Family warmth helps pass on religion

One concern many families of faith share is how to pass on their faith to their children. At least one sociologist has made this a major project in his scholarly career. It turns out that one of the most important factors in children adopting religion is the warmth of the father—or if not the father, then the grandfather.

Vern Bengtson started the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a multidisciplinary investigation of families, aging and social change and has followed families since 1970. He is coauthor of Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations and How Families Still Matter: A Longitudinal Study of Youth in Two Generations.

Associate editor Amy Frykholm interviews Bengtson in the Dec. 25, 2013, issue of Christian Century.

Bengtson states up front that “the highest generational transmission [of religion from generation to generation] occurs in families with a high degree of warmth—particularly if the father is perceived as warm and close.”

In other words, being role models, taking the kids to church, being involved in church and having devotional activities at home are all good, but what really counts is what Bengtson calls “intergenerational solidarity or family cohesion.”

Frykholm asks what we want to know: Why is fatherly warmth so important? Bengtson says he doesn’t know. Generally mothers have more contact with the children, and fathers are more absent. He does, however, offer a hunch, that there is something about religion, at least in American society, that is male-influenced. Thus, he says, “if a father picks up on religion, the kids are going to pick up on it, too. And if the father is indifferent to religion, the kids may be indifferent to religion. This is especially true in father-son relationships.”

Turns out it’s not just fathers that are important in transmitting religion but grandfathers as well. Bengtson tells the story of a family in which the parents split up, and the mother was dysfunctional. “The daughter,” Bengtson says, “who is now in her 40s, talked about how on Sundays Grandpa would take them to church, and they would all sit together. He always had a red carnation in his lapel, and it was the same Sunday after Sunday. She said, ‘I felt so secure.’ ”

So what does religion transmission even mean? How do you know if it’s taken place? Frykholm asks.

Bengtson points out that they didn’t just ask about church attendance and membership. The study included questions about religious intensity, he says, such as, “How religious would you say you are?” They also looked at similarity between the answers of the children and those of the parents.

Which groups do it best? Frykholm asks.

“Mormons, Jews and evangelical Christians have the highest rate of transmission,” Bengtson says. He notes that Catholics, Mainline Protestants and Eastern Orthodox assume the family but put more emphasis on ritual.

He also makes clear that he’s measuring religious intensity, not denominational affiliation. So it’s not about Mennonite parents producing Mennonite children but parents with a religious intensity passing that on to their children.

One interesting discovery Bengtson made, he says, “is that the degree of religious influence across generations has not changed much since the ’60s and ’70s, despite the forces in culture that indicate they should have changed: increasing secularization with decreasing church attendance.” In other words, “Parents and grandparents influence their children in much the same way as they did in the 1970s.”

This may feel sobering to those of us who are fathers, seeing how it seems to fall on our shoulders. But it also gives us some insight into what we should be emphasizing in our families: warmth and cohesion.

Forgiveness in strange places

Good fiction often takes us into worlds completely foreign to us and makes them familiar. It even creates characters we may on first sight think we have nothing in common with and makes them feel human, sympathetic.

 

Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel is one such work. The subject of We Sinners is a family, two parents and nine children. The Rovaniemis belong to a conservative church—a Lutheran revival movement called Laestadianism—in modern-day Michigan. The church forbids dancing, drinking, TV and other common practices in our culture. But its central belief, repeated several times in the novel, is that believers are forgiven in Jesus’ blood when they repent.

Pylväinen tells the story from the point of view of the various members of the family. We witness the struggle of each person with other family members and with their faith. Some hold onto the faith; others reject it; some fall somewhere in between.

Pylväinen uses telling details to show these struggles. For example, Warren, the father, reflects on the family’s constant struggle with poverty: “It was daily things, it was money, it was when he stopped at a gas station and the kids all chanted, ‘Get a treat, get a treat,’ and when he came out with chips they grabbed for them like starving people.”

Tiina, the second oldest child, is the first in the family to leave the faith, yet “she felt no thrills of liberation.” Her becoming an unbeliever is like a conversion, yet she can’t quite fill the emptiness. After she cheats on her boyfriend, she feels “she was no good in both the church’s world and in the world she had chosen.” For her, “it wasn’t about the sinning at all, it was what you did about the sinning, and she had no means of forgiveness about her.”

In spite of how oppressive the church feels to many of the children, it’s difficult to leave it behind. When Julia, the fourth youngest, who has left, returns for a visit, she sleeps in a bed with her younger sister and experiences “the old childhood security of many people asleep in one place, the uncomplicated comfort of someone in her bed who was not her lover.”

Not everyone leaves. Brita, the oldest, marries a man in the church and has numerous children (four and counting). Nels, the oldest boy, goes to college and takes up drinking and going to parties in pursuit of Bernie, a girl outside the faith. But no matter how often he breaks the rules, forgiveness is available at church, and eventually he marries a girl in the church and settles down.

Pylväinen uses irony in this interplay of belief and unbelief. Nels’ roommate, Clayton, is his conscience as Nels breaks the rules. But later, Clayton takes up drinking and ends up with Bernie.

Uppu, the youngest, befriends a new student, Jonas Chan, a shy Asian-American, at her high school. Jonas goes to her church out of courtesy and discovers a faith different from the one his parents had left. “Unlike his family’s old church, no one said they loved Jesus, no one was overemotional, and God was less a personal friend than someone spoken of quietly, as if in fear of disturbing Him.” As Jonas becomes more and more interested in the church and then becomes a believer, Uppu can’t stand it and leaves.

The final chapter goes back to 1847, to Finland, where we encounter Laestadius, the founder of the church. What became in many ways a group that imprisons people in its conservative, sometimes harsh ways began as a revival that liberated people from some harsh cultural practices that were particularly oppressive to women.

In We Sinners, Pylväinen deftly explores this dance between between oppression and liberation, between belief and unbelief, and shows the gray areas. These are not polarities but gradations of human experience. We all move in and out of various communities and belief systems, searching for love and acceptance. Often we search for forgiveness. This novel shows that sometimes it’s found in strange places.