Key Takeaways

The Story: A National Platform Covers Communio’s Most Significant Research

The Deseret News, one of America’s most respected faith-informed daily newspapers, published a feature by Lois M. Collins on September 21, 2026, covering the Passing the Torch report from Communio and the Institute for Family Studies. The piece ran in the publication’s Family and Faith sections simultaneously, reaching one of the largest audiences of religiously engaged readers of any daily newspaper in the country.

The article is significant for two reasons. First, it gives the Passing the Torch research one of its most prominent national platforms since the report’s release, placing the findings in front of an audience actively concerned about the future of faith in American family life. Second, it surfaces angles in the research that have not received enough attention: the avalanche framing of generational decline, the counterintuitive finding about parental restraint, and J.P. De Gance’s public health argument for faith that deserves wider circulation.

The Core Finding: The Decline Is Generational, Not Individual. And That Changes Everything.

The Deseret News piece opens with a framing that reorients the entire conversation about religious decline in America.

The common assumption is that faith loss happens when individuals drift. A person who once believed gradually loses interest, gets busy, encounters doubt, or simply stops prioritizing Sunday attendance. The rise of the “nones” is understood as millions of individual defections, one person at a time.

The Passing the Torch report challenges that picture directly. As the research makes clear, most of the decline is intergenerational. Rather than people becoming less religious over their adult lives, each new generation enters adulthood less faithful than the last one. Faith is not primarily being lost within a generation. It is failing to be transmitted between generations.

The difference matters enormously. If decline is individual drift, the response is individual re-engagement: better programming, more compelling worship, stronger pastoral care. But if decline is intergenerational transmission failure, the response must be fundamentally different: strengthening the families where faith is either passed on or quietly extinguished, and equipping the parents who are the most decisive factor in that process.

The report’s authors describe the compounding effect as an avalanche: as the most devout generations disappear and are replaced by more secular ones, the pace of decline accelerates. The time to act is not after the slide is underway. It is now, in the homes and congregations where the next generation is being formed.

The Counterintuitive Angle: Faith Has a Public Health Case. And It Is Stronger Than Most People Realize.

Here is the angle in J.P. De Gance’s comments to the Deseret News that deserves its own moment of attention.

For believers, the value of faith needs no argument from secular data. But De Gance makes the case on secular grounds as well, and it is compelling. For adults who worship regularly, the research shows less depression, lower anxiety, less loneliness, and a greater sense of purpose and life satisfaction. For adolescents who worship, the outcomes when they become young adults include higher life satisfaction, lower drug use, less depression, and less criminal or delinquent behavior.

De Gance told the Deseret News that from a public health perspective, these benefits give faith “far greater importance than many medical or mental health interventions.”

That is not a statement of religious triumphalism. It is a data-grounded observation that the country’s mental health crisis, the youth loneliness epidemic, the rise in depression and anxiety among young adults: these are problems that religious community has historically buffered against, and that secular interventions have struggled to match. At a moment when the mental health system is overwhelmed, the faith community is an underutilized asset of enormous scope and scale.

Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies reinforced this in the same article: religious connection helps people be a better version of themselves. They are more likely to volunteer, more charitable, more engaged in their local communities, and more honest and trustworthy. The prosocial dimension of religion, he said, is well-documented.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, the Deseret News feature captures what the Passing the Torch report makes plain: the work of faith transmission is primarily a family enterprise, and the local church’s most important contribution is equipping and supporting the families doing that work.

The Deseret News article includes the report’s five-step guidance for parents, and each step carries direct implications for how churches design their ministry:

Be your children’s faith role model. The modeling that happens in the home, day in and day out, carries more weight than any program the church can offer. Churches that help parents understand this, and that equip them to live their faith visibly, are doing the most important work available.

Make a strong marriage and strong parent-child relationships a priority. Parental marital quality is directly linked to stronger faith transmission. A church that invests in marriage is investing in the next generation’s faith.

Work together: both fathers and mothers. Only 17% of fathers see themselves as primarily responsible for their children’s faith formation. The data says they are the most underutilized lever in the entire system. Churches that actively engage fathers in this understanding are changing outcomes a generation from now.

Make religion an ordinary part of family life. Faith embedded in everyday routines, through conversation, ritual, and visible commitment, is far more likely to be internalized by children as part of their enduring identity than faith practiced only on Sunday.

Talk about faith regularly. Parents are more likely to undercommunicate than overcommunicate. The report is clear: taking too light a touch is a bigger risk than laying it on too thick.

The Deseret News chose to give this research its platform because the stakes are that significant. The church has the same opportunity to act on what the data shows, in the lives of the families already in its congregation, starting this week.

Take the Next Step

Download the Passing the Torch report and share it with your leadership team, your parents, and your pastors as a foundation for a more intentional ministry strategy.

► Read the full Deseret News article by Lois M. Collins → deseret.com

► Download the Passing the Torch report → communio.org/passing-the-torch-report

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the Passing the Torch report say faith decline is generational rather than individual? The research found that most of the decline in American religiosity is intergenerational: each new generation enters adulthood less faithful than the one before it, rather than individuals becoming less religious over the course of their adult lives. The report describes this compounding effect as an avalanche, as the most devout generations disappear and are replaced by more secular ones, the pace of decline accelerates. This reframes the entire response: the priority must be strengthening intergenerational faith transmission, not only re-engaging individuals who have drifted.

What does the data show about the role of fathers in faith formation? A strong father-child relationship increases the odds of weekly church attendance in adulthood by 58%, according to the Passing the Torch report. A strong mother-child relationship increases those odds by 65%. When both parent-child relationships are strong, the odds rise by 76%. Yet only 17% of fathers see themselves as primarily responsible for their children’s religious formation. This gap between perceived responsibility and actual impact represents one of the most significant and underaddressed opportunities in church ministry.

What did J.P. De Gance say about faith and public health? J.P. De Gance told the Deseret News that for adults who worship regularly, the research shows less depression, lower anxiety, less loneliness, and greater purpose and life satisfaction. For adolescents, regular worship is associated with higher life satisfaction, lower drug use, less depression, and less criminal behavior as young adults. De Gance said from a public health perspective, these benefits give faith “far greater importance than many medical or mental health interventions.”

Is it possible for parents to talk about faith too much with their children? The Passing the Torch report suggests not. It finds that efforts to transmit faith to children are more often undermined by parents taking too light a touch than by laying it on too thick. Because Christianity is no longer affirmed by the broader culture, parental silence at home creates a vacuum that the culture fills with competing narratives. Parents who speak openly and regularly about faith are not at risk of overdoing it. They are doing exactly what the data shows is most effective.

What practical steps does the report recommend for parents? The report advises parents to be a faith role model for their children, prioritize strong marriages and parent-child relationships, work together with both mothers and fathers on faith formation, make religion a normal part of everyday family life, and talk about faith regularly at home. It concludes that “there is no substitute for steady prayer and trust in the grace of God.”

Credit: This post draws on reporting by Lois M. Collins for the Deseret News, published September 21, 2026, and the study “Passing the Torch: How Faith Moves Across Generations” by the Institute for Family Studies and Communio. Read the original Deseret News article here.