The Parental Role in the Loss of Faith in Youth

A few months ago, I looked at the sociological data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) on the loss of faith in youth:

• post 1 (how many are lost),
• post 2 (where do they go),
• post 3 (why do they leave), 
• post 4 (bibliography),
• post 5 (why do they leave II),
• post 6 (why do they leave III),
• post 6 (what we are doing well),
• post 7 (major reasons for leaving),
• post 8 (the effects of divorce),
• post 9 (the impact of morality),
• post 10 (shifts among various levels of activity),

By request, here I am going to look at one area where parents help bring about the loss of faith in youth. This is not to say that parents are the only factor, just where they are one factor.

The NSYR used qualitative comparative analysis to look at "combinations of causal factors most likely shifting the more highly religious teenagers into the least religious emerging adult religious groups within five years" (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 230). They found three different combinations of factors (or pathways) to loss of faith.

The first combination of factors is:

• lower parental religious service attendance and importance of faith
• lower importance of religious faith for the teen
•  the teen prays and reads scriptures less frequently
• the teen has some doubts about their faith
• the teen has few adults in the congregation to whom he or she can turn for help

The second pathway is:

• lower parental religious service attendance and importance of faith
• lower importance of religious faith for the teen
• the teen has fewer personal religious experiences 
• teen prays and reads scriptures frequently
• the teen has many adults in the congregation to whom he or she can turn for help

The third combination of factors is:

• lower parental religious service attendance and importance of faith
• lower importance of religious faith for the teen
• the teen has fewer personal religious experiences
• the teen prays and reads scriptures less frequently
• the teen has no doubts about their faith

(Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 230.)

The NSYR notes:

Altogether, 60 percent of teens who experienced one of these three combinations of factors ended up as emerging adults in the low religious categories. And 56 percent of all those higher religious teenagers who did end up as emerging adults in a low religion category got there by following one of these three paths.

(Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 230.)

Two factors appear in all pathways: (1) religion and church attendance is not that important to the parents, and (2) it is not all that important to the teen. The two factors are probably related.

My concern is with what parents do or can do for their youth. What does it mean for parents to have lower religious service attendance and importance of faith? In a Latter-day Saint context it might be manifest by the following (not an exhaustive list by any means):

• Using Stake or General Conference as an excuse for a vacation.


• Giving athletic events a higher priority than attendance at a young men's or young women's activity.


• Not holding family home evening if it is not convenient.


• Treating Youth Conference as an optional activity.

This is not to say that there might not be legitimate reasons to miss Stake Conference or family home evening, or a young women's meeting. But when it becomes a regular occurrence, parents might ask themselves what sort of message they are sending to their children. Elder Jeffery R. Holland gave another example in a General Conference talk in 2003:

Parents simply cannot flirt with skepticism or cynicism, then be surprised when their children expand that flirtation into full-blown romance. If in matters of faith and belief children are at risk of being swept downstream by this intellectual current or that cultural rapid, we as their parents must be more certain than ever to hold to anchored, unmistakable moorings clearly recognizable to those of our own household. It won’t help anyone if we go over the edge with them, explaining through the roar of the falls all the way down that we really did know the Church was true and that the keys of the priesthood really were lodged there but we just didn’t want to stifle anyone’s freedom to think otherwise. No, we can hardly expect the children to get to shore safely if the parents don’t seem to know where to anchor their own boat. Isaiah once used a variation on such imagery when he said of unbelievers, “[Their] tacklings are loosed; they could not … strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail.”

I think some parents may not understand that even when they feel secure in their own minds regarding matters of personal testimony, they can nevertheless make that faith too difficult for their children to detect. We can be reasonably active, meeting-going Latter-day Saints, but if we do not live lives of gospel integrity and convey to our children powerful heartfelt convictions regarding the truthfulness of the Restoration and the divine guidance of the Church from the First Vision to this very hour, then those children may, to our regret but not surprise, turn out not to be visibly active, meeting-going Latter-day Saints or sometimes anything close to it.

Not long ago Sister Holland and I met a fine young man who came in contact with us after he had been roaming around through the occult and sorting through a variety of Eastern religions, all in an attempt to find religious faith. His father, he admitted, believed in nothing whatsoever. But his grandfather, he said, was actually a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “But he didn’t do much with it,” the young man said. “He was always pretty cynical about the Church.” From a grandfather who is cynical to a son who is agnostic to a grandson who is now looking desperately for what God had already once given his family! What a classic example of the warning Elder Richard L. Evans once gave.

Said he: “Sometimes some parents mistakenly feel that they can relax a little as to conduct and conformity or take perhaps a so called liberal view of basic and fundamental things—thinking that a little laxness or indulgence won’t matter—or they may fail to teach or to attend Church, or may voice critical views. Some parents … seem to feel that they can ease up a little on the fundamentals without affecting their family or their family’s future. But,” he observed, “if a parent goes a little off course, the children are likely to exceed the parent’s example.”

To lead a child (or anyone else!), even inadvertently, away from faithfulness, away from loyalty and bedrock belief simply because we want to be clever or independent is license no parent nor any other person has ever been given. In matters of religion a skeptical mind is not a higher manifestation of virtue than is a believing heart, and analytical deconstruction in the field of, say, literary fiction can be just plain old-fashioned destruction when transferred to families yearning for faith at home. And such a deviation from the true course can be deceptively slow and subtle in its impact

Now, this covers a majority of the cases, but forty percent do not follow the three pathways. What factors were present in those cases, the NSYR did not specify; we cannot know whether or not parental attendance at Church was a factor; but in at least three out of five cases it was. Parents would be foolish not to take it into consideration.

This brings to mind the famous quote of William Law:

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.