If one pays too much attention to the culture wars—to the right-wing jeremiads about moral collapse and left-wing celebrations of individual liberation—it would seem that both religion and family are on their last legs. Neither institution enjoys the authority it once had. Pews are emptying, and parents seem helpless to cajole their teenagers to accompany them to church.
Based on a long-range research project extending over four decades, the authors of Families and Faith argue otherwise. Despite rapid social change in the years since the 1960s, they find that the ability of parents to pass their religious tradition on to their children has not diminished. The majority of parents and their young adult children share the same religious identities. Despite the influence of peers, schools, and media, parents are still the strongest influence on their children’s religious identities. Grandparents matter too, and because of increased longevity, the importance of grandparents as religious models and tutors for their grandchildren seems likely only to increase. These outcomes are not automatic—intergenerational continuity varies by religious tradition, religious transmission must be worked at, divorce and intermarriage make it much harder, and missteps are common even under propitious conditions—but the chances of success are better than the authors (and we, their readers, they say) have been led to expect.
These and other conclusions emerge from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG), initially funded in 1970 by the National Institute of Mental Health as a one-time study. Beginning with men enrolled in Southern California’s largest health-maintenance organization, the researchers identified a representative sample of 358 three-generation families whose 2,044 members—grandparents to grandchildren—were surveyed on questions centering on mental health, including questions on religion. Fifteen years later, the National Institute on Aging began funding a very expensive twenty-year follow-up, which eventually made the 1970 survey into an 8-wave longitudinal study of the same families. By 1991, fourth-generation members—great-grandchildren and their spouses—were added, and, in the nature of things, the deaths of other family members subtracted from the sample, while still others disappeared or opted out. (In other words, there was attrition from the sample.) The most recent wave of the survey, in 2005, queried 1,766 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 102. In all, more than 3,500 individuals eventually participated. The conclusions summarized above emerge from the mountains of statistical data collected from the surveys over these 35 years.
Having decided that the findings on religion were of particular interest, lead researcher Vern Bengtson obtained more funding (from the John Templeton Foundation) to conduct in-depth interviews with a subsample of 156 individual members of 25 of the families. Six great-grandparents, averaging 95 years of age, were interviewed. Members of the first generation of the study, they are spoken of as G1 participants. Thirty-two G2 members were interviewed (average age 78), 57 from G3 (average age 54), and 62 from G4 (29). It is from these interviews that the researchers extract deeply textured insights about the family dynamics that produced the surprisingly high levels of religious continuity documented by the quantitative data.
The magnitude of this opus fills me with awe. Bengston, a contemporary with whom I am slightly acquainted, was a first-year graduate student in Chicago a half-century ago (1963) when he was given an assignment to observe a three-generation family over a year’s duration. By 1970, he was in his second year as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California when he began the LSOG. With the cooperation of countless assistants and associates, many of whom, such as the collaborators on this book, are acknowledged by name, he oversaw the seven subsequent surveys of the same families. He retired in 2007, but not before obtaining funding for the depth interviews, which continued until 2009. Families and Faith, the most recent of his hundreds of publications, is the capstone of a long, distinguished career.
Particularly compelling are the capsule histories of some of the families, for example the “Pooles” (by sociological practice, this is a pseudonym). In 2007, the researchers interviewed the matriarch, age 97, her older son, age 77, his third daughter, age 54, and her second son, age 23. (These individuals are identified with the awkward expressions “G1 Gladys,” “G2 Adam,” “G3 Mary,” and “G4 Michael,” which initially put me off until I found them, as the authors intended, to be a useful shorthand way of keeping track of the family relationships in question.)
The interviews flesh out the quantitative finding that quality of relationship between parents and children—especially the emotional warmth, or lack thereof, that children experience from their fathers—matters more than does the level of piety of parents. Emotional solidarity, consistent role modeling, and openness to adolescent and young adult experimentation are ingredients in successful intergenerational religious transmission.
The authors identify two particular patterns of unsuccessful transmission. Judgmental, authoritarian parenting is likely to produce what the authors call religious “rebels,” many of whom reject religion altogether. Distant, inconsistent parenting may lead children to become religious “zealots,” offspring who are more religious than their parents. With the benefit of their long-term hindsight, the authors identify a pattern whereby zealots, as they become parents, produce rebels by “shoving religion down my throat,” as grown children recall. On the other hand, the long-term patience of supportive parents may be vindicated when once-rebellious offspring return as “prodigals.” Bengtson, having returned to church life decades after he left, counts himself among their number.
Unsurprisingly, intergenerational religious transmission is higher among Mormons, Jews, and evangelical Protestants than among Mainline Protestants and Catholics, in part because of cultural traditions that promote such transmission (e.g., norms of endogamy and home-based rituals among Jews) and programs that facilitate it (e.g., regular devotions among evangelicals and Family Home Evening among Mormons). But one surprise is the intergenerational continuity of a “no religion” identity. Perhaps because the sample was initially drawn in relatively irreligious California, already in 1970 11 percent of the LSOG interviewees claimed to have no religion, a figure that increased to 36 percent by 2005. Initially, these “nones” were likely to stem from Mainline Protestant families. But by 2005, nearly 60 percent of young adult nones had inherited their lack of religion. For some of them—memorably presented in family case studies—”no religion” is a distinct tradition.
Thus, the Adams family have been secular humanists since the Depression, when G1 Ted, a labor leader, moved his family to California. The Wagner family—beginning with G1 Fanny, who has never had much use for organized religion and, at age 95, described her religion as “only my own”—have been spiritual but not religious for four generations. The Wagners’ intergenerational consistency of spiritual expression (“only my own”) rivals that of the dyed-in-the-wool evangelicalism of the Wilson family, who, over five generations, speak in one voice of their “personal relationship” with “God,” “Jesus,” and the “Holy Spirit.”
The authors also use the depth interviews to characterize differences in religiosity across the very wide age range of their subjects. They identify seven birth cohorts, from those, like Fanny Wagner, born near the turn of the 20th century (1909 to 1915) to those called Millennials (born in 1980 to 1988). “Spirituality” shows up early in these accounts, among the Depression-era cohort (born 1916-1931), although it is not distinguished from “religion” until the advent of the Boomers (1946) and not invidiously subordinated to religion until the Younger Boomers (born 1955-1964). But the issue seems to have faded among the Millennials, a majority of whom were at the time of the interviews affiliated with conservative congregations and who evinced little hostility to organized religion. (To be sure, many of the Millennials lack firm confidence in their religious convictions; at the time of the interviews, they were still in their twenties.) Overall, religion has become steadily more inward and less focused on institutions, even as the opposition of religion and spirituality seems to have peaked with the cohort now entering their sixties.
The book’s well-documented findings will be of interest, as the authors intend, to parents, religious leaders, and scholars, particularly for the juxtaposition of good and bad news—many strong families, richly varied religious and spiritual traditions, few strong religious institutions—that confounds metanarratives of decline or revival. The authors argue convincingly that the findings on family dynamics are borne out by similar studies. That the overall portrait—the appearance of “spirituality” as a meaningful concept among pre-Boomer cohorts and the overall high rate of religious disaffiliation—may be colored by the study’s West Coast locale can be taken as a distant early warning for readers in the heartland.
More troubling to me is that the findings on family strength may be partly an artifact of sampling, that is, who got into the study. Recall that the original sample was drawn from men who were enrolled in a large Southern California HMO and had children and grandchildren; their families have been followed ever since. The authors recognize that the HMO enrollment in 1970 was disproportionately made up of unionized, white, working- and middle-class families, and they acknowledge that by 2005 participation in the study seriously under-represented Hispanic, Asian, and especially lower-class and less educated populations. Given that family formation is happening later in life today than in the 1960s, that many more people are single longer, that fewer children are born into married families, and that marital stability is increasingly a function of education and occupation, it is hard to have confidence that the multigenerational families whose stories are the heart of this study truly represent the families in which American children are being brought up today. To an extent that the authors do not address, their chronicles are stories born of relative privilege. Surely, the authors have no intention to promote complacency about today’s children of poverty. (A long-term look at families in the circumstances of persistent poverty may be found in Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.)
That bias does not diminish the value of Families and Faith for the primary audience the authors address—parents and practitioners, the kind of people who read this magazine. They will be edified to know that, although there are no guarantees, they are not powerless to bring up their children in their faith. Mormons, evangelicals, and Jews, who are miles apart theologically, have similar rates of success. Affection, consistency (you have to walk the walk), and intentionality (you have to work at it) matter more than doctrine. Strictness often backfires. Patience may be rewarded.
R. Stephen Warner is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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