The Myth That Fathers Shape Kids’ Faith More Than Moms

Fathers shape kids’ faith more than mothers – or so a 1994 Swiss study is said to conclude. The Rev. Sam Ferguson, rector of my church, the Falls Church Anglican, quoted this study in a sermon this past Sunday to support his premise that fathers have a greater “weight of responsibility” for developing their children’s faith:

“All the studies show that parental religion is the single strongest predictor of the adult religion of children….and this is especially true for fathers. There was a study done on Swiss families some years ago that found that the rates of children growing up and keeping their parents’ faith goes up exponentially if the father is engaged spiritually, not just the mother. This isn’t saying that fathers are more important; rather, it’s saying that for some reason, God has put a seeming unfair weight of responsibility on you; but so it is. This isn’t to downplay the importance of mothers…my mom would come down and sit on my bed and take me through the Lord’s prayer every night…but it is to say that parents, fathers especially, need to hear the Sabbath command as a responsibility for ensuring that your home is being discipled….that there’s a day of the week when you try to disentangle from the idols of this world.”

I wasn’t overly surprised to hear this vignette. For several weeks, Sam has promoted these really cool “liturgy boxes” that the church is putting together for family discipleship during Lent. It’s a great idea. However, he has especially marketed the boxes to dads as a tool to lead fellowship in the home, despite the fact that plenty of people in our church believe parents should take an equal role here. There are also single moms in our church, including me. Where does this “father focus” leave us?

Also, what’s really going on with the data in this Swiss study?

Fathers shape kids’ faith more than mothers – or maybe not

I do anti-money laundering investigations for a global payments company, so I work with a lot of data. I also have an MA in Middle Eastern Studies, a large component of which was theory-based, i.e. focused on how Middle Eastern Studies has been studied (or mis-studied). So professionally and academically, I know that data NEVER speaks for itself. Data is subject to manipulation, misrepresentation, and misinterpretation, which can have devastating consequences depending on how that data is used.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to acquire data or leverage it – in sermons, in business memos, in research and academia. But it does mean we need to be incredibly careful to scrutinize data, especially when it seems to set up one group of people over another in some way.

Priests need to exercise particular caution here.

So on Sunday, when I heard an unequivocal endorsement of the Swiss study (and unnamed others?) and its claims regarding fathers, I set about to find an analysis of this data.

In an article for Missio Alliance, an evangelical Christian organization, Miranda Zapor Cruz indicates that the Swiss study has some significant limitations. (For context, Cruz is well-equipped to offer a considered opinion here. She is professor of historical theology and academic chair in the School of Theology and Ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University. She holds a PhD in religion, politics, and society from Baylor University’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, and an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary.)

In reviewing the Swiss study, Cruz states the following:

“…the study did not examine ‘coming to Christ,’ or being ‘first to attend church.’ It examined regular church attendance. Moreover, it did not study whether families started attending after the father did, but rather whether adult children maintain the religious practices of their fathers or mothers. While the study did find a stronger correlation between fathers’ church attendance than mothers’…the data presents a more complex picture. One study from the mid-1990s found that 82% of adolescents identified their mother’s influence as a positive factor in their spiritual development, while only 69% identified the father as a positive factor.⁷ A 2016 Pew Research Center study of mixed-religion households found that, among children raised in interfaith families “almost half of those adults now identify with their mother’s religion, while 28% identify with their father’s and the rest with neither.”⁸

The takeaway here is that both parents play a pivotal role in their children’s spiritual upbringing, and there is simply no need (and no data foundation) to pit men and women against each other in some kind of hierarchy where fathers shape kids’ faith more. Cruz continues:

The statistics aren’t the only thing that need to be corrected. A much more insidious issue that we need to interrupt and reframe is pitting fathers’ influence against mothers’ influence….The 93% myth [or the idea that where the father goes spiritually, the child will follow] places fathers and mothers in a competitive hierarchy instead of a united partnership…[it] is used to justify pouring resources into men’s ministries, while limiting women to support roles. This perpetuates gendered stereotypes and prevents people from pursuing God’s callings in their lives. While the available data from reputable sources is certainly interesting and can have implications for ministry, when we highlight one parent’s influence over the other’s, it does not serve the Kingdom of God well. Would the Body of Christ not be better served by having all adults well-equipped to disciple their children faithfully and to invest in the lives of children in their churches in ways that demonstrate the Spirit’s love instead of a spirit of competitive disciple-making?

We can do better than parroting myths when they serve our ministry agendas.

Cruz concludes with a call to “disrupt these narratives together.”

Deconstructing the pre-eminent male

Even if we assumed that fathers somehow have a greater impact on a child’s adult faith, it seems like the outreach focus should be the women in the congregation who are single moms, not the men. If you are a man attending church and hearing that sermon, presumably you, at minimum, are already setting an example of faithful worship to your children. Whereas if you are a single mom, you may have to work twice as hard – no, actually MORE than twice as hard, because your contribution to your children’s spirituality is inherently less than a dad’s.

To be clear, I’m not speaking about my own situation. I’m divorced, not widowed, and my ex-husband is a wonderful spiritual role model for our children. He worships faithfully and serves on his church council; our oldest daughter even reads as a lector at his church from time to time. But other single moms are not as fortunate as I.

Citing the Swiss study, Sam said that fathers’ greater “weight of responsibility” to lead their children spiritually doesn’t mean that mothers’ contributions aren’t important. But logically, if fathers shape kids’ faith more than mothers, it must mean that mothers’ contributions in this arena, generally speaking, aren’t as important in some notable way. It puts dudes at the top of the food chain. In fact, proclaiming that fathers vs. mothers have an “unfair weight of responsibility” to establish one day a week in their home (Sunday) to disentangle from worldly idols – ensuring a kind of male pre-eminence – arguably sets up an idol.

Consider too that responsibility and power are two sides of the same coin. When I hear about “men’s special leadership burden” or fathers’ greater responsibility to shepherd their family spiritually (in a way that magically does not demote the status of a mother?), I feel an ominous sense of déjà vu. I feel a tickling in the back of my mind, the specter of nearly-forgotten things from school days long gone by: colonialism, imperialism, “white man’s burden,” “separate but equal”….

Does anyone else remember?

These concepts were taught to me mostly as relics of the past, lessons painfully learned from which our society emerged enlightened, finito! But these horrors are not just in our past; they haunt our present.

A Lenten reflection

I lament that the church continues to be ensnared by the same beast taking different forms. I long for a future in which every manifestation of patriarchy is replaced with the “complementarity without hierarchy” Adam evoked when he declared of woman so lovingly, so tenderly:

“Here is someone like me! She is part of my body, my own flesh and bones.” (Gen. 2:23).

In the meantime, we (the church) can keep repeating our often-sordid history of supporting various human supremacies – by our words and actions, or by silent acquiescence.

Or we can follow in the footsteps of Christ by faithfully and respectfully disrupting these narratives.

As we move into Lent, it’s the perfect time to reflect on these issues and examine ourselves.

To be sure, I’m super excited to lead my girls through the reading material in our Lenten liturgy boxes. But I may also ask my oldest daughter to read for us a selection from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”