Passing the Torch So Kids Are Kept Christian

My focus has been elsewhere lately, but in the last few months three significant studies on childhood-to-adulthood faith retention have been published, all which validate the arguments laid out in Keeping Kids Christian.

The Experience of God’s Love in Children. World Vision and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University studied how children experience the love of God. Christianity Today has a good write-up of the study. This is slightly different than the question of faith retention, but the “how” covers the same territory: the relationship between children and adults. The study found that children experience the love of God through their families, particularly their parents. Kids understand God’s love, not in abstract categories, but in concrete, relationally grounded human connection. Parents, families, and the adults of the church providing care and guidance is crucial for kids understanding the love of God. All people grab onto models for thinking of God, and kids inherently look to their parents to be that template.

Childhood Experiences with Adulthood Religious Outcomes. Published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the authors looked at preexisting data sets to examine seven childhood factors: parental marital status, conversations about faith with parents, childhood religious service attendance, mother/father religious service attendance, and the quality of the relationship with one’s mother/father. They then examined five adulthood outcomes: religious service attendance, conversations with one’s own children about faith, forgivingness, sense of belonging, and marital status.

The key takeaway is that the relationship between children and their parents is the key indicator of children holding onto their faith into adulthood. Specifically, each of the following factors corresponded with significant, increase in faith retention: when faith conversations were normal parts of family life, when parents and children had a healthy relationship, when parents were frequent church attenders, and when parents had their children frequently attend church. Praying with kids and praying before meals were the only specific practice the authors recommended for embodying the faith at home.

Passing the Torch. The Institute for Family Studies has produced a study asking how faith passes from one generation to the next. It identifies four factors that predicate childhood-to-adulthood faith retention: religious practice in childhood, quality of parent-child relationships, parental marital quality, and congregational involvement in the life of children. Nothing new on these fronts from past studies, but reinforcement is good.

Like with “Childhood Experience”, this study emphasizes that the quality of parent-child relationship is key in faith formation. However, both studies are asking for adult children’s self-reported understanding of their relationship with their parents. While helpful, this does not actually explain what a good relationship should look like or what parents need to do about it. Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk’s research on parenting styles in Handing Down the Faith, translated into practical guidance in my Keeping Kids Christian, is still the best work on this question.

“Passing the Torch” has made waves for a few reasons, but one of them is because it detail some specific practices parents and pastors can implement to achieve theses results. Some of these confuse correlation and causation, such as parents monitoring the media their children consume. Yes, perhaps what kids watch and read influences their faith retention, and yes, good parenting should account for their kids’ media consumption, but the data shows that involved parents have a direct influence on kids’ faith retention and that involved parents monitor their children’s media consumption. The data does not show that overseeing your child’s media consumption predicates faith retention; involved Christian parenting predicates both faith retention and media consumption.

Other pieces are good, if a tad obvious advice: families should go to church together, do devotionals as a family, talk about faith together, as a parent work on your marriage by going on dates, listen to your kids and enforce your boundaries, etc. For pastors/churches the advice included equipping parents to raise their kids, teaching parents so that they have their own faith, hosting marriage seminars, creating space for community, investing in fathers, etc.

It gives bad advice about youth groups. “Passing the Torch” notes that “When parents encourage their children to participate in a youth group, they were more likely to exhibit high religiosity in young adulthood across multiple indicators. For instance, 22% of children who were encouraged to attend youth group as teenagers attended church weekly at ages 25–28, compared to only 9% who were not similarly encouraged.” The conclusion of the report is that pastors and churches need to invest in youth groups and youth ministries.

Now, I don’t automatically disagree, but there are some problems baked into this. The report again confuses correlation and causation: involved Christian parents encourage their kids to attend youth group. It is the involved parenting, not the youth group, that is predictive of faith retention; encouraging youth group attendance is an expression of involved parenting. Sociologists call this “channeling”, the process by which parents find channels in the community to express their whole-of-life approach to faith for their families. Youth group is an extension of the family and community, not an additional, independent predictive source of faith retention. Sending your kid to youth group will not increase their likelihood of being a Christian as an adult unless the way you live your life with your kids communicates sincere faith already.

However, even with weak parental faith or quality of relationship with their kid, there is one way that youth groups can help teens retain their faith. Something left unaddressed by “Passing the Torch” is the power of the church community to shape and form kids for lifelong faith. The community of the church does this as a channel of parental faith. But not all channels work equally well. What makes the community of the church an effective channel is when there is intergenerational interaction between children/teens and godly, mature grownups who model a feasible pattern of faith into adulthood. This has the added bonus of providing surrogate parents to the children/teens who attend church and who are coming from disrupted family/parental situations.

Rubber meets the road, churches should invest in creating a space for intergenerational community and prioritize staffing to that end. Perhaps that will look like a traditional youth group, but it should not only look like a traditional youth group. It should look like the families of the church together taking faith seriously and joyously.