The Fare Forward Interview with Amy Adamczyk
Dr. Amy Adamczyk shares insights from her recent book on how parents in America today pass religion on to their children, highlighting patterns across several religious traditions that underscore how both parenting and American religion have changed in the last century.
Interview Conducted by Jake Casale
Dr. Amy Adamczyk is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on how different contexts (e.g., nations, counties, friendship groups), and personal religious beliefs shape people’s attitudes and behaviors. She has published over 50 journal articles. Her first book, Cross-national Public Opinion about Homosexuality, received the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the International Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Her second book, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation (coauthored with Christian Smith) was published by Oxford University Press in 2021 and was a finalist for Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year Award, Marriage & Family Category. Currently, she is conducting research for her third book, which will examine differences in views about abortion around the world. Her research has been supported with grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Templeton Religion Trust of Nassau, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
FF: How did your team decide to study this set of questions, and what was compelling about them to you?
AA: I’ve known Chris Smith for more than 20 years at this point, and earlier in my career I was doing a lot of work on religion and young people, and he was too. So, we’d been in touch with each other at various academic conferences, and then we linked up about four years before the book came out in 2021. He had some wonderful funding and was putting together a research team to go out and interview parents all over the United States, and ultimately, we were able to interview over 200 parents from a range of different religious backgrounds (including about 20 who weren’t religious at all).
The book project that came out of the research was an intersection of our interests on young people and religion. We knew a lot about how religion works from young people’s perspectives. But there was always this missing piece: what the heck do the parents think? What are their techniques, are there similarities or differences across religions, how does it all come together? What is their role? That’s what led us to this book.
FF: What are some of the most prominent cultural frameworks and schemas through which you saw parents approach this task of passing on religion to their kids? Did those schemas vary significantly between faith traditions, or did you see commonalities throughout?
AA: One of the things that became very clear to us early in the process is that parents transmit religious belief in part because they want their children to lead happy and good lives. They want their children to have a life that goes well, to enjoy success and happiness, and they also want them to live rightly. And they saw religion as informing this. The parents we spoke to wanted their kids to be self-determined, to pursue their individual unique selves and live to their ultimate potential. They also wanted their kids to be morally grounded and do the right thing. It was about passing on enough religion so these young people could live good and ethical lives, but not passing on so much that there might be problems later—like religious extremism. The parents also didn’t want their children to have too much more or less religion than them, because they were very concerned about having a good relationship with their kids later in life. It was all about trying to find that happy medium that would give the kids just enough for what they needed. So that was a major idea that framed a lot of what we found and how we thought about it.
Parents are really into their kids today. They want to be with them. It’s not shoved off on the churches.
FF: Could you walk us through what your book describes as the transition of American religion from a community solidarity project to a personal identity accessory, and why that transition is so important for understanding what makes these parents tick?
AA: This transition has been happening over the last 100 years in how religion is viewed and used. It’s a gradual change, but it’s a distinct change from how we used to understand religion. We previously viewed it as shaping people’s view of what is good and desirable, while also governing their behaviors. It’s not that we don’t have that anymore, but we’re not so focused religious tradition telling us what is wrong and right, what we should or should not do. Today, we’re much more interested in using religion to cope with life and to make good choices. And that’s what a lot of the parents talked about. “How do we pass on religion so our children can use it as this accessory or this device that is going to make their lives better, that’s going to help them make better choices or cope when things get tough?” And that’s been a big shift.
FF: It seems like, in this framework, the child is seen as a sea of untapped potential that needs to be carefully nurtured and cultivated so that they’ll transform into their best self. Is it fair to say that religion is then seen, at least functionally, as a tool that can help a child become the best version of themselves?
AA: Yeah, exactly. It’s one more—I mean, it’s an important and meaningful tool, but for many parents, it was just one more tool that they could give their kids that would help them live their best life.
FF: Does this view of religion’s utility come from the parent’s own childhood experience of religion, or is the schema coming from another place?
AA: There’s a historical element to this, where—when we think about what families looked like fifty years ago—a lot of people have a vision of the family as mom not working, dad working outside of the home, and families spending lots of time together. Some of that is actually where we are today. Parents spend as much time with their children today as they did forty or fifty years ago, which is crazy because so often both parents are working outside the home.
FF: I remember when I got to that part of the book. I thought, “No, it can’t be!” Because it goes so against our scripts.
AA: Parents are really into their kids today. They want to be with them. It’s not shoved off on the churches. It’s joyful to be with them—and parents might have to be with kids more, to get them to all the activities they want them to be involved with. Some of this is a historical change—as we’ve had fewer and fewer children, parents have looked at parenting differently. We just like our children more, and we spend more time with them.
But at the same time, a huge theme in all our interviews is that parents think about transmitting religion based on their own relationship with their parents. There are two ways that can work. Some think, “I loved what my parents did for me, I want to emulate it.” Then others think, “I hated what my parents did for me, I’m going do it in a different way.” So regardless of which way someone moved, their own visions of their parents had a profound impact. That was always the reference point: “What did my parents do for me?”
The parents that were most successful at passing on religious belief talked about having these two-way conversations, where their children felt free to ask questions.
FF: Was this goal of setting kids up for a “happy and good life” articulated consistently across faith traditions?
AA: Absolutely. That was one of the most surprising findings. We talked to parents from all the major religions and some from minority religious faiths, like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses. We found that parents didn’t differ that much in their background assumptions about how they wanted to raise their kids, and how they wanted to transmit religious belief. For the most part, everyone was thinking about these things in the same way, and when we went back and interviewed our twenty parents who weren’t religious at all, they were also very similar in how they were thinking about transmitting non-religious beliefs. Parents from different faiths might be trying to pass on slightly different things; for example, Mormons, Muslims, and some of the conservative Protestants were trying to pass on slightly higher levels of religious belief. But the fundamental assumptions were, for the most part, very similar.
FF: It sounds like another point of consistency is this idea of the happy medium—in some ways, the parents were using themselves as a benchmark for how much belief to pass on. Can you tell us more about the findings there?
AA: That was also a surprise. I’d assumed the parents would have thought, “The more the better!” But parents wanted to pass on moderate levels of religious belief. I think a lot of parents were worried about extremism. Certainly, our Muslim parents thought about that, but so did other parents. There was a certain amount they wanted to pass on, but they didn’t want anyone to become fanatically or overly religious. For the most part, they didn’t really want their children to go into a church leadership position—no one said, “I can’t wait for my daughter to become a nun!”
Overall, the happy medium was whatever the parent was, in part because they wanted a relationship with their kids. If the kids went too low or too high, maybe it wouldn’t be a good fit for them all to hang out together later in life. That was where it stopped, these moderate levels. I also was surprised at how many interviews we had where parents said something like, “My kid has soccer practice on Sunday morning, so we’re going to that instead of church services.” There wasn’t as much focus on religion beyond anything else. It was, “Religion is one of the many things we’re giving our kids, and there’s time for both, and we’ll find a way to make room.”
FF: What most strongly predicted a child’s religious commitment later in life?
AA: I’ll talk about two items here: two-way conversations and parenting types. These came up both in quantitative data analyses from large national surveys and the interviews.
First, two-way conversations. Many parents recalled how, when they were growing up, they would ask something about religion and their parents shut them down. Maybe they’d say, “Mom, how do you know that there’s a God?” And Mom would say, “Don’t be ridiculous, you know there’s a God.” Their parents didn’t let that conversation develop or go in new directions, such as thinking more theoretically about what it means to have a God.
The parents that were most successful at passing on religious belief talked about having these two-way conversations, where their children felt free to ask questions. I can think about a same-sex couple here in New York—they were telling me about somebody who recently died in their family, and their child wanted to know, “What happens to dead bodies? Where do they go?” And these moms really engaged the child, asking him, “What do you think is going on? What do you think happens here?” Those kinds of conversations were very engaging for the child, giving them the freedom to explore, think, and let those ideas really seep into their sense of being. That was probably going to stick with them for the long run.
Many parents also talked about how they were preached to as kids. Their parent told them “This is how things are” or “This is how it’s going to go.” Looking back, the parents really did not like this, so they were much more interested in asking questions of their kids, but not contriving them, making them part of everyday life, so there would be more fluidity. The kids could tell if the questions were a test of whatever they remembered from the sermon. But two-way conversations where kids were asked to provide their ideas, and they weren’t being preached at or getting shut down—that was really important for passing on religious belief.
The second critical piece is parenting style. There’s authoritative parenting, and there’s two elements to it. The first is that you consistently hold your child to clear, reasonable expectations and standards. It’s clear what the child can and cannot do. Then secondly, parents with these standards also display a lot of warmth, support, and care toward their kids. It seemed to be this combination of, “We have expectations, but we also love you deeply. You know you shouldn’t violate those boundaries, but if you do, we still love you and we’re going to find a way around it.” That parenting style seemed to be more successful than authoritarian parenting, where they don’t have the warmth, or the permissive style, where the child can do whatever they want, or the disengaged. Part of that is the fact that children of parents with the authoritative parenting style just like their parents more.
For the most part, young people have slightly lower levels of religious belief than their parents, so their parents set the standard by which they’re going to go after it.
FF: I’d love to ask about this quote from the book: “Parents set a glass ceiling of religious commitment above which their children rarely rise.” What do the data show about that phenomenon?
AA: For the most part, young people have slightly lower levels of religious belief than their parents, so their parents set the standard by which they’re going to go after it. I was always a big believer in the idea that America was unique in that religious belief was remaining constant. I see now, in the last 10 years, religious belief really has dipped down, and that would be consistent with what we’re finding here, that parents set the standard for how high belief is going to go.
FF: Do you have a sense of what dynamics might contribute to that? Are parents successful at passing on their level of happy medium and we get a little attrition as the kid gets more independent, such as one less church service a month? What’s the driver of that?
AA: If I were to speculate, I think you have it down—parents set up what the framework is, and over time, young people—they might leave it and then come back. That’s usually the pattern, right? There are some dangers for religion when there’s such an emphasis on young people completing catechism or Bible study, and then what do they do for those remaining 4 to 6 years of high school before they go off to college? There’s this dead zone where everyone says, “You’ve got everything you need, you’re good now, come back when you have kids.” So there is a bit of the no-man’s space, but I would agree that parents set the boundaries, and then the children meet that level or don’t go higher, and some will naturally leave that. I think you’d need more to go higher—you need an experience, or something beyond what your parents have given you. Maybe you married a very religious partner, or you had an existential crisis and religion pulls you out of that, or you go through a tough time and switch religions. There has to be something more profound than the day-to-day pushes and pulls of everyday life.
FF: I’m glad you mentioned partners, because I want to explore that piece further. You had a lot of interesting findings around compromises a parent might make when their partner has varying levels of religious preference or doesn’t want to participate in all the activities. Did parents ever view their partnership as an asset in passing on religious belief?
AA: We did see cases where being in the partnership really helped the parent both transmit religious beliefs and strengthened their own religious beliefs. We had couples—and again, they’re always bouncing it against what they were raised in—where one had a wonderful religious upbringing and loved it, but the other person said, “Mine sort of sucked,” even though it was the same religion. But they’d chosen to raise their child in that religion. In those cases, the one parent might show the other who didn’t like religion as much how to make it joyful and interesting, how to engage it, and how to make it fun for the kids. That same-sex couple I mentioned earlier, they were Jewish, and one talked about how she hated being raised Jewish. Nothing was fun, she’d get punished for anything she did wrong. But her partner had this whole different view, and so it was their quest to figure out together how to make this fun—that certainly strengthened their belief.
Now, you can imagine the flipside—we also talked to many divorced parents, and parents who didn’t share the same religious belief. But by far, the divorced parents really suffered. I think, if they could have, they would have loved to have religion as one of the negotiating items for child custody. They wish their partner had to commit to their religion. If their former partner had the kids on Sunday, they couldn’t attend the service, which was hard—and probably wasn’t going to be nearly as successful as the two parents who are trying to raise the kids in the same religion. And then there were parents in between—one is Catholic, one is Protestant—one has higher levels of religion, one has lower—and that was just a negotiation all the time.
No one’s dropping the kids off to let the congregation do the religious upbringing!
FF: Did you see any interplay between socioeconomic status and how parents approached passing religion on to their kids?
AA: We didn’t see much of that—sometimes parents were from a certain type of background, including the immigrant background, where the grandparents were more heavily involved in raising the kids. We saw a lot of that with some of the immigrant parents, since the parents spent so much time working.
We did see interplay with race. The African-American community was much more likely to go back to their original church on Sundays. They commuted more and drove farther. Part of that was for cultural identity reasons, connectedness, and being among others who had some of the same experiences. We also saw that people who weren’t Christian had to go further to find their house of worship, or to engage the cultural traditions that they really valued. They had to use more resources and went further to seek those out.
FF: What did you learn about how parents thought about local congregations?
AA: Right away, we’d ask parents what role congregations have—how important are they in passing on belief, relative to yourself? I think I had an idea or stereotype that parents dropped their kids off at a congregation, and they put all the responsibility for transmitting belief on the congregation. I did not find a single parent who said anything like that. These parents were so heavily involved, so into their kids, and they took full ownership—they’d say, “This is up to me!” They didn’t want anyone messing with that. They were really in the game.
I think this has a lot of implications for congregations—they didn’t see congregations as the main vehicle that would transmit religious beliefs, but they’d use congregations as a tool. They appreciated when congregations had people there who looked out for their kid, or when their congregation sponsored events that their kids wanted to attend. It really stunk when the parents were trying to get their kid to like going to church, but there’s no friends or fun activities. Congregations were also helpful for channeling their kids into networks with similarly religious parents, and for formal religious education. After Sunday school, the parents had something to ask the kids about. The congregations provided that space through formal education. We hope the congregation chapter will be helpful to church leaders in thinking about how to support parents, and hopefully get rid of the stereotype. No one’s dropping the kids off to let the congregation do the religious upbringing!
There was a sense that you get all this training in Sunday school, then you go through a confirmation in junior high or middle school, and then you’re done!
FF: It seems that because parents have been prioritizing using religion as this tool to establish a moral foundation, they haven’t inculcated this idea of religion as a long-term part of life that is always developing. The quote that hit me from the book is how, as a result, “Religion is ultimately child’s stuff.” What are some of the implications for religious life in America?
AA: Especially for mainline Protestants and Catholics, and to some extent the conservative Protestants, there was a sense that you get all this training in Sunday school, then you go through a confirmation in junior high or middle school, and then you’re done! You’ve absorbed this knowledge and have a celebration. Your religious education is over—and you’ll come back when you have children. This wasn’t something that would be continuing to grow in you. That raises an important question for religious leaders—what do you do with that space where kids leave religion, and they may not rejoin until they have kids of their own?
FF: What do you hope are some of the practical ways parents and religious leaders will be equipped from these findings?
AA: I’m not sure we thought the book would get as much attention as it has. It’s been neat to see a lot of practicalities to this research. A lot of church leaders are reading this book thinking, “How can we better support parents?” In that regard, the congregations chapter will be really helpful. Maybe knowing how parents are seeing these things will prompt them to run activities for the children, bring in mentors, or ask “Who can we link up with?” to build community. A lot of parents said, “You need someone for my kid to date. If my church can’t provide someone for my kid to date, what’re they going to do? They want to date!” Congregations can think in more creative ways about how to do that.
I think it will also help people who are curious about religion and perhaps grew up religious, but aren’t now, to consider: why did that happen, and where did that go? For me personally, I’m not religious, but I grew up very religious. It was neat thinking about the parenting styles and two-way conversations, what I was given but what I didn’t have—and now that I have a child, what do I want to pass on? So there can be a lot of reflection. I think the kinds of parents that we interviewed—if they can get their hands on the book, it will be helpful for thinking how they can pass on religion. Take parenting style—you can have strict parenting, but it needs to be offset with that love and affection. Hopefully there will be more research in this area so we can better understand these processes.
FF: Where do you see this research going in the future, and are there any directions you’d personally be interested in exploring further?
AA: I do a lot of research in religion and morality, but if I could do more research on this, one future direction would be to talk to congregational leaders. That seems to be a missing piece in how this works. It would also be neat to revisit some of these parents. We had them reflecting on everything while in the process of parenting, but now that it’s over and you have grandchildren, what would you have done differently?
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.