relationships.”
But you don’t have to be a religious fanatic to take things too far; even just being insensitive or oblivious to how religious practices, teachings and leaders are affecting youth in subtle ways, Dollahite adds, “can harm people, relationships, and families.” Being overly critical, expecting more than people can offer, or neglecting fun and respite are just some of the ways that religious devotion can morph into less-than-ideal practice.
Low-demand risks
All this is enough to persuade some to go marginal. Maybe dip a toe or ankle in and keep it to Christmas, Easter, Passover and Ramadan, skipping over the inconvenient and soul-stretching sacrifices that living “high demand” day-to-day entails.
Yet there’s a “threshold effect” they’re missing, Dollahite says. Those highly involved with personal and communal religion reap significant emotional and relational benefits not connected to “those only somewhat or nominally involved.”
“Anything half in doesn’t come close to the rewards of those who go all in,” he summarizes.
Such vibrant faith can be transmitted to the next generation while respecting children’s autonomy and agency. “This is no easy or simple process,” Dollahite admits. Yet this thoughtful and balanced approach mirrors family scholars’ consensus that authoritative parenting, which combines warmth with high expectations, benefits children far more than the simpler styles of either permissive (mainly warmth) or authoritarian parenting (mainly expectations).
Jonathan T. Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup and author of the forthcoming book “Why Modern Children Need Ancient Parenting,” notes that a much higher percentage of depression exists among children raised with permissive parents than authoritative ones. He concludes that “the mental health challenges facing today’s youth are unlikely to stem from a decline in parental warmth,” but more likely to stem from “reduction in the demands that parents place on their children … (who) benefit from clear rules and boundaries that are appropriately enforced.”
In family religious practice, this can look like the Lutheran mother interviewed in the American Families of Faith Project who raises her kids lovingly but firmly, telling them, “I can’t imagine not going to church on Sundays.”
But it can also be the Muslim family who does their religious reading without those who can’t or don’t want to. Or a Catholic father encouraging nightly prayer together while making allowance for busier lives as his family grows. While the dynamic shifts with the family’s needs, the dedication and underlying devotion remain intact, illustrating high religiosity without rigidity.
What we learn from the devout
Marks and Dollahite, both practicing Latter-day Saint professors in BYU’s School of Family Life, have learned a lot from the families they’ve studied — especially, Dollahite observes, “about the power of sincere prayer in various forms, religious service attendance, and the study of sacred texts from various traditions.”
He and Marks also watched parents react with patience and love when children did not choose their family’s faith path. Marks recalls a Latter-day Saint father who wanted to grow closer to his agnostic daughter. “Although his heart was broken, he enrolled in a weekly yoga class to spend time with her instead of harshly condemning her,” says Marks. “It’s true stories like this that motivate me to be much better.”
Why these highly religious people pay the costs, these researchers find, consists of multiple reasons. The love and emotional support of their faith communities help them navigate hardships, while overriding interpersonal nuisances and even reasons to doubt. High expectations, many find, lead to personal growth and stronger relationships — benefits that multiply in longer-term family well-being across generations.
Inevitable extremists
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “The Poisonwood Bible” offers up the trope of the preacher-missionary protagonist’s destructive rigidity and blind faith that some readers have called out for its blanket attack on Christian missionaries and conflation of faith with ignorance. But again, we all run the risk of overdoing it, whether in the office, the military, the gym or the church.
John Stuart Mill’s father overdid education to such an extent (Greek at age 3, for example) that his son suffered a mental breakdown, regaining emotional healing in part by reading William Wordsworth’s poetry before going on to become one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century. Yet Mill’s father’s educational extremism doesn’t mean rational thought is bad any more than spiritual zealotry means religion itself is inherently harmful.
Religious extremists exist, just as extremists in business, politics and sports will always be with us. Seventy-eight percent of the rising generation of “nones” — those who reject organized religious affiliation — come from religious families. Dollahite and Marks suggest that “this may be, in part, associated with religious parents exercising excessive firmness with inadequate flexibility (rigidity).”
Yet Marks reassures young nones wondering whether or not to return and raise their own children religiously that “the best available science shows significant benefits across physical, mental, and social health for those who invest in their faith.”
He also notes that other than faith communities, “we know of no other community in contemporary America that unites individuals and families across generations, across social strata, and endures across time.”
For those who have never been religious and fear trying something new, Marks adds: “Remember that a significant portion of any faith community are converts and have been in the new shoes you are in yourself. Strength awaits you.”