The evidence shows that our families are the key to transmitting our faith

As a father of seven and convert to Catholicism, it’s important to me that my kids share our faith and have the best opportunity to grow up and continue practicing that Catholic faith.  The news is full of scary statistics about Americans losing their religion.  For more than a year, I’ve been digging into those statistics.  Tens of millions of Americans that were raised Catholic no longer identify as such.  The Pew Research Center made headlines in 2022 for predicting that, within several decades, America might become a majority non-Christian country.  Almost a third of people raised Christian will become religiously “unaffiliated” between ages 15 and 29.  Although most teens do in fact share the religion of their parents, the loss of even one soul from the faith is a tragedy, and I’ve wanted to understand what evidence exists on the life circumstances, programs, or opportunities that make children more or less likely to continue the faith.

I’m certainly not alone in caring about the faith life of my children. Surveys show that most Americans care about their children’s spiritual development.  The Bible encourages us to raise our children up in faith (see, for example, Deuteronomy 6 or Psalm 78).  Even from a purely secular perspective, there are positive associations between religiosity and physical health, mental health, avoidance of substance abuse, and overall satisfaction with life.  Most of my children are not in that age range yet where kids tend to start losing their faith.  But they’re a sufficient reason for me to pore through the books, research, surveys, and papers on the topic. 

The passing on of faith from generation to generation, often called “religious transmission,” has been studied by many academics and surveyed by research groups around the planet.   Researchers have investigated this in different ways, looking at the trends and what factors are linked to kids growing up to share or fall away from the faith of their parents.  Broadly speaking, the results are both surprising and obvious at the same time: it’s all about the family.

Professor Vern Bengston, for example, conducted thousands of longitudinal surveys over a thirty-five-year period with thousands of respondents from hundreds of three-generational families and published a book on it.  In short, he measured the successes and failures in transmitting religion across the generational lines of multiple specific families.  Among his findings were a significant drop in religious transmission to adult children if their parents had divorced, and this drop actually doubled for Catholics.  However, divorced Catholics need not necessarily assume the worst, as Bengston certainly identified families where the high religious commitment of a divorced parent succeeded in transmitting the faith.  Beyond marriage, though, Bengston’s research showed that the family and parent-child relationship itself was important: “Parental warmth is the key to successful transmission.”

Using a different approach, Professor Christian Smith interviewed thousands of teenagers and studied their responses on religious questions, which spawned books and many research papers.  Once again, the same patterns emerge.  Teens from families with currently married parents were more religious; teen religiosity decreased if their parents were divorced. But again, how close parents were to their children and the quality of the parental relationship played a huge role in successfully passing along the faith.

Similar patterns emerge from other sources.  The Public Religion Research Institute found children of divorced parents were less likely to attend religious services weekly.  The Pew Research Center data shows a correlation with divorce and being an “ex-Catholic.”  Pew’s research also shows rates of religious attendance and prayer among teens are linked to their parents’ religious practices.  Professor Jesse Smith broadly summarizes the research on religious transmission as: “Parental religiosity is consistently found to be the single strongest predictor of child religiosity over the life course.” 

There’s evidence to support the value of many of the tools of our faith.  Catholic schools are great tools, and I’m proud of the Catholic school my kids attend. Our diocese has a goal of increasing the percentage of baptized Catholic children attending Catholic schools from 17% to 19%.  A 2021 survey sponsored by the online Catholic newspaper The Pillar found increased Mass attendance in adulthood among those who went to Catholic schools.  Nevertheless, there’s no silver bullet or external tool that can ensure your kids grow up to share your faith.  That same Pillar survey found that Catholics who grow up saying grace before meals were 34% more likely to attend Mass weekly as other adults.  Yet they do not claim that praying before meals itself is the key; it “is a marker for a way of life in which faith is practiced in a more everyday fashion.”  If you want your kids to practice your faith when they grow up, the evidence recommends that you warmly love your children, love your spouse, pray with them, and get yourself to Mass.

J.C. Miller is an attorney from Michigan.