Want your kids to keep their faith? New research says it’s about conversation, not just church attendance

An analysis of Communio data found that more frequent religious engagement in childhood and better family experiences were associated with greater religious participation in adulthood. Children who frequently talked about faith with their parents tended to attend religious services more frequently as adults and were more likely to transmit their faith to their own children. The paper was published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Religiosity and spirituality are central parts of many people’s lives. They shape people’s moral frameworks, inform commitments, and guide behaviors, while also supporting many aspects of their health and well-being. As concepts, religiosity and spirituality are related, but not identical. Religiosity is the degree to which a person believes in, practices, and identifies with an organized religion. Spirituality is broader and usually refers to a person’s search for meaning, connection, transcendence, inner peace, or relationship with something larger than the self.

Both religiosity and spirituality can help people make sense of suffering, uncertainty, loss, and major life transitions. They can provide comfort, hope, emotional regulation, and a feeling that life has meaning. Religious and spiritual communities can also provide social support, shared values, identity, and practical help during difficult periods. They can be psychologically beneficial, although they may also create distress when linked with guilt, fear, exclusion, or conflict.

Study author Julia S. Nakamura and her colleagues examined how religious and familial experiences in childhood shape religious and relational outcomes in adulthood. The researchers focused on 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 also investigated five adulthood outcomes: religious service attendance, conversations with one’s own children about faith, forgivingness, sense of belonging, and marital status. The study authors hypothesized that more religious involvement in childhood, as well as intact family structures and better relationship quality with parents, would be associated with more religious engagement and better relational outcomes in adulthood.

The researchers analyzed data from Communio, a faith-based nonprofit focused on strengthening relationships and families among those embedded in church communities. Data came from 16,548 members of 32 Catholic and Protestant congregations across the U.S. Approximately 54% of study participants were Protestant, and 60% of participants were women.

Study participants reported their parental marital status (“Were your biological mother and father married to each other?”), how much they talked with their parents about faith when they were children, how often they and their parents attended religious services when they were around 12 years old, and the quality of their relationship with their parents (“Please think about your relationship with your mother/father when you were growing up. Would you say that relationship was very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad?”).

Study participants also reported how often they attend religious services now (“How often do you attend Mass/Church Services?”), how often they have open conversations with their children encouraging the Christian faith, their sense of belonging to their church community (“How would you describe your sense of belonging to your church community?”), and their marital status. They also answered a single-item question to assess dispositional forgiveness (“I have forgiven those who hurt me”).

Results showed that 71% of participants reported growing up in intact families (or 83% of the participants who responded to that specific question). Forty percent reported attending services once a week when they were children, while 25% reported attending more than once a week. Twenty-three percent reported having conversations with parents about faith yearly or a few times a year, while 16% reported having them monthly or a few times a month. Forty-one percent reported having a *very* good relationship with their father, and 51% reported a *very* good relationship with their mother.

Additionally, participants whose parents were never married to each other were less likely to have conversations about faith with their own children later in life, and were less likely to be married in adulthood. Interestingly, those whose parents divorced before they turned 18 reported higher levels of forgivingness.

Further analyses showed that participants who attended religious services more often as children tended to attend them more often as adults. However, parental religious attendance showed contrasting patterns depending on the parent: while frequent attendance by a father was linked to more frequent attendance by the participant in adulthood, frequent attendance by a mother was actually associated with slightly *less* frequent adult attendance.

The researchers noted that the strongest predictor of adult outcomes was communication. Those who had conversations about faith with their parents more often as children tended to talk about faith more often with their own children, attend religious services more frequently as adults, and report higher forgivingness and a stronger sense of belonging to their church. Finally, results showed that people who reported better relationships with their fathers tended to report higher forgiveness and a stronger sense of belonging to a church community, but less frequent conversations about faith with their own children.

“Our findings contribute to a growing body of research demonstrating that faith transmission is not solely a matter of childhood RSA [religious service attendance] but is also deeply embedded in relational and experiential contexts. The role of conversations about faith with parents may be a particularly influential factor, potentially reinforcing the importance of proximal factors in childhood in shaping later religious engagement and future relationships, though further research is needed to corroborate these findings,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about the transgenerational transmission of religious beliefs and practices. However, it should be noted that all data from this study came from self-reports, leaving room for reporting and recall biases to have affected the results. Additionally, all study participants were current congregation members and thus likely more religious than the general population. This limits the generalizability of the findings.

The paper, “Associations of Childhood Experiences With Adulthood Religious and Relational Outcomes Among Protestants and Catholics in the United States,” was authored by Julia S. Nakamura, J. P. De Gance, Isaiah Contu, Katheryn C. H. Yang, Rachel S. Leong, Richard G. Cowden, Katelyn N. G. Long, and Tyler J. VanderWeele.