Daily talk about faith helps kids stay in pews as adults

American churches have long been concerned about retaining the young people who have grown up in their pews. Christian denominations’ websites and publications are filled with analyses of why young adults leave church, and what pastors, priests and youth group leaders can do to bring them back into the fold.

A mountain of research suggests that churches are looking in the wrong place: If they want to understand why young adults do or don’t attend church, they should turn their attention away from church and focus on the childhood home. The strongest influence on any adult’s religious practice is that person’s parents.

Among the factors that can affect how strongly religious habits are passed down is how close parents are to their children: the better the relationship, the more likely the kids are to carry on. Traditions with a strong sense of identity, such as Latter-day Saints or Black Protestants, too, show higher rates of “transmission.”

A recent study I published in the academic journal Sociology of Religion shows another predictor: religious conservatism. Using data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I find that when parents identify as religious conservatives, their young adult children (ages 23-28) attend church more often and report higher levels of faith.

Children of religious conservatives have a predicted 19 percent chance of going to church at least weekly, compared with 15 percent of their peers from more moderate or liberal families. If we look at the probability of never attending after leaving their family’s home, this flips. A predicted 43 percent

of children of religious conservatives have left the pews entirely, compared with 52 percent for the rest.

We see basically the same trends when we ask about how central their faith is in their lives. About a quarter of the children of religious conservatives can be expected to say faith is “extremely important,” compared with less than a fifth of less conservative churchgoers. Conversely, only 15 percent of the religious conservative group is predicted to say faith is “not at all important,” compared with 21 percent of all others.

This may seem like a no-brainer. But these numbers adjust for key factors such as parents’ religious tradition, and political ideology.

This means that it isn’t just that evangelicals retain their youth more than mainline Protestants (though this is also true). If you take parents from any single religious tradition, with the same levels of faith and frequency of attendance, those who identify as religious conservatives will still produce more religious young adults in the next generation.

One surprisingly straightforward explanation

as to what religious conservative parents do differently that promotes stronger transmission stood out above all the others: It’s the frequency of religious discussion at home while children are growing up.

Specifically, in the first wave of the data collection, when children were 12 to 17 years old, they were asked how often their families discuss “God, the Scriptures, prayer, or other religious or spiritual things together.” This one measure explained roughly half of the difference in church attendance between children of religious conservatives and their peers.

For churches concerned about how to keep younger people in the pews, the answer suggested here is: Start early, and work through parents.

For parents concerned about how to pass religion on to their kids, the answer is: Make it a part of daily life.

Jesse Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Penn State. Ahead of the Trend is a collaboration between Religion News Service and the Association of Religion Data Archives funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Getty Images The strongest influence on any adult’s religious practice is that person’s parents.