Key Takeaways

• The Institute for Family Studies published a Father’s Day op-ed in WORLD Magazine by Passing the Torch report co-authors Jesse Smith, Ph.D., and Jane Lankes Smith, Ph.D., surfacing one of the most practically significant findings in the entire study.

• Many Christian parents avoid frequent faith conversations with their children out of fear of “jamming it down their throats” and pushing them away. The data shows this fear is misplaced.

• According to the Passing the Torch research, efforts to pass on faith are more often undermined by parents taking too light a touch, not by being too intentional. Faith discussed frequently at home produces dramatically better outcomes.

• Fathers carry a disproportionate and often unrecognized influence: only 17% see themselves as primarily responsible for their children’s faith formation, but a strong father-child relationship is associated with 73% higher odds of believing in God as an adult.

• Churches cannot simply invest in children and youth programs and expect faith to transmit. They must equip and engage parents — especially fathers — as the primary agents of intergenerational faith formation.

The Story: The Report’s Authors Speak Directly to Parents and Pastors

On June 22, 2026, the Institute for Family Studies highlighted an op-ed published in WORLD Magazine by Jesse Smith, Ph.D., and Jane Lankes Smith, Ph.D., the co-authors of the Passing the Torch report. The piece, written in the days following Father’s Day, offered a direct message from the researchers themselves to the parents and pastors who most need to hear what the data actually shows.

Jesse Smith is an assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University. Jane Lankes Smith is a research scientist at the Institute for Population Research, also at Ohio State. Together they produced the most comprehensive examination of intergenerational faith transmission published to date, drawing on data from four major national longitudinal studies covering tens of thousands of Americans raised in Christian households.

Their WORLD Magazine piece distills one of the report’s most actionable and surprising findings: the primary risk in faith transmission is not parental overreach. It is parental restraint.

The Core Finding: Two Involved Parents Are Better Than One — But One Active Parent Beats One Silent One

The Passing the Torch data makes a striking and consistent case for dual parental engagement in faith formation. Children who attend church weekly with both parents have a 41% likelihood of attending church as adults. When only one parent attends regularly, that drops to 29%. The same pattern holds across prayer, Bible reading, belief in God, and the centrality of faith in daily life.

Mothers currently carry the majority of the faith formation load in most Christian households. Among teenagers who attend church with only one parent, 79% attend with their mother. When asked who is primarily responsible for how their children learn about religion, only 17% of fathers cited themselves, compared to 39% of mothers.

But the research is equally clear that when fathers are actively engaged, the outcomes for children’s faith are extraordinary. A strong father-child relationship is associated with 58% higher odds of weekly church attendance, 45% higher odds of daily prayer, and 73% higher odds of believing in God as an adult. Fathers are not a supplementary presence in faith formation. They are a structurally decisive one.

And the single most important thing both parents can do, according to the Smiths’ op-ed, is simpler than most assume: talk about faith. Children raised in homes where faith was discussed regularly were more than twice as likely to attend church, pray daily, and consider religion highly important as young adults. The frequency and naturalness of those conversations is one of the strongest predictors in the entire dataset.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Danger Isn’t Too Much Faith Talk. It’s Too Little.

Here is the finding that should reach every parent in your congregation, and that very few of them have heard clearly stated.

Many Christian parents today are holding back. They are aware that the culture is hostile to faith, that their teenagers are sensitive, and that heavy-handed religious pressure can produce rebellion rather than belief. So they moderate. They choose their moments carefully. They avoid pushing too hard on the faith conversation, hoping that the example of their lives will be enough.

The Passing the Torch data tells a different story. As the Smiths write directly: efforts to pass on faith are more often undermined not by parents laying it on too thick, but by taking too light a touch. Because Christianity is rarely upheld and often denigrated in the broader culture, parents who are silent about faith at home are not giving their children a neutral environment in which to find their own belief. They are leaving a vacuum that the culture fills with competing stories about meaning, identity, and purpose.

The families most successful at transmitting faith are the ones who set a tone in the household where talk of religion is normal — who prepare for the hard theological and moral conversations as their children grow older, rather than avoiding them in the hope that faith will simply rub off through proximity.

This is not a call to lecture or pressure. It is a call to normalcy. Faith discussed as naturally as any other important part of life, woven into ordinary conversation rather than reserved for formal religious instruction, is the pattern the data consistently rewards.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, the WORLD Magazine piece points to something we see repeatedly in churches across the country: many parents want to pass on their faith, genuinely intend to, and are actively undermining that transmission through restraint they believe is wisdom.

The church’s role in addressing this is not simply to run better programs for children and teenagers. Jesse Smith makes this explicit: youth programming alone is not enough. Congregations must invest in parents, not just in children, equipping them to fulfill their central role in shaping the next generation’s religious lives. That means teaching parents directly about the data on faith formation. It means helping fathers understand that their everyday presence, their willingness to pray out loud, and their openness to faith conversations are among the most consequential investments they will make. It means building a church culture where faith conversations at home are normalized, celebrated, and modeled by pastoral leadership.

As Family Research Council Senior Fellow Joseph Backholm put it in his response to the report: children are watching their parents’ lives and deciding whether they like what they see. A life in which actions match words is more compelling to those who are watching. That includes our children.

The local church is the most natural place to help parents close the gap between the faith they hold and the faith they are visibly, vocally, consistently living in front of their children. Communio helps churches build the relational and formation culture that makes that possible — equipping fathers, strengthening marriages, and building the kind of congregational environment where faith transmission becomes a community project rather than an isolated parental effort.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build marriage and family ministry that equips parents, engages fathers, and strengthens the relational foundations where faith is formed and passed to the next generation.

► Read the full IFS / WORLD Magazine piece → ifstudies.org

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do many Christian parents avoid frequent faith conversations with their children? Many Christian parents fear that talking too often about faith will push their children away or feel coercive. The Passing the Torch report directly challenges this assumption. According to the data, efforts to pass on faith are more often undermined by parents taking too light a touch than by being too intentional. Because the broader culture rarely reinforces Christian belief, parental silence at home leaves a vacuum rather than a neutral space.

What does the data show about how often parents should discuss faith with their children? Children raised in homes where faith is discussed several times a week are more than twice as likely to attend church regularly, pray daily, and consider religion very important as young adults, compared to those in homes where faith is rarely discussed. The Smiths urge parents to set a tone in the household where talk of religion is normal and to prepare for hard theological and moral conversations as children grow older.

Why do fathers have such a significant impact on their children’s faith? According to the Passing the Torch report, a strong father-child relationship is associated with 58% higher odds of weekly church attendance, 45% higher odds of daily prayer, and 73% higher odds of believing in God as an adult. When both parents attend church together with their children, 41% of those children attend as adults, compared to 29% when only one parent participates. Fathers are a structurally decisive influence in faith transmission — not supplementary.

What should churches do differently based on these findings? Churches should invest not only in children’s and youth programs but actively in parents, equipping them to fulfill their central role in faith formation. This means teaching parents about the data on how faith transmits, engaging fathers directly, building a church culture where faith conversations at home are normalized, and strengthening marriages — since parental marital quality is directly linked to stronger faith transmission outcomes.

How does Communio help churches apply these findings? Communio partners with churches to build data-informed marriage and family ministry that equips parents and engages fathers as the primary agents of intergenerational faith formation. Rather than adding another children’s program, Communio helps churches build the relational culture — through marriage strengthening, father engagement, and community formation — that gives the next generation of faith its best chance of lasting.

Credit: This post draws on the op-ed “Fathers and Faith Formation” by Jesse Smith, Ph.D., and Jane Lankes Smith, Ph.D., published in WORLD Magazine on June 22, 2026, highlighted by the Institute for Family Studies. Read the IFS entry here and the original WORLD Magazine op-ed here.