Research consistently shows that religion is good for you and your children. The importance of passing on the faith to your children may not be a controversial point to readers of a Catholic website, but parents may be encouraged to know that the evidence broadly supports Catholic parenting. While the data is compelling, our obligation to pass on the faith is based on research.
As discussed below, the Bible explicitly admonishes us to raise our children in the faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is emphatic about our duties: “Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children.” (paragraph 2225; emphasis original). The positive outcomes associated with successful evangelizing our own children are well documented.
Professor Christian Smith undertook the National Study of Youth and Religion, surveying a large group of young people multiple times over several years, and spawning a number of books and academic articles. When Smith examined Catholics aged 18 to 23, in his 2014 book Young Catholic America, he details how practicing Catholics were more likely to be physically healthy and more likely to be happy.
Professor Kendra Creasy Dean’s 2010 book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church also uses some of that study data to conclude:
While religious youth do not avoid problem behaviors and relationships, those who participate in religious communities are more likely to do well in school, have positive relationships with their families, have a positive outlook on life, wear their seatbelts–the list goes on, enumerating an array of outcomes that parents pray for.
Mormon researchers have reached similar conclusions. Other researchers note that:
A substantial body of literature exists in the social and behavioral sciences on associations between religion, spirituality, and well-being in adulthood. Depending upon the types of measures of religiosity and spirituality utilized and the outcomes assessed, results with adults support low but significant positive associations between religiosity and components of well-being, including substance abuse, mental health, physical health, and general life satisfaction.
Stephen Cranney, a lecturer at The Catholic University of America and a data scientist puts it simply: “Religion is almost always associated with being happier.” Cranney notes that we know actually know a lot about “whether religious or non religious people are happier” from the perspective of “statistics and empirical evidence.”
When analyzing hundreds of “articles on the relationship between health and measures” of religion and health or happiness, the overwhelming majority of studies show that religious people are happier. In reviewing data from 25 countries, Professor Ryan Burge found a link between being religious and self-reported well being, particularly among religious folks in the United States.
Popular writers, or famous ones like now Vice-President J.D. Vance also refer to this kind of research. While media stereotypes may portray people of faith as miserable, the evidence shows the opposite.
Of course, the evidence that passing on the faith leads to good outcomes is not the reason I teach the faith to my children. I raise them as Catholics because I believe that is the truth. I find nothing in the Bible or in our tradition that recommends that kids should make up their own mind about faith.
In Deuteronomy, for example, just after the famous Shema (Hear, O Israel) verse, the Israelites are instructed that “these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” (Deut 6:4-7.)
Psalm 78 rejects hiding the faith from one’s children and instead encourages parents to “tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might, and the wonders which he has wrought.” God “commanded our fathers to teach to their children; that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments. . . .” (Psa 78:4-7).
This thinking is not limited to the Old Testament. Saint Paul exhorts fathers to bring their children “up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Eph 6:4.)
Most Americans do indeed care about their children’s spiritual development, but there is still a thread in modern society that is hostile to “imposing” your faith. Now and then you encounter people, sometimes even smart people, making the claim that parents should not push their religion on their kids.
This modern idea of letting your kids pick their religion is not a part of our faith, where the Bible and the Catechism make it our responsibility to raise our children up in the faith. It is also an unhealthy approach. You would not feel like you are manipulating your children if you serve them bagels instead of frosted brownies for breakfast; you should not feel bad in giving them the faith.
The world might disagree, but the world is wrong.
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Letting children choose (or not) their own religion appears to let parents off the hook. In fact, the parents have thereby made the choice for the child that religion is not important.