Religious Transmission: A Solution to the Church's Biggest Problem

For over fifty years, the General Social Survey has asked a large, representative sample of Americans a battery of questions, including questions about religion. These data reveal a major problem—indeed, arguably the single biggest problem—for the Catholic Church in the United States. In 1973, 84% of all those raised Catholic still identified as Catholic when surveyed as adults. In 2002, that figure was 74%. By 2022, it had dropped to 62%. More and more of those raised Catholic are leaving.

Those figures concern whether a person raised Catholic continues to check the “Catholic” box on a survey. That is a pretty low bar as a measure of Catholic commitment. Perhaps a more salient question is how many of those raised Catholic still participate in Mass every Sunday. In 1973, about 34% of all those raised Catholic were attending Mass weekly (or more often) when they were surveyed as adults. By 2002, the number had fallen to 20%. By 2022, it had plummeted to 11%. We are losing nine out of ten cradle Catholics.

While many religious groups in the U.S. have experienced decline over this period, Catholics are doing particularly poorly. A 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) allows us to compare respondents’ childhood religious affiliation and their adult religious affiliation to see how conversions into, and disaffiliations out of, a religious group have affected membership overall. To illustrate, if 3% of those surveyed reported having been Jewish as children, but 4% reported being Jewish now (as adults), then Judaism would have experienced a one percentage point net gain, and more people would have converted to Judaism than left. As shown in the table below, White Catholics suffered a six percentage point net loss in this large, representative sample. That is, about 6% of the American adult population are White ex-Catholics. For Hispanic Catholics the numbers are only slightly better: a 3.4% net loss. For every one Catholic convert, about nine or ten Catholics leave. That translates to roughly 15 million Catholics gone from the Church. In the same survey, White evangelical Protestants and Hispanic Protestants experienced small net gains. But the biggest winner is the category of the religiously unaffiliated—almost a 16% net gain. And that is where most ex-Catholics have gone: the majority of those leaving the Church become religious “nones.”[1]

So where does this leave us? Modern life in the United States presents many obstacles to faith, and Catholic parents are, for the most part, failing—failing to effectively hand on a life of faith to their children. If these trends continue, then even with ongoing significant levels of Catholic immigration (which mitigate, or rather mask, our domestic decline), the size of the American Church will shrink dramatically in the decades to come. Simply put, no realistic amount of evangelizing new people, or bringing back those “prodigals” who have left—mission-critical as both those apostolates are—can make up for these kinds of losses.

How can we address this problem? Somewhat surprisingly, the social science here bears some good news. Much is known about what parents can do to more successfully hand on the Faith to their children, and we can therefore make some well-informed judgments about what parishes should be doing differently.

The Causes of Catholic Disaffiliation

Why have almost all religious groups in the U.S. declined since the 1950s? To find an answer, we need to understand how children form religious beliefs and why they make religious commitments. Children form religious beliefs primarily based on testimony and example, and also by participating in religious activities themselves. As they grow into adolescents and young adults, their religious commitments are strongly influenced by their close personal relationships, as well as by the wider culture.[2]

Religious beliefs are not unique here. For the most part, children learn about religious realities in the same way they learn about other things they cannot directly observe, like viruses or ultraviolet light. Young children have a natural disposition to believe what their parents and other trusted adults tell them. Yet even while still children, they track the credibility of their informants, largely by attending to the level of consensus present among informants and the level of certainty conveyed by informants. Consensus, certainty, credibility: each is important in the story of religious decline in America.

First, consensus: children are more likely to accept religious claims with a high level of confidence when both of their parents are united in making those claims, yet over the course of the last century interreligious marriages have become more common. Similarly, children are more likely to accept religious beliefs with high confidence when they see that those beliefs are widely shared in their “local” social networks, like their extended families, friends and friends’ parents, teachers, coaches, and neighbors. Yet as American society has become more pluralistic over the last century, people’s local social networks have become less religiously homogenous, hence consensus on religious matters among the average individual’s social network has declined.

More, faith-supportive social networks of the past were tighter. That is, the relational connections within the average Catholic’s parish were richer and deeper in the early 1900s than they are today. Wavering Catholics of, say, 1925 would have experienced a strong pull towards Catholic belief and practice from a close group of Catholic extended family, Catholic friends, and (often) Catholic neighbors and co-workers. Wavering Catholics of 2025, by contrast, experience a general sense that their religious beliefs are contested and their religious practices are optional—disaffiliation would bring comparatively little disruption to their personal relationships and way of life.

Next, children and youth are more likely to accept a religious belief if they observe consensus about it in the wider culture, experienced primarily through mass media and social media. But there have been massive changes on this score in the last seventy-five years. During the Cold War Americans tended to conceive of themselves as a religious nation locked in a struggle with the godless Soviet Union. Rejecting religion was almost un-American. By the early 2000s, the external “enemies” of popular imagination were not people with too little religion, they were people with too much religion—Muslim extremists.[3] Religious affiliation is no longer the default setting for an American citizen. In 2013, 72% of Americans considered religion to be either the most important thing in their lives, or one among many important things in their lives. In 2023, only 53% of Americans said the same.[4]

Moreover, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and other social changes, have led to an increasingly large values gap between traditional Catholic morality and the ethics of mainstream American culture. A Catholic in the 1950s felt little pressure from the wider culture on Catholic views about abortion, sex outside of marriage, divorce, homosexuality, gay marriage, or transgenderism. Times have changed.

And there is more. As the internet became widely available in the 1990s, Catholic youth more frequently came into contact with a wide variety of secular views.[5] This means that the lack of cultural consensus on moral and religious issues has become more salient in the consciousness of Catholic youth than it was before the internet. As we would expect, researchers have found that “Internet use is associated with increases in being religiously unaffiliated and decreases in religious exclusivism.”[6]

More recently still, smartphones have amped up the influence of the wider culture and turned down the influence of families and religious communities. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains:

Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.[7]

Given that the influencers doing all that drowning out are increasingly secular and worldly, adolescents and young adults experience far less of a draw towards the religion of their parents than in generations past.

So increased pluralism, the conclusion of the Cold War, the values gap, the internet, and smartphones have together led to a massive decrease in the level of religious consensus observed by cradle Catholics. The preambles of the faith and Christian morality are no longer the cultural default. While the wider culture used to gently pull American youth towards traditional Christianity, the opposite is true today.

Second, certainty. Children pick up on subtle cues as they listen to adults talk, cues about the certainty with which adults hold the beliefs they are communicating. When parents are forming their kids about basic scientific matters, they do not say things like “Sarah, in this family, we believe that viruses can cause illness.” They just assert the existence of viruses and make their kids wash their hands. But when parents are less confident in their religious beliefs, they tend to hedge their religious assertions with qualifications—“I think,” “We believe,” etc. Kids seem to pick up on this and adjust their confidence accordingly.[8]

Decreased consensus in the wider culture has an implication here too. In a culture with less religious consensus, parents will tend to be less confident in their religious beliefs. This is for both evidential and social reasons. If a person does not have a strong philosophical and theological education, or has not had robust religious experiences, it is natural for that person to note the cultural disagreement about religion and respond by downgrading confidence in religious beliefs. And if many of those whom one loves and relates with do not share one’s religious beliefs, one will feel slightly less comfortable confidently asserting one’s contested views, even to one’s own children, even in the privacy of one’s own home. For both these reasons, even while the average Catholic parent continues to believe, they will probably express weaker confidence now than many decades ago, and kids would notice that.

Third, credibility. It is one thing for parents to tell their children that God exists and that following Jesus is important. It is another thing for parents to live their lives in a way that only makes sense if the parents deeply believe what they are saying. Social psychologists refer to “CREDs,” or credibility enhancing displays, which are behaviors performed by the person making a claim—behaviors which indicate that the person making the claim really does believe it. When kids see their parents wash their hands before meals, they witness a CRED backing up the claim that invisible germs cause disease. More generally, children pick up the beliefs of their parents more reliably when children see their parents engaged in relevant CREDs. But the American Church is a “CRED-depleted” church in many ways. Rosaries, pilgrimages, novenas, Eucharistic processions, abstinence from meat on Fridays—such devotions and religious practices, when engaged in by parents, play a powerful role in communicating credibility to children. But these devotions are less widespread than in the past.[9] And on the flip-side, there is the negative effect of a serious credibility undermining display: the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Evidence suggests priestly sexual abuse in Boston widely reported in 2002 accelerated disaffiliation among American Catholics.[10] More broadly, the cumulative effect of many such crimes is almost certainly a contributing factor. In 2023, 45% of lapsed cradle Catholics said clergy sexual abuse scandals were a reason they no longer identify as Catholic.[11]

So, we have less consensus, less confidence, less credibility. On top of all these factors, there is a compounding effect. The parents are less devout than the grandparents—so those parents have less faith to hand on, so to speak. But then the children of those parents will tend to be less religious still, and so will have less to hand on to the fourth generation. The pattern is self-reinforcing.[12]

Predictors of Successful Religious Transmission

And yet, some Catholic parents do hand on the faith to their children quite successfully. What makes the difference? If someone is raised Catholic, what factors make it more likely that he or she will continue to practice the faith as an adult? A large body of rigorous social scientific research has made a good deal of headway on these questions. There are no silver bullets here, no guaranteed formulas, and faith is a gift from God—ultimately the Holy Spirit is in the driver’s seat, not us. But God wills to work through us as secondary causes, and hence with God’s help we can cooperate in removing some of the obstacles to faith that our youth experience. Here’s what we know helps.

Both parents have the same religious identity. Available data indicates that children of two Catholic parents are more than twice as likely to retain their Catholic identity, as compared to children with a Catholic parent and a non-Catholic parent.[13] We do not mean to imply that Catholic couples including a non-Catholic spouse are in any way less welcome in the Church—indeed, we are very glad they are here. But we raise this point simply because it stands out so clearly in the data.

The parents’ marriage is intact. Family break-ups are hard on intergenerational religious transmission. Cradle Catholics with parents who remain married are around 1.67 times as likely to retain their Catholic identity, as compared to cradle Catholics with divorced parents.[14] Again, this should in no way imply that divorced Catholics are less valued members of our community. But if as a Church we can help couples flourish in their relationships, those efforts will bear fruit on many levels.

The parents live their religion and their religion is important to them. This is the point about CREDs, and it is very strongly borne out in the data.[15]

Parents talk with their children about religion. It is one thing for parents to practice the faith themselves; it is an additional thing for them to have religious conversations with their children, and doing so has an independent positive effect for religious transmission.[16] There are better and worse ways for parents to approach these conversations. Particularly as children grow into adolescence, it is helpful for parents to speak to the questions their children actually have, and to listen as well as talk.[17]

Parents provide both warmth and structure, and children form secure attachments to their parents. Parents who have good relationships with their children pass on their worldview more effectively.[18] It is also important to promote children’s autonomy in an age-appropriate way—eventually, children need to make the faith their own.

Thus far, we have mentioned factors focused on parents. But of course what kids are doing is crucial too. Individuals are more likely to retain the religion of their childhood and youth when:

As younger teenagers, they considered religious faith important in everyday life.[19]

As young children and younger teenagers, they were religiously active. This means reading Scripture and personal prayer as well as Mass attendance and other forms of engagement with a congregation.[20]

They attended Catholic high school.[21]

They had many faith-supportive peer relationships, especially as they moved into adolescence and young adulthood.[22]

Lastly, one more factor stands out in the data: when children grow up with many supportive Catholic adults in their lives, that increases their likelihood of remaining Catholic, even holding all the other factors fixed. Grandparents, friends’ parents, mentors, youth ministers and other non-parental adults can make a big difference.[23]

Implications: What the Church Can Do

All this points to some prescriptions for the Church, and for families within the Church.

Parents need to parent well, practice the faith individually and with their families, and talk with their children about religious topics. Both children and parents need to avoid getting enmeshed in secular culture. Today that especially means handling smartphones and social media well. Children also need to form deep friendships with other practicing Catholics, and for those called to marriage, marrying a fellow Catholic would certainly help promote their future children’s relationship with Jesus in the Church he founded. Of course parents need social support for their faith too—so we need to promote relationships with other Catholics for adults as well as children.

To do all of these things at once, there may be a single key: community. Envision a practicing but not highly active family in a typical Catholic parish. They go to Mass most Sundays, but that is about it for their level of involvement in the parish, and in the faith, really. They are not praying at home much, they are not talking about religion with their children. Still, the kids have some friends in the parish, and would be glad to see them more. The same goes for the parents. And the parents do care enough about God and the Church to be showing up to Mass. They want to hand on the faith. But maybe they do not really know how, and their mode of life makes it easy to put off taking action. Perhaps what they need is an invitation.

What if those families were invited to a recurring gathering with others in their parish—and preferably invited by someone whom they already knew and liked? A gathering where the kids would receive meaningful formation and have fun with other children. And where the parents would have a chance away from the pressures of childcare to talk to other adults about religiously-relevant topics they found interesting. Where they would pray together. Where they would learn in very concrete ways how to practice the faith in their homes with their children. And, crucially, where both parents and children would form strong bonds with other Catholics.

Parish-based discipleship formation that highlights community would do many things at once—it would promote almost all of the factors that promote transmission of faith from one generation to the next. It would tend to increase parents’ religious activity and perceived importance of religion. Same for children. It would promote faith-supportive peer relationships for children, and put children into contact with many supportive religious adults. Further, if discussions focused on the right things, parents at these meetings could be thinking and learning about how to strengthen their marriage, how to parent well, how to practice the faith in the home, and how to talk with their children about religious topics. Perhaps in our secular culture it would also be helpful for parents and older children to consider more deeply the reasons for our hope; that is, intellectual formation in the preambles of faith and fundamental theology may be needed now more than ever.

When American churchgoers are asked about their reason for religious attendance, the most popular answer is “Feel closer to God,” and on this Catholics and Protestants are similar. But another answer is “Experience Religion as a Community,” and here Catholics lag far behind, as appears in this data from 2023:

That Catholics do not do community well is disheartening, but it is also very useful information—there is low-hanging fruit here.

We (the authors) come to this issue as academics and as Catholic fathers, but ministry leaders working in the field are way ahead of us. Across the country, many parishes are already bringing new attention to the goal of building community. The Trinity House Community model is being used in thirty-five parishes, across fourteen states. The Families of St. John Paul II are living a beautiful rule for family life developed by the priests serving the ecclesial lay movement Communion and Liberation. And there are other movements focused on similar work: Teams of Our Lady, Schoenstatt, and others. The National Community of Catechetical Leaders is currently engaged in a large project on “Parents & Families at the Center of Faith Formation” in parishes throughout the nation.

In June, we convened a gathering of leaders from twelve dioceses, and also had an opportunity to discuss these ideas with over twenty American bishops. If you are interested in bringing family-focused and community-focused, parish-based discipleship formation to your parish, or if you are interested in supporting the efforts of others in this area, we invite you to contact us directly, as we continue to study and connect those working in this area.