Abandoning religion often harms relationships with parents, study finds

An analysis of the data from the National Study of Youth and Religion showed that abandoning a religious identification during adolescence or early adulthood led to worse relationship with parents. Interestingly, this effect was not observed in young adults who either switched religions or adopted a religious affiliation after growing up non-religious. The study was published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

People change their religion for a variety of personal, cultural, and spiritual reasons. Some individuals may undergo a change of faith due to a profound spiritual or religious experience that leads them to change their beliefs. Cultural and social factors can also influence religious conversions. Individuals may adopt the religion of their spouse or community to foster a sense of belonging or maintain social harmony. Dissatisfaction or disagreement with the teachings, practices, or leadership of their current religion can prompt people to seek a more suitable spiritual path. There are many other possible reasons.

By mid-century, it’s estimated that 162 million individuals globally will have changed their religious affiliation. In the United States, nearly 20% of adults who were raised within a religious framework now identify as non-religious. While changing one’s religious affiliation is fundamentally personal, it can profoundly impact relationships, especially within the family.

Study author Justin J. Hendricks and his colleagues wanted to examine the associations between changes in religious identification during adolescence and emerging adulthood and later parent-child relationship quality. They hypothesized that any change in religion might negatively impact parent-child relationships, whether it was a conversion, abandonment, or adoption of a religious identity. The team also anticipated a bidirectional relationship between religious change and parental relationships, suggesting that parental warmth might be a mediating factor.

“I want to explore the relational repercussions of religious changes, like leaving or converting to a religion, because I’ve seen firsthand the challenges these changes have sometimes posed in the lives of my family and friends,” explained Hendricks, a PhD student in sociology at The Pennsylvania State University.

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“I have also seen how the process of leaving religion or converting to religion can be mentally and emotionally taxing to go through, perhaps in part because of the occasional loss of previous relational connections. Additionally, this is becoming an increasingly common issue for individuals and families, with 42% of adults in the United States changing their religious identity at some point in their lives, including nearly one in five U.S. adults (around 19.3%) who have left the religion of their youth and now identify with no religion.”

“Even though these types of religious and spiritual changes occur frequently and tentative evidence points to the potential relational problems associated with this change, relatively little research has explored how individuals and families can most ideally go through these types of change, which I want to help address.”

Data for the study was sourced from the National Study of Youth and Religion, which took samples from English and Spanish-speaking households with teenagers in the U.S. The initial wave of data, collected via phone in 2002, encompassed 3,290 households with teenagers aged 13-17. Follow-up waves occurred in 2005 and 2007, with a 68.4% completion rate across all three waves. The analysis included data from 2,352 participants who were teenagers or young adults at the onset.

Participants disclosed any changes in their religious identification. The researchers identified four categories to define these changes: maintaining religious affiliation, adopting a religion from a non-religious background, changing religions, and abandoning a religious affiliation. Participants also provided insights into their parent-child relationships, religious alignment with parents, and perceived parental warmth.

Findings indicated that, on average, the quality of relationships with parents, parental warmth, and religious alignment remained mostly consistent over the study’s duration.

Between the first and second waves, 72% of participants retained their religious identity, 12.7% changed religions, 4.7% adopted a religious identity, and 10.7% left their religion. Overall, 28.2% experienced some form of religious transition during this period. Between the second and third waves, 4.6% adopted a religious affiliation, 8.8% changed religions, and 13.1% departed from their faith.

Those who left their religion between the first and second waves reported weaker relationships with both parents during the second wave. Similarly, weaker father-child relationships in the second wave were linked to religious departures between the second and third waves, which correlated with deteriorating relationships with mothers in the third wave.

The research team also examined a model suggesting that leaving a religion between the first and second waves might decrease belief alignment with parents and their warmth, subsequently affecting the relationship quality. The findings supported this model, emphasizing parental warmth as the primary mediator between religious departure and parent-child relationship dynamics.

“We found in our study, based on national data, that when teenagers or young adults leave their religion, it can lead to worse relationships with their parents over time,” Hendricks told PsyPost. “Two potential reasons for negative relational repercussions following a departure from religion that we found in our analyses are decreased parental warmth from both fathers and mothers (i.e., parents expressed their love, praise, and encouragement less frequently after their child left religion) and decreased similarity of religious beliefs with mothers.”

“In practice, the study suggests that parents and youth that want to maintain their relationship following a religious change may benefit from focusing on shared beliefs and maintaining expressions of love, encouragement, and warmth. In seeking to answer the question “which comes first,” poor relationship quality or leaving religion, we found that the relationship was primarily one-directional (i.e., leaving religion predicted decreased relationship quality), although there is some evidence for a bi-directional relationship for the father-child relationship.”

Hendricks and his colleagues found that adopting or changing a religion between waves did not significantly impact relationships with parents in subsequent waves. “We were somewhat surprised that changes like converting to religion or switching religions did not show a link to declining parent-child relationships over time in our study,” he told PsyPost. “However, since anecdotal evidence and previous qualitative research suggest that these changes can indeed strain parent-child relationships, we believe that future research will likely identify the specific conditions under which such changes might result in negative parent-child outcomes.”

The study sheds light on the links between religious identification and relationships with parents. However, it also has limitations that need to be considered. Notably, the assessment of parental warmth and relationship quality was done using custom-made items and not validated scales. Additionally, the study contained data on parents’ religious identification only in the first wave, so if parents also changed their religious identification later, this remained unknown to researchers.

“One caveat we found is that the association between religious changes and parent-child relationships varied depending on the child’s age and the parent’s gender,” Hendricks added. “When a child left religion during adolescence, we found that it was related to short-term strain in both mother-child and father-child relationships. However, our results found that the mother-child relationship tends to adapt in time and find a new balance. In early adulthood, leaving religion seemed to primarily be associated with decreased mother-child relationship quality, but not so much for the father-child relationship.”

The study, “Does Leaving Faith Mean Leaving Family? Longitudinal Associations Between Religious Identification and Parent-Child Relationships Across Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood”, was authored by Justin J. Hendricks, Sam A. Hardy, Emily M. Taylor, and David C. Dollahite.