Abstract
Religion and family have been intertwined institutions in the United States for much of our history. Families have relied on religious communities to socialize children, and religious institutions have relied on families to pass on religious traditions. The growth of the non-religious raises important sociological questions about the fate of religious institutions. It also creates an urgent need to rethink our sociological assumptions about the necessity of religious socialization to family formation and the socialization of children and to analyze the range of supportive communal structures available to the growing non-religious portion of the American landscape.
The trend toward religious disaffiliation in the United States has been underway for over 30 years, and there is a growing body of work on its implications. There is qualitative research on the trajectories and experiences of religious disaffiliation; fieldwork-based and quantitative research on the growing set of voluntary and activist organizations that have helped non-religious persons form identities and link them to political interests and policy preferences; experimental and quantitative research on the stigmatization of the non-religious; and quantitative research on the varieties of non-religious identification.
What has not been studied in any serious way are the philosophies and practices of non-religious parenting. In Losing Our Religion, Christel Manning has made a very fine first foray into this research area. The primary data comprise 48 in-depth interviews with non-religious parents in eight field sites that span the Pacific Northwest, the West Coast, the Mountain region, the East Coast, and the South (one Florida location), supplemented by participant observation of social events, communal and institutional settings, and family gatherings, along with secondary analysis of survey data.
To make a definitive statement on “non-religious parenting in America,” the sample would need to be larger and more diverse in terms of race and socio-economic status, but that is not Manning’s purpose or her claim. Her focus is on developing analytical concepts and providing theoretical tools with which to understand the meaning and practices of non-religious parenting; qualitative research is the appropriate approach for this, especially given the paucity of what we know about non-religious parenting in the United States.
The non-religious parent in our society faces a highly religious context, one in which religious participation is defined through powerful narratives as constitutive of good citizenship and good parenting. Religious involvement has long followed a life-course pattern in which parenthood triggers a re-engagement with religious institutions after a young adulthood spent largely outside of religious settings. Manning argues that in such a context being a non-religious parent creates a cultural and social dilemma. One must decide, explicitly and perhaps in dialogue with others who do not agree with one’s choices, whether and how to teach one’s children anything at all about religion and, if not, whether to seek out other loci of supportive community activity or worldview socialization.
In the field of non-religious studies, there is a problem of multiple classification systems, as scholars seek to make sense of a new, evolving, and multi-faceted social phenomenon. This raises a question of what, exactly, is a non-religious parent? Manning makes a sensible and defensible choice to focus on parents who are not willing to claim a religious identification, and she uncovers four broad orientations among them. Unchurched believers will not claim religious affiliation but affirm many religious beliefs and may participate in religious institutions. Those with a Seeker spirituality combine an eclectic array of religious and spiritual practices in an evolving approach to meaning-making. Philosophical secularists include self-identified atheists and humanists but also those who do not so identify but who hold a relatively coherent, science-based, naturalistic understanding of the world that they perceive as distinct from or in opposition to religious understandings. And the Indifferent are a-religious and not concerned with finding what Manning calls a “functional substitute” for religious participation. One of the contributions of this book is the reorientation of scholarly attention away from religious socialization and toward worldview choice.
This approach, she argues, allows us to go beyond a simple religious/secular binary. She finds five different strategies of worldview transmission among her non-religious parents, including three that include some aspects of religious socialization and one that includes a serious attempt to find communities that support the transmission ofa secular worldview. Conventional non-religious parents find a church or religious education class for their children and become involved themselves, in an attempt to expose them to a faith tradition and equip them to make their own choice about whether they want to embrace religion. An Alternative strategy involves finding a secular group, for example a local chapter of the American Humanist Association or a Sunday Assembly, to provide community and socialize children into a secular philosophy or worldview. Other parents Self-provide religious or spiritual instruction in the home or Outsource religious instruction by relying on grandparents or perhaps sending children to religious or spiritual activities with a neighbor or friend. And some parents do Nothing in the way of religious or secular worldview socialization; interestingly, it is not just the parents who are themselves indifferent to religion who adopt this last strategy, but also those who simply cannot decide on a strategy that makes sense in terms of other time commitments or is agreeable to both partners (when both are involved).
Overall, this is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how non-religious parents grapple with the meaning of their own worldview choices and the practices they use to transmit meaningful worldviews to their children. It sensibly cuts through a tangle of possible classifications and provides an analytically sound vocabulary for talking about non-religious choices and identities. It highlights the social pressures that non-religious parents face from both family and community members, how these vary by social context, and the different strategies that non-religious parents adopt in the face of pressure to provide religious instruction for their children. Future research should explore in more depth how these dynamics play out in other social contexts: for example, in new immigrant communities and African American communities where religious non-conformity may carry higher social costs. We also need more research comparing the outcomes of socialization strategies for both religious and non-religious parents. In the meantime, scholars of non-religion and scholars of the family will find Losing Our Religion an important and sound contribution and a promising beginning to much-needed research on the meaning and practice of non-religious parenting.