Happiness for the Church is Intergenerational

On October 13th I’ll be leading a Zoom seminar for the Christian Reformed Church’s Thrive ministry on lifelong discipleship and keeping kids Christian. Join us! Registration is here.

The last few years have seen a significant uptick in research on faith retention for children as they enter adulthood, and for good reason. Just this week I heard of more childhood friends growing up and walking away from the faith. This is a pressing issue as Christianity ceases to be the social default for most of the Western world, with families and churches seeing the kids they love abandoning the faith in greater numbers. Sociologically, figuring who stays and who leaves, and why, is a fascinating question, and sociological research provides good tools to assist the church in its job of discipleship. In that vein, here some articles of which I have recently become aware.

Authoritative Parenting, Not Conservatism, Best for Faith Transmission. There are different styles of parenting: authoritative, wherein parents join clean boundaries and expectations with warmth and open communication; authoritarian, with strict obedience and conformity demanded of kids without warmth or openness; and permissive, where the parents are warm but enforce few standard or expectations. What Amy Adamczyk and Christian Smith discovered in Handing Down the Faith, and what I expanded for the church in Keeping Kids Christian, is that authoritative parenting is by far-and-away the best indicator of childhood faith retention. This was groundbreaking in 2021, and sociologically raised a number of questions about culture and regional differences, though Adamczyk and Smith found that authoritative parenting was effective across cultures.

A study published this April in the Journal of Religion and Health (easier summary here) asked how parenting styles varied in their effectiveness across U.S. regions. Regardless of geographic region, “authoritative parenting acted as a general amplifier for [kids keeping their parent’s faith] across the entire sample.” Interestingly, there was regional variation on whether permissive or authoritarian parenting had positive/negative effects, generally connected to the gender of the parent. For instance, permissive mothering in the South was ineffective, while in the Pacific Northwest permissive mothering was more effective than authoritarian parenting.

Notably, the researchers specifically investigated whether faith was more likely to be transmitted if parents were conservative, but found that there was no effect from conservatism. More research is necessary here, but this helps debunk the idea that merely being a theological/social/political conservative is what transmits the faith…