Eric Baker is an atheist, and if you asked him where his atheism came from, he would not tell you a story about rebellion. He would give you a genealogy. "My grandfather was a liberal academic and my...
Eric Baker is an atheist, and if you asked him where his atheism came from, he would not tell you a story about rebellion. He would give you a genealogy. "My grandfather was a liberal academic and my great uncle was a Communist," the thirty-one-year-old told researchers. "So we're pretty much drenched in atheism and socialistic values." Drenched: not argued into it, not driven to it by a strict religious childhood he fled. Soaked in it from birth, the way other children are soaked in hymns.
For most of a century, social science assumed people like Eric did not exist in any number. The standing theory held that atheism and non-belief were reactions, a backlash against overbearing religious parents, "an expression of liberation from the domination of one's parents," as one scholar the study quotes put it. Non-belief was understood as something that happened to a family, not something a family handed down.
Then came the one dataset long enough to check. In Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013), the sociologist Vern L. Bengtson, with Norella M. Putney and Susan Harris, reports the capstone findings of the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which followed more than 3,500 people in 358 families across four generations for thirty-five years, from 1970 to 2005, supplemented by 157 in-depth interviews across 25 families. And on this question the data flatly overturned the field's assumption, and the authors' own. "Our data suggest a different picture of the religious backgrounds of the nonaffiliated," they write, "one in which family continuity and transmission is more likely to be involved than discontinuity and rebellion." In 1970, 40 percent of religiously unaffiliated parents had unaffiliated young adult children. By 2005 that figure had climbed to 63 percent. Nearly six in ten nonreligious young adults, the study found, came from nonreligious families, "indicating that nonreligion is indeed transmitted from one generation to the next."
A note on where we stand before we go on. LegacyPot writes for families across many traditions, and most of our readers are believing families; this Journal is not arguing anyone toward or away from faith. What this study offers is rarer than an argument: evidence about how the things a family lives by actually move into its children, whatever those things are. Read it as a believer and it is a mirror. Read it as a secular family and it is something you have rarely been given: permission, with data behind it, to treat your own convictions as a tradition worth tending on purpose.
Because here is the one idea this essay carries, said in a single sentence. Whatever your family actually lives by, a creed of God or a creed of work, service, reason, or generosity, it travels to your children through the same channel, warmth plus example plus repetition, and a family that never names what it believes is still transmitting something every day, only without ever checking what.
Walk through the Baker family and watch the inheritance move. Five generations of a Jewish family, and only one, a great-great-grandmother named Golda, was religiously observant. Everyone after her was, in the study's vocabulary, a "none." But nobody in the family describes emptiness where religion used to be. They describe a tradition, fiercely held. Donald and Lydia Baker were political activists who met at an antiwar meeting during World War II. For years their daughter Robyn and her children lived in the grandparents' house, and the political arguments around that kitchen table did the work that catechism does in other families. Robyn's daughter Laura, at fifty-two, credits her moral formation exactly where a devout family would credit Sunday school: "I think my values came from my grandparents when I was young, certain values of equality and justness, what's right and what's wrong. Those values were definitely put on us or passed on to us through their efforts, their political efforts, to make social change for the benefit of all."
Notice the machinery. Multiple generations under one roof or close by. A grandmother's table as the site of instruction. Stories told and retold until they hardened into identity. Strong emotional bonds; the study describes the Bakers as "a very close family made up of strong personalities." Swap the content and this is precisely how the study's devout Mormon and Evangelical families passed on their faith. The channel is identical. Only the cargo differs.
Honesty requires the usual caveats, and the authors make them before we do. These are American families from a Southern California sample drawn in 1969, with few Black or immigrant families and, among the case studies, essentially no Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or African-tradition households; the percentages rest on self-reported surveys, rigorous ones, mailed to the same families for thirty-five years, but self-report all the same. What the study earns the right to claim is the mechanism, replicated across religious and secular households alike. It is the mechanism we are after.
The clearest specimen in the book is the Adams family, and its founding scene contains no sermon at all. Ted Adams was a labor union leader who moved his family to California during the Great Depression, a man his son describes as a Social Democrat and "a great humanitarian" who "denied the existence of the need for a church." What Ted did instead was load his children into the practice of giving when there was nothing to give from. His son Victor, at seventy-eight, could still see it: "This is during the Depression, when nobody had anything. He would find a family. We'd bring them some groceries. I'll never forget that day we brought some groceries to this lady's house with a little kid. And they just cried." The lesson Victor took, in his own words: "If you've got it made, you need to give back."
Now run the line forward. Victor became a social activist and a lifelong helper, church or no church. His daughter Dawn, whose relationship to organized religion collapsed during an abusive marriage, still orbits service and community. And Dawn's daughter Gina, thirty-six, is an atheist married to an atheist, raising her children on "reason and science and treating people the way you would want to be treated." Asked to account for herself, she does not cite an argument that convinced her. She cites descent: she puts "a lot of value on a liberal, humanistic point of view," a view she calls "not dogmatic," and says plainly, "I think that comes from my family."
Four generations. One bag of groceries, retold for eighty years. The study's authors note that the Adamses transmitted their values "consciously, but more often implicitly through example." That sentence deserves to be underlined in every founder's copy of the book, because it names the two channels every family is using whether it knows it or not: the deliberate one, and the ambient one. Ted Adams used both. He never wrote a creed, but he made sure his son was in the room when the groceries changed hands, and the room did the teaching.
The study offers a small classification tool that turns out to be surprisingly useful far beyond religion. Sorting its unaffiliated respondents, it found the "nones" were not one thing but four:
The categories are fluid, the authors caution, and people drift between them. But the exercise of naming is the point, and here is our translation, made in our own voice: the book stops at religion, and we go one step further. Every household, believing or not, runs on a working creed, the set of convictions it actually lives by as distinct from the ones it announces. There are churchgoing households whose lived creed, the one the children are marinating in, is really ambition, or appearances, or fear of scarcity. There are secular households whose lived creed is service so consistent it would shame a seminary. A diaspora family may announce one creed in the language of home and live another in the language of the new country, while the children, fluent in both, quietly absorb only what is practiced. The four-part typology is a prompt for a harder audit: if a researcher followed your family for thirty-five years, what would they conclude you believe? Not from your answers. From your Tuesdays.
Founders will recognize the irony fastest. Almost every founder we know has written company values: a one-page creed, debated, wordsmithed, laminated, taught to every new hire. The enterprise that will outlive the company, the family, usually has nothing. The convictions meant to govern for generations are stored in one place only: the founder's habits, visible but unnamed, transmitting ambiently and hoping for the best.
This is the finding's sharp edge, and the reason it belongs in a journal about legacy rather than a journal about religion. The nonreligious families in the study did not opt out of transmission. There is no opting out. The channel, warmth, modeling, repetition, runs all day, every day, in every household, and the study's authors extend their own conclusion in exactly this direction, generalizing their model to the moral and ethical principles nonreligious parents pass down. Six in ten of the study's nonreligious young adults were living proof that the channel works without a single sermon.
But unnamed transmission has no error correction. The Adams family got a good outcome partly by luck: the ambient lesson, generosity, happened to be the one Ted would have chosen. Families are not always so fortunate. A father's unnamed anxiety about money transmits as faithfully as his named generosity. A mother's unspoken rule that we do not discuss the business transmits as a value, the value of silence. Children are indiscriminate receivers; they record what is lived, not what is intended. A family that never states its creed has not chosen neutrality. It has chosen to let its worst days teach with the same authority as its best ones.
Naming changes that. The moment a conviction is written, spoken at the table, and attached to its carrying story, two things happen: the family can check the lived record against the stated one, and the children gain the thing the study found everywhere transmission succeeded, a definite inheritance they can later choose, question, and make their own. This holds for the faith of the Wilsons, the atheism of the Bakers, and everything between.
Here is the work for this month, and none of it requires a single theological commitment.
Name the creed. Sit down, alone or with your spouse, and write no more than three sentences beginning "In this family, we believe" about work, about money, and about other people. Not the answers you would give a visitor. The ones your Tuesdays would support.
Attach the stories. A creed without stories is a poster; the groceries story is what made the Adams creed survive four generations. For each sentence, write down the family scene that proves it: the year the shop nearly failed and who showed up, the relative who was carried through school, the grandmother's rule about debt. If the best stories sit with your eldest living relative, go and collect them while you can.
Then put both where the channel can reach the next generation. This is exactly what the Wisdom Library in LegacyPot is built to hold: the creed, the stories that carry it, in text or in the elder's own recorded voice, placed where your children and their children can meet it on purpose rather than by accident.
Eric Baker's family never planned the word he reached for, but they earned it. Drenched. That is what a tradition feels like from the inside when the transmission worked: not a lesson you remember learning, but the water you grew up swimming in. Every family is filling the pool with something. The only question this study leaves you with is whether you will choose what.