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How do American parents pass their religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of traditional religion and an increased interest in personal “spirituality,” this book investigates the ways that parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on their children's religious lives, yet parents have been virtually ignored in previous work on religious socialization. The book explores American parents' strategies, experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is important for the foundation it provides for becoming one's best self on life's difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious professionals', to ground their children in life-enhancing religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological assumptions about culture, the book demonstrates that parents of highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same “cultural models” when passing on religion to their children.

This chapter considers how religious parents in the United States approach the job of passing on their family's faith and practices to their children. Furthermore, the chapter takes a look at what assumptions, categories, and beliefs inform their views on the question, as well as which desires, feelings, and concerns influence the ways they undertake the transmission of their religion to their kids. This chapter addresses these issues by systematically analyzing the cultural models that most U.S. parents hold about the issue. It identifies the relevant cultural models that parents hold, which significantly influence their behaviors. In short, the chapter focuses on cognitive frameworks that shape practices rather than the practices themselves.

This chapter examines three other important cultural models that condition their approach to religious transmission to children—those concerning the nature of children, the task of parenting, and the importance of family solidarity. The dominant view of religious American parents about intergenerational religious transmission is also informed by a particular understanding of children's nature and potentials. In addition, American religious parents have a cultural model not only of the nature of children but also the job of parenting. Finally, conversations with religious parents about passing on religion to children brought to the surface a distinct cultural model with its own beliefs and associated feelings about the importance of family solidarity. This outlook is related to the cultural models of the nature of children and the task of parenting described above, but not reducible to them.

This chapter reconsiders the post-Parsonian theory of culture by examining the cognitive anthropology school. Here, the internal dimension of culture is understood as most basically cognitively constituted in neurological systems, organized in networks of structurally durable beliefs and schemas, often widely shared by varieties of types of populations, and motivationally directive of action and practices. The chapter focuses on driving home a few limited but crucial points in a larger argument—namely, that culture can be coherent, consensual, reasonable, internalized, and teleological in its orientation to guiding life practices. This is not an argument for a return to Parsonianism, since the chapter's approach is different from that in important ways. Instead, this chapter hopes to advance into a post-post-Parsonian era that corrects the numerous over-reactions and mistakes of the dominant approach of recent decades.

This chapter takes a look at the cultural model that runs in the background of and helps to guide American religious parents' approach to handing on religious faith and practice to their children. This is determined by the content of all of the cultural models examined in the previous chapter. Here, parents do good and well to pass on religious faith and practice to their offspring, because religion can help growing children successfully navigate the journey of life in the world that they will soon face. Life's journey can be a difficult one, and parents' primary job is to prepare and provision their children for safety and success on the road. Religion offers particularly valuable help in the forms of guidance, comfort, and rest stops offering rejuvenation and aid along the way.

This chapter examines the cultural models specifically about religion, its value, and possible truth. Grasping parents' views of these two features of religion is essential to understanding their approaches to the transmission of religion to their children. For few American parents does religion singularly determine their understanding of the ultimate purpose and expected experience of life. Instead, the expected experiences of life involve clusters of largely autonomous beliefs forming their own distinct cultural models, perhaps partly shaped by religious traditions generally but not principally determined by the specific views and priorities of those traditions. Those basic cultural models being firmly in place, religion then comes in as its own distinct issue. And when parents think about religion, the primary focus is its practical value, how it helps people, and what makes it important in this life.