Dylan Matthews investigates whether the children of atheists rebel against their unbelieving parents by seeking out religion:
As it turns out, yes. The most recent data on this that I’ve come across comes from Pew’s 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, which finds that only 46 percent of people who are raised religiously unaffiliated (which includes atheists, agnostics, and those who say they’re “nothing in particular”) remain unaffiliated as adults. By contrast, 68 percent of Catholics and 52 percent of Protestant stay with their childhood religion, and only 14 percent and 13 percent (respectively) stop subscribing to any religion at all.
Sarah Posner casts doubt on Matthews’s data:
Matthews admits the data he uses is imperfect, but that it “does suggest that religion has a somewhat easier time transmitting across generations than irreligion does.”
This struck me as a bit off the mark, so I posed the question to Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, founder of that institution’s unique Department of Secular Studies, and author of, among others, the forthcoming book, Living the Secular Life. Zuckerman told me he found the data “sort of bizarre” and that it “runs counter to all that I know on the topic.”
In the upcoming book, Zuckerman notes that while there is a paucity of research on secular parenting, there are longitudinal studies on the future impact of a secular childhood on adult religiosity are out there, and they show that retention rates of irreligiosity are very high.
The Dish 