We have long known that the family that prays together stays together, but now comes news that the family that doesn’t stay together may not pray at all. And that’s a problem for all of us, especially our children.
According to new data released by the Public Religion Research Institute this month, “Americans who were raised by divorced parents are more likely than children whose parents were married during most of their formative years to be religiously unaffiliated.” In fact, researchers concluded that high rates of divorce may actually be a major cause of the rise in the religiously unaffiliated today.
The fact that both family and faith — the glues that hold together our culture and civic life, the safety nets of our most vulnerable citizens and the source of so much meaning and stability in our children’s lives — are each contributing to the weakening of the other is downright alarming.
We have long known that the decline of marriage and organized religion contribute separately to worse outcomes for kids. Children of divorce are less likely to experience economic mobility. According to data from the Economic Mobility Project children who start off in the bottom third of the income distribution, only 26 percent with divorced parents move up, compared to 50 percent of those who grow up with two married parents.
Organized religion also provides members with economic opportunities thanks in part to the networks they provide and the messages they pass along about the importance of becoming hard-working, law-abiding citizens.
In a study called “No Money, No Honey, No Church,” Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project and other researchers looked at the ways in which lack of church attendance has contributed to the economic marginalization of the working class.
So a broken home and a lack of church attendance is actually a double-blow to a kid’s economic prospects.
Both of these factors present emotional challenges as well. Parental divorce, for instance, has been linked to adolescent depression. The presence of other family members and adults in a community can be a mitigating factor in the psychological results of divorce. Unfortunately, being cut off from a church community can mean such adults are less likely to be present.
Elizabeth Marquardt examined the psychological difficulties of divorce for children in her book “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.”
Writing in the Huffington Post, she described some of the results of her interviews: “Young people from divorced families told me they had to grow up traveling between two worlds, literally and metaphorically. When their parents divorced, the tough job of making sense of the differences between the parents’ values and beliefs did not go away. Rather, this job was handed to the child alone.”
Marquardt notes that sadly, “When it came to the big questions in life — Who am I? Where do I belong? What is right and wrong? Is there a God? — those from divorced families more often felt like they had to struggle for the answers alone.”
For some of these children, this feeling of being alone was the result of parents who had different views of faith. For others, it may have been the result of growing up in religious institutions that didn’t know how to help or serve the children of divorce.
Many will read this new research as an explanation — maybe even an excuse — for religious decline in America. And certainly for those people wondering about why we have had a rise in “nones” — people with no religious affiliation — this recent report is enlightening.
Perhaps it would be better understood, though, as a rallying call to churches and to parents. Whatever the cause of their falling away from faith, the depressing truth is that these young people were left without a religious identity and community at precisely the time in their life when they most needed one.
Instead of pulling away from institutions to which they belonged as a family, parents who are splitting up should actually think about strengthening their ties. Their churches — and their children — will thank them.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.