Handing Down the Faith

In the early 2000s, Christian Smith and colleagues embarked on an ambitious project to explore and understand religion among American youth. They also followed a group of young people for about 15 years to see how their religious lives unfolded as they entered early adulthood. The results of this project include several books and dozens of articles that illuminate religion among young people in the USA. They have now extended this research by interviewing 215 religious and 20 nonreligious parents to comprehend their role in the religious development and socialization of children, even to the point of studying whether and in what ways they pass on their beliefs, practices, and devotion to their children as they enter adulthood. Analyzing the results of these interviews, as well as their own and others’ survey data, Smith and Amy Adamcyzk present their findings in exhaustive detail in Handing Down the Faith. The denouement is that parents matter a great deal. Whereas many contemporary academic treatments of socialization underplay the role of families in the long-term socialization of individuals, Smith and Adamcyzk present a compelling case that religious socialization is centered in parenting. The recipe for successful religious socialization, however, is variegated. One of the simplest recipes, though complicated by other factors, is for highly religious parents to practice an authoritative style that features clear expectations for but also warmth and open communication with their children. Of interest, though, is that this is also a recipe for raising nonreligious teens and young adults: nonreligious parents who practice an authoritative style tend to raise children who are unlikely to be religious as they mature. It is not only the parents that matter, however, as the authors describe how intergenerational transmission extends across at least three generations, with grandparents the initial link in the chain.

Christian faith · Faith · Sociology · Theology · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Religious studies

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