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Passing on faith in the home can be an anxious business – as recent ComRes polling commissioned by Theos indicates. Parents’ concerns around passing on beliefs to their children include the worry that their child will be alienated at school, the fear of not having the right answer to their questions and, above all, the concern that technology and social media will have a greater impact on the beliefs of their children than they will.

As well as the anxious parents, there are the indifferent ones. In the same polling, only 31% of British parents said they wanted their children “to hold the same beliefs about whether or not there is a God or Higher Power as me when they are older”. For the parents who were agnostic or indifferent about God, the percentage was considerably lower. More surprising was the 28% of church-attending Christian parents who did not mind whether their children shared their beliefs.

On accounting for this indifference, it could be the case that parents have bought into the popular cultural narrative that a rationalistic, ‘neutral’ upbringing is the ideal, in spite of it being an impossible goal.  Alternatively, their perceived indifference could be on account of the powerlessness they feel in the face of other cultural influences and messages. Or perhaps they have simply neglected the family and community narrative of their own faith tradition.

In spite of this perceived anxiety and indifference, the academic literature reviewed in the new Passing on Faith report shows that parents play a leading and, indeed, an inevitable role in faith transmission; social scientists repeatedly tell us that this is the case. Research evidence gathered over the past decades would also suggest that adolescents and young adults, who continue in the faith tradition of their parents, are more likely to have grown up in homes where relational warmth and stability was experienced, and where faith was practiced and nurtured with dedication and integrity.

The cumulative findings of this report present a challenge for passing on faith to the next generation; the challenge is not centred on parents’ lack or loss of influence – social theory and research evidence would strongly indicate that this is not the case. Instead, the challenge emerges in their apparent reluctance to exercise it, and their perceived indifference towards the spiritual outcomes of their children. While spiritual nurture is arguably the responsibility of every parent, this indifference is particularly pronounced when evidenced in faith communities. It falls to faith communities themselves to provide the necessary resources to respond to this challenge.

Parents should at least draw confidence from the fact that – in spite of cultural changes and pressures – the emerging evidence strongly affirms their continued role and influence in faith transmission. This influence is magnified when it is exercised with care and diligence.

Olwyn Mark is Visiting lecturer in Christian Ethics at London School of Theology and the author of Passing on Faith

Passing on Faith is a partnership between Theos and Canterbury Christ Church University https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/  

The report can be downloaded here and the ComRes polling data tables here

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