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…
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…
The Vanishing Church and Faith Retention
My essay “How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?” has been included in Mere Orthodoxy‘s inaugural ebook, Spiritual Formation for the Family. If you become a member of MO you have access to this and all future ebooks. That essay was the origin of Keeping Kids Christian, which is published in one week! You can find it for pre-order with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and 40% off at Westminster Books (it was WTS Books’ promotional focus last week, which was cool and humbling); and for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
Ryan Burge is the guru sociologist of religion who writes at Graphs about Religion. I’ve followed and appreciated his work for years now, and have read all of his books. His most recent is The Vanishing Church. It explores the decline of the mainline tradition and its central thesis is that the moderate sensibilities of mainline congregations couldn’t handle the increased polarization of American culture and that very sensibility is something desperately needed to moderate the most extreme impulses in our society, both religious and secular. It was classic Burge: lots of statistics that are easy to digest, the familiar recounting of the American religious landscape over the last 75 years, with the vulnerability of a pastor whose church shut its doors.
What left me scratching my head was how he contrasted mainline with evangelical sensibilities when it comes to Christian discipleship…
Three Stages of Religious Decline
Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship comes out in just under a month. You find it for pre-order for 40% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and discounted on Amazon and Westminster Books; and at Barnes & Noble and Christianbook.com.
There is a decent time-lapse between writing a book and its publication. In this case, I submitted my manuscript in mid-January 2025 and it’s officially out 13 months later. One of the inevitabilities that occurs in that gap is the publication of something relevant that would have been really helpful to engage.
In August 2025, a group of researchers published “The three stages of religious decline around the world” in Nature Communications. The secularization transition hypothesis is that countries become less religious and more secular over a 200-year span. As nations become more industrialized and modern, the importance of religious symbols and rituals to bind the country together and present solutions to life’s problems fades, and the people gradually become less religious. This hypothesis has been criticized as being overly focused on Western, traditionally Christian nations, and the researchers sought to establish whether it could extend to non-Western, non-Christian nations.
The researchers “propose that secularization follows a consistent sequence: first, participation in public rituals declines; second, importance of religion drops, and third, people shed their formal belonging. We refer to this as the Participation–Importance–Belonging (P-I-B) sequence…
Passing Down Christianity and Adult Children
Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship comes out in a month. I’m excited about my first book, which is being published by Baker Books. You find it for pre-order for 40% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com, and also on pre-order and discounted on Amazon and Westminster Books.
Ryan Burge has a good article examining weekly religious service attendance based on birth cohort — how frequently people born in a five year period (e.g. 1950-1954) attended religious services at different stages of life. He tests a common theory called the “life cycle effect”, which says that kids are raised religious, drift away from religion in their chaotic young adult years, return to church when they have their own kids, and then once their kids move out either stick with church or walk away from it.
Most pastors have seen the latter possibility play out time and time again. I know I have. When parents are in church for the sake of their kids they leave once their kids are “done”. In most of these cases I’ve observed that both children and parents subsequently walk away from the faith…
