Absent fathers primary reason why Christians are declining: study

A new study on faith and relationships suggests that absent fathers and collapsed marriages might be two of the best explanations for why Christianity is declining in the United States.

The Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, research recently released by the church-consulting organization Communio, reports that “family decline appears to fuel faith decline.”

The study drew data from a nationwide survey of 19,000 Sunday church attendees from 112 Evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic congregations in 13 states. The research shows marriage rates have dropped 31 percent since 2000 and 61 percent since 1970, while less than half of all adults under 30 today grew up in a home with married parents.

According to the study, individuals who regularly attend Church are likelier to have fathers present.

In the U.S., approximately 80% of Sunday churchgoers were raised in homes where their biological parents were married to each other throughout their upbringing.

Additionally, the study confirms that “boys who grew up in homes with married parents are considerably more likely to attend church regularly as adults.”

Communio President J.P. DeGance, who contributed to the study, told The Christian Post that young people are not leaving churches in enormous numbers because of a lack of ministry outreach.

“We’ve never spent more money in the church’s history to transmit our faith to our young people, and yet they’re falling away at higher and higher numbers,” DeGance said.

“The reason for the decline in faith is unpacked in the study; that the absence of a married home where dad is warmly engaged in the life of his child is the cause of the fire that is the source of the reason fewer and fewer people believe.”

DeGance said, “Unless we get deeply effective and strategic about increasing the number of Christian marriages and young people raised in homes with faithful and healthy Christian families, we will continue to see an increase in religious non-affiliation.”

“Throughout the Old Testament and into the New Testament, God’s love is told spousally, most frequently that God is chasing after the Church like a bride. And when Jesus comes at the end of time, He will be looking for His bride,” DeGance said.

“I think it shouldn’t surprise us that when the human analog of marriage and the family breaks down, it’s a lot harder for a young person to understand that there’s a Father in Heaven, ‘who so loved [them] that He sent His only Son to die for [them].'”

“This becomes difficult when someone has never been able to relate to a dad healthily if they perhaps hate their dad or have a difficult relationship with their dad.”

The study predicts that “the overall population of the religious nones is unlikely to stabilize until 25-30 years after the family structure has stabilized.”

“The number of young people being born and raised and reaching adulthood in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married appears to have been constant over the last ten years. That’s some good news; at least temporarily, it seems to be stabilized. This is incredibly important for churches,” DeGance said.

The vast majority of polling shows that young people overwhelmingly still want marriage, but they cannot just do it, according to DeGance.

“I see this as a great opportunity to advance the Gospel, that churches can become schools of love. They can help form people to discern relationships well and to form healthy dating relationships that can lead to marriage and to help married Christians to have a thriving and healthy Christ-centered marriage,” he said.

“All of that is within the reach and power of the Church. And if the Church answers this time of crisis with this approach, the study would suggest that you will see a great revival.”

DeGance warned that if the Church doesn’t take drastic steps to “evangelize fruitfully in the 21st century,” the declining number of marriages will continue, and marital health will remain low, as well as the effectiveness of fathers in those marriages.

“The sexual revolution has been a never-ending set of events in many ways. We’ve certainly had a decoupling of sex from marriage and sex from partnering and sex from parenting,” DeGance said.

“As Christian parents and as pastors, we also need to own a portion of the responsibility to ask ourselves: Are we discouraging marriage ourselves? Are we discouraging young people from the ideas leading to a healthy marriage?”