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…
Mere Orthodoxy Web Forum Bonus Q&A
I had a great time participating in Mere Orthodoxy’s first ever author forum to discuss my book Keeping Kids Christian. We ran out of time to cover all the questions, so I wrote up a series of short answers that Mere Orthodoxy published, along with a link to a recording of the forum.
How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?
I have a new article up on Mere Orthodoxy on how kids stay Christian. Much has been made of the great dechurching and how to evangelize people who left Christianity, but the real scandal is the volume of people who we failed to retain. This article is a summary of how I’ve tried to deal with this in our own church, based scripture and the best sociological data. Here’s the start of the article,
How do our kids stay Christian? Some version of this question has animated both scholarly and pastoral discussion over the last several years, especially as the great dechurching marches on unabated. This is not merely an academic question, but one that has kept younger parents anxious as they watch more and more of their peers turn away from the faith.
Of course, it is the Holy Spirit sovereignly acting as he wills that keeps people abiding in Christ. And of course, God who ordains the salvation of his children has also ordained the regular means of bringing about that salvation, specifically the word, sacraments, and prayer. But how should the church approach those gifts in regards to the discipleship of its children? And what steps can the church take to maintain its children’s faithfulness as they grow into adulthood?
Several recent works have provided invaluable insight into this dilemma, the most important of which is Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion to the Next Generation (2021) by Amy Adamczyk and Christian Smith. Adamczyk and Smith looked at the religious landscape of North America over the last few decades and came to a simple conclusion: the communities that were most effective at handing down their religion were those that prioritized faith in the family home.
That might not sound earth-shattering, but it corroborated decades of sociological research showing that things like Sunday School, youth group, VBS, Christian camps, confirmation, and youth conferences are either minimally consequential to the maintenance of a child’s faith or in some cases actually counterproductive. Sociologists of religion have known for some time that these programs, while they feel nice, are led by earnest people, and have some anecdotal success stories, are ineffective for passing along the Christian faith…
