Key Takeaways
New research from the University of St. Thomas finds that faith transmission is less about what children are taught and more about how faith is lived and discussed at home.
The most important factor in whether children keep the faith as adults? Their parents – especially their father – consistently practicing it themselves.
Latter-day Saints pass on faith at the highest rate of any group in America. African American Christian communities follow closely. Both offer instructive lessons for Catholic and Protestant churches alike.
Young people who drift from faith in college may not have rejected it -they may never have fully internalized it in the first place.
For churches, the implication is urgent: investing in the marriages and families of current members is the most direct path to a thriving congregation a generation from now.
The Research: Why Are Young Catholics Coming Back?
News outlets across the country have been reporting on a notable cultural shift: young people returning to the Catholic faith. The trend is real – but the reasons behind it, according to one researcher, are less about cultural forces and more about something much closer to home.
Dr. Timothy Reilly, associate professor of Psychology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, has been studying how faith is transmitted from one generation to the next – and why some young Catholics are not just staying, but actively returning. His findings, rooted in developmental psychology and national survey data, offer a clear and sometimes surprising picture of what actually works.
The central insight: faith that endures isn’t handed down from the top. It’s grown from within – through relationships, consistent practice, and conversations that invite young people into ownership of their belief rather than mere compliance with it.
The Core Finding: Faith Follows Relationship
Dr. Reilly’s research draws heavily on the American Families of Faith Project from Brigham Young University – a landmark study examining faith transmission across Muslim, Latter-day Saint, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant families. The patterns that emerge across traditions are strikingly consistent.
Strong community ties, regular faith practice, and meaningful family conversations are the three most reliable predictors of whether children carry faith into adulthood. Not curriculum. Not programs. Relationships and practice, modeled consistently at home and reinforced by community.
One finding stands out above the rest: a father’s religious attendance is especially predictive of whether children continue practicing their faith. Not just whether faith is talked about – but whether it is visibly, consistently lived by the father in the home.
This tracks directly with what Communio’s own research has found across more than 150,000 surveys of churchgoers: approximately 80% of people sitting in church on Sunday were raised in a home where their parents stayed married. Faith and family are not parallel tracks. They are the same track.
Dr. Reilly also points to what researchers call “religious sacrifice” – the practice of choosing faith over competing priorities – as a powerful signal to children that belief is real and worth something. When parents make tangible choices that put faith first, children notice. And it shapes how seriously they take their own.
The Counterintuitive Angle: Kids Don’t Leave Faith. They Leave Faith They Never Owned.
Here’s the finding that reframes everything.
For years, the dominant narrative around young adults leaving the church has been framed as rejection – a generation walking away from something they once had. Dr. Reilly challenges that framing directly.
Many young people who drift from faith in college, he suggests, may not be leaving something they deeply held. They may be leaving something they never fully internalized in the first place. Faith was present in their household – but it was inherited as a set of rules or expectations rather than embraced as a personal conviction.
When those external structures fall away in college, there’s nothing underneath to hold.
The implication for churches and parents is profound. The goal of faith formation isn’t compliance – it’s internalization. And internalization happens through conversations, questions, authentic example, and the kind of relational security that only a stable, engaged family can provide. As Dr. Reilly puts it, the aim is for faith to be something a person comes to own within themselves – not something they belong to because their family does.
This is why the health of marriages and families isn’t a secondary concern for churches. It is the primary engine of faith formation – and the primary reason faith either endures or quietly disappears between generations.
What This Means for Your Church
At Communio, Dr. Reilly’s findings confirm what we’ve seen in congregations across the country: you cannot separate the health of families from the long-term vitality of a church.
When marriages are strong, fathers are present and engaged, and families practice faith together – children grow up with the relational foundation that makes belief stick. When marriages fracture, when fathers disengage, when family life becomes unstable – the transmission breaks. A generation later, the pews reflect it.
Think about the families in your congregation right now. The young couples in their first years of marriage, still building the habits and patterns that will shape everything that follows. The fathers who are physically present but spiritually disengaged. The households where faith is more cultural than convictional. These are the families where the next generation of believers – or non-believers – is being formed right now.
Investing in those marriages and families isn’t a peripheral ministry. According to both Dr. Reilly’s research and Communio’s nationwide data, it is the most strategic investment a church can make for its own future.
The churches that will be full in twenty years are the ones doing the relational work today – strengthening marriages, supporting fathers, and creating the kind of community where faith becomes something the next generation owns, not just inherits.
Take the Next Step
Communio partners with churches to build data-informed marriage and family ministry that strengthens the relational foundations where faith is formed and passed on.
► Read the full UST research story → news.stthom.edu
► Explore Communio’s Newest Research on Faith Transmission → communio.org/pastors-guide
Credit: This post draws on research published by the University of St. Thomas Houston featuring Dr. Timothy Reilly, the American Families of Faith Project from Brigham Young University, and Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships. Read the original UST article here.
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