It is no secret that parental behavior–and especially the choices and actions of parents in the privacy of the home–have a major impact on the lives of their children. A recent study published by the Religion, Brain and Behavior Journal took this knowledge a step further and explored the connection between parental behavior in religious parents and how that behavior shapes their children’s future belief system.
Specifically, the study sought to understand why the children of religious parents would eventually become atheist.
The study author, Joseph Langston, is a researcher at the Atheist Research Collaborative. He shared that he was interested in studying this topic because he wanted to know why and how people choose to become atheists. In his words:
“At the beginning of this project, the thought process was that perhaps a growing number of people are becoming non-believers because belief was not modeled to them in any appreciable or robust way during their upbringing,”
His hypothesis, though reasonable, turned out to be incorrect. What he found in his research was surprising and impactful.
For the study, researchers asked 5,153 atheists two questions. First, “How old were you when you gave up on your religion?” Second, “How committed were your parents in their own faith?”
According to the answers accumulated from those two questions, the research indicates that people tend to choose atheism at younger ages if their religious parents talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.
According to the study, when parents lived sincere, dedicated lives in front of their children, those children delayed the decision to become atheists until a later age. But when parents were deemed insincere or unfaithful to live out what they claimed to believe, those children had a harder time believing what their parents taught and therefore identified as atheist much earlier.
Basically, the more hypocritical the parents were at home, the more likely the children were to become atheists at an earlier age.
Three Takeaways
Langston expressed three basic takeaways for the average person reading the study.
First, “the extent to which parents faithfully model their own religious beliefs to their children works in tandem with other processes to produce unique trajectories of the timing at which one becomes an atheist: being allowed greater religious choice seems to drive the age of atheism down, but so do elevated levels of religious conflict.”
Second, “although important, [parents’ religious behaviors] alone are not enough to provide us with the most complete explanation of how or why people do or don’t believe in a god or gods.”
Third, “[parents’ religious behaviors] had a very robust impact on age of atheism.”
The Good News for Christian Parents
Keeping in mind that only atheists were interviewed for this study, one ray of hope was found in the research. The words, “They found that when parents engaged in more credibility-enhancing displays, such as acting fairly to others because their religion taught them so, their children tended to become atheists later in life.”
Also, “The findings line up with previous research, which found that religious individuals who were exposed to high levels of [consistent religious behavior] by their parents were more likely to report believing in the existence of God with high certainty.
While it may come as a surprise that parental hypocrisy is a leading cause in children turning to atheism at younger ages, it should not come as much of a shock that parents who model consistent, faithful, godly behavior over time tend to raise children who see the benefits of a close walk with God and choose to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
History bears a conveyor belt of illustrations where godly parents raised children who did not choose to walk with God. Nothing is certain when it comes to parenting, and it is only by God’s grace that children trust Him. But very few illustrations exist where parents lived hypocritical lives–claiming to love God and yet living in ways contradictory to that–and yet raised children who wanted to walk with their parents’ God.
More good news: Perfection (or the lack thereof) isn’t what drives children to or away from God. Sincerity and consistency are key. So making mistakes wouldn’t seem to be as much of a repellant as refusing to own them.
Bottom line: Hypocrisy is one of the fastest tracks to religious and spiritual ruin.
I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth (3 John 4).
~ Christian Patriot Daily
