Marjorie Brigham watched her four youngest children walk away from everything she had built her home around. She was a Mormon convert who had raised her family on weekly gatherings, scripture...
Marjorie Brigham watched her four youngest children walk away from everything she had built her home around. She was a Mormon convert who had raised her family on weekly gatherings, scripture stories, and the settled hope that her children "would see emptiness without" the faith. And then, one by one, the youngest four left the church. Her eldest daughter stayed away seven years. Her son James was gone for three. Her daughter Jill struggled with drugs and alcohol and stayed, in the study's words, "more than a decade out of the fold." The youngest, Holly, simply decided for a time that religion did not matter to her.
Then, on a schedule no parent controlled, they came back. All of them. Ten years after the divorce that had shaken the family, Marjorie could report that every one of her children had married in the church. "Holly will be married in the Temple this summer; it's really quite a miraculous thing," she told the researchers, and then said the sentence that gives this essay its title: "All my children, even if they had strayed away from it, have come back to deciding that this was very important in their lives. To me it's a miracle!"
The Brighams appear in Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013), by the sociologist Vern L. Bengtson with Norella M. Putney and Susan Harris, the capstone of the Longitudinal Study of Generations: thirty-five years, more than 3,500 people in 358 families across four generations, with 157 in-depth interviews layered on top. It is the only study of its kind in the world, and it exists, in part, because of a wound. Bengtson opens the book with his own mother. As he drifted from the fundamentalism of his childhood, she wrote him a letter containing one of the most painful sentences a parent has ever put on paper: "Vern, if I have to choose between you and my Jesus, I will choose Jesus." For the remaining twenty-six years of her life, he writes, they lived in "a sort of uneasy truce," unable to speak of the thing that mattered most to her. She died believing that, because of him, she would never see her only child in heaven.
Hold both stories, Marjorie's and Bengtson's mother's, because this essay lives in the space between them. Both women watched a child walk away from the family's deepest values. One waited with the door open and lived to call the return a miracle. The other guarded the door so fiercely it stayed shut for twenty-six years, and she did not live to see what happened after.
Here is the one idea this essay carries, said in a single sentence. Most children who walk away from a family's values eventually walk back, on their own life's schedule and not the family's, and the elders who receive them home are the ones who kept the door open without pushing, and, wisest of all, the ones who wrote the welcome down in case the wait outlasted the waiter.
Among the study's closing counsels to parents stands this one, stated as plainly as a research team ever states anything: "Don't give up on Prodigals, because many do return." Prodigals are the study's name for children who leave the family's faith, sometimes for another tradition, sometimes for nothing at all, and later come back to it or to something closely resembling it. They are the third figure in the study's typology of departure, alongside Rebels, who leave and stay gone, and Zealots, who become far more devout than their parents. The categories blur into each other across a life: many Prodigals were Rebels for a decade first.
But it is the second half of the counsel that carries the sting, especially for a devout parent. Surveying the families where the leavers returned, the authors found a pattern: "the Religious Rebels who returned to the fold had parents who waited, were open and accepting, and did not push." Young adults, they note, "zig and zag in their faith explorations, trying out several religious styles for size before settling into something comfortable." And then the sentence every waiting parent should copy out: "Acceptance and affirmation, rather than judgment and preaching, are the keys."
This is a hard saying, and the authors know it. For a parent whose faith, or whose life's values, feel like the family's very foundation, waiting quietly can feel like dereliction. Every instinct says to argue, to correct, to keep the pressure on, because silence looks like surrender. The data say the instinct has it backwards. Pressure is what Rebels cite, in interview after interview, as the reason they left and the reason they stayed away. The waiting parents were not surrendering. They were keeping the one thing intact that every return in the study traveled across: the relationship.
The researchers examined the Brigham family closely, precisely because all four leavers came home, and they identified three things operating, none of which was pressure. First, warmth: Marjorie was a warm, affirming mother who stayed close to her children through the whole excursion, which echoes the study's single most repeated finding, that the emotional quality of the parent-child bond predicts transmission better than any amount of parental devoutness. Second, latitude: her son Nathan, asked whether his parents expected the children to carry the faith, answered, "Yes, but they never pressured. Never pressured us. And they still don't," adding, "My parents were great. They allowed us to have our own agency to choose what we wanted to believe." Third, foundation: years of consistent example and teaching had built something definite for the children to return to. Warmth kept the door open, latitude kept the doorway unblocked, and the foundation meant there was a lit house behind it.
Honesty asks us to complicate the miracle slightly, as the study itself does. The Brigham story includes a strained marriage and, after thirty years, a divorce; the children's departures began in those years, when their father had stopped participating and the household was under strain. The return of all four is one family's outcome in a study of self-reported lives, not a formula, and the authors present their findings on warmth and return as strong, repeated correlations, not laws of physics. The study's sample is American, drawn from Southern California, and contains almost no African or immigrant families; and for every Marjorie in its pages there is a family still waiting at the book's end. What the study claims, and documents across thirty-five years, is the direction of the odds: openness brings more of them home than pressure does, and many more come home than their grieving parents believe.
When the researchers took their findings to nineteen clergy across seven traditions, the ministers of the oldest churches turned out to know the Prodigal pattern by heart. An Episcopal priest told them: "You have a group of young people in your sample that you call the Prodigals. We have lots of them in our churches. They drift away in high school. After they finish college and marry and have a baby, they return. Give them time." And then he added the line that reframes the whole ordeal, from a failure of transmission into a stage of it: "Maybe it's not good for people to just 'inherit' religion unquestioningly. It's got to become theirs."
It's got to become theirs. The return, in other words, is not triggered by the parent's best argument. It is triggered by the child's own life reaching the places where the inheritance suddenly makes sense: a marriage that needs more than the couple can generate alone, a newborn who forces the question of what this child will be taught, and, later, the losses of midlife and age that no philosophy of self-invention has ever carried anyone through. The study's life-course data agree: the zigzag years cluster in the twenties, and the settling comes with the great thresholds.
Bengtson's own life closed the loop, and he tells it without embarrassment in the book's opening pages. After a lifetime as the study's chief scientist and a self-described skeptical nonbeliever, he wandered into a church service one Easter Sunday, three years before the book was published, and was, in the phrase he borrows from C. S. Lewis, "surprised by joy." He came back. "So these days I'm in church every Sunday, singing away in the choir," he writes, a Prodigal returned in his seventies, decades after his mother's letter. And then the sentence that is almost unbearable in context: "I think my father and grandfather would be pleased. I hope my mom would too."
Hope. Not knowledge. Because she was gone, and she had left him nothing that said the door was open.
This is where the study ends and our own counsel begins, and we mark the seam plainly: the book stops here, and we go one step further, from faith to everything a family hands down, and from waiting to writing.
Bengtson's mother waited twenty-six years and died, the book records, "with sorrow and anger," believing the story was over. It was not over. Her son came back. But her voice was not there to meet him; what he carried instead was the letter about choosing Jesus, the door swung shut, and a hope about what she might have felt. Now imagine, and it is not hard, that somewhere in her papers there had been a second letter, written in a soft hour, sealed and dated: Vern, if you are reading this, you have found your way back to something I could not argue you into. I knew you would. I never stopped being your mother, the truce was my failure as much as yours, and there was never a moment when the door was closed from my side. Twenty-six years of uneasy truce could not have been undone by one page. But the homecoming would have had a welcome in it, and the welcome would have been hers.
This applies far beyond religion, which is why it belongs to every elder reading this, whatever your family's creed. Children walk away from more than faith. They walk away from the business, the land, the profession, the country, the family itself, and the same Prodigal odds apply: many are gone for a decade, and many come back when their own lives ripen the questions. The elder's stewardship task is therefore double. Tend the relationship now, warmly and without pressure, because the relationship is the road home. And write the welcome now, because you do not control the calendar, and for a widow or widower especially, the years of waiting arrive when time is no longer a thing to spend freely.
So write it. One letter per child who has gone their own way, or one for each child regardless. Say what you hoped, without prosecution. Say what in your values you suspect they will rediscover in their own words, and that their own words will be good enough. Say, in whatever language your heart uses, that the door was never locked. Seal it, date it, and put it where it will be found and delivered even if you are not there: this is precisely what the Document Vault in LegacyPot is for, a letter stored beside the will and the titles, with instructions for the day it should be opened. A will distributes what you owned. This letter distributes what you meant, to the one reader who could not hear it yet.
Here is the work for this month, in three movements, and none of them requires the child to change first.
Stop pushing, if you have been pushing. The study's evidence is as close to unanimous as social science gets: judgment and preaching lengthen the exile, and "acceptance and affirmation" shorten it. Call the child who left, and talk about anything except the thing. That call is not weakness. According to thirty-five years of data, it is the single most effective act of transmission left to you.
Keep the foundation lit. Marjorie's children came back to something because something was still there: the same warm mother, the same practices, the same open Sunday table. Whatever your family's equivalent is, keep it running, visibly, without conscription.
And write the welcome letter, this month, while the writing is easy because the return still feels far away. Seal it, date it, place it in the vault, and tell one trusted person it exists. Then go back to your waiting, which the study has renamed for you. It is not the aftermath of a failure. It is the middle of a story whose ending, in most families, is better than the middle ever let anyone believe. Marjorie named that ending from inside her own kitchen: to me it's a miracle. The miracle had a decade of quiet, unpressured faithfulness behind it. Yours can have that, and one thing more: your own voice, waiting at the door, whether or not you are.