From The Department of Telling Us What We Already Knew

Faith begins at the dinner table, not the pew. The mashed potatoes of faith.

According to a new Harvard study of more than 16,000 churchgoing adults, a person’s connection to faith starts at home, not the church.

Your intuition is now evidence-based. A best practice.

In 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that 28% of U.S. adults were religiously unaffiliated. Checkers of the “none” box. That box is getting bigger because of generational succession - meaning that each younger generation is, on average, less religious than the last. Older generations are less effective at sharing their faith with younger generations.

Churchgoers who had regular conversations about faith in childhood reported higher forgiveness towards those who hurt them and a greater sense of belonging to their church community.

Churchgoers who recalled having at least weekly talks with their parents about faith had more than 2.5 times higher odds of having regular conversations about faith with their own children. When those conversations were daily, those odds rose to 7.5 times higher.

However, despite acknowledging the impact of conversations about faith on their lives, less than half of churchgoers responding to the survey reported having at least weekly talks with their own children.

The study found that fathers play an important role in their children’s faith. People were more likely to attend church regularly in adulthood if they reported attending church with their own dad weekly at age 12.

It’s new but old information. Moses understood this over 3,000 years ago when he gave these instructions to the Jewish nation:

“You shall teach these commandments diligently to your children. Talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk, when you lie down, and when you rise.”

The wisdom of this admonishment is illustrated in the book Inside, Outside,

by Herman Wouk. Wouk chronicles a large Russian Jewish immigrant family’s story across generations, exploring the tension between the “inside” life of tradition and faith and the “outside” life of the secular world. It is a sad tale of how quickly the dreams, sacrifices, and courage of those original immigrants were cast aside and forgotten, traded for a superficial culture and shifting values.

When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices.

Progress is real only when it evolves naturally and thoughtfully from the history of human experience and accumulated wisdom. When it is imposed in contempt for that experience and wisdom, it is always destructive.  When society erases its past, it cannot have a future.

This information seems especially pertinent as we enter the holiday season. For too long, many have expected the church and the school to provide for their children’s education. The results speak for themselves.

It’s time we accepted the responsibility of sharing the true message of Christmas with our children and grandchildren. It’s an opportunity to offer the gift of what is most precious to us.

Tim Powell MD