It’s Really a Shame That This Particular Parenting Tool Has Been Co-Opted By the Right – Slate

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The oatmeal jokes are what did it. Sick of them, I kept my Quakerism on the down-low as a kid. But then a Sunday birthday party invite that I’d have to turn down would force me to explain that, no, most of us don’t quake. And yes, Meeting is basically church, but also not. With a sigh, I’d hit the salient points: “There’s this quote about ‘that of God in every one,’ and if you believe it, you can’t play with water guns.” I lived in the tangible, as children do, and would explain our commitment to Peace as: “If you’ve got a little chunk of God in you, I can’t hurt you, ’cause I’d be hurting God.” Then Equality was: “If we both have a little bit of God, how can one of us be better than the other?” Needless to say, this material wasn’t a big hit with the under-20 set. But recently, I wrote an article about how Peace, Equality, and the rest of the Quaker acronym SPICES offers a rudder to parents adrift in a sea of child-rearing advice. The overwhelming response to it left me wondering: Do today’s parents, who are largely forsaking it, need religion?
Almost immediately, another question took the center of my mind’s stage: Can I even suggest that families might need organized religion at a time when the most vocal defenders of churchgoing advance divisive, socially regressive, and destructive policies in the name of Godliness? Today’s news cycle recalls the English Civil War of the mid-1600s, with the power-hungry running roughshod over democratic institutions, brutality and false arrests in the streets, and new laws and orders showcasing indifference to human suffering. I didn’t want to add fuel to fires currently burning the American family, or to be misconstrued as arguing, as some pronatalists do, that birthrates wouldn’t be declining if more of us were religious. But maybe, I thought, there could be room to reclaim faith and its practice in the same way “No Kings” participants waved Old Glory alongside “Protest Is Patriotism” signs?
The answers to these questions may lie in the children’s section of your local library. In one of Brinton Turkle’s Obadiah picture books, about a Quaker family in the colonial era, a seagull trails Obadiah, who gets annoyed, yells at the bird, and throws a pebble at it. When the gull is nowhere to be seen, the boy starts to worry. He finds it and frees its beak from a rusty fishhook, thinking it will fly away from him forever, but instead Obadiah is rewarded with good feeling. Turkle got that bit right, according to modern psychology. “Study after study backs up the phenomenon of feeling better by doing good for others,” writes University of Michigan professor Ethan Kross in Shift.
Quakers aren’t alone, of course, in sharing parables of altruism with their children in order to encourage them to do good and feel good. Dan McKanan, a senior lecturer in divinity at Harvard University, pointed me to Buddhist Jataka Tales, such as “The Selfless Hare.” And he said other traditions have also created “easy-to-remember lists of core values” like the SPICES. McKanan’s own faith, Unitarian Universalism, has the Seven Principles and a Shared Values Flower. Both of them have “thematic overlap” with the Seven Themes of Roman Catholic social teaching, as well as lists published by schools associated with the Benedictines, Jesuits, and Franciscans. McKanan said many Protestant denominations have also issued “social creeds,” like the one Harry Ward wrote for the Methodists. “The Five Pillars of Islam are another good example,” he said, even though they’re more theological than value-based, and “we can find other religious use of cutesy acronyms, such as the Calvinist TULIP.”
But fewer Americans are learning shorthands for values systems these days. Ryan Cragun, a professor of empirical sociology at the University of Tampa, has co-written two books on secularization: 2023’s Beyond Doubt and 2024’s Goodbye Religion. “People are increasingly not identifying with religion,” he told me. In 1990, 7 percent of adults said they had no religious affiliation; today that number is around 30 percent. “This is a massive shift in religiosity,” he said. And identity isn’t the only measure of it. In surveys on beliefs, around 50 percent of Americans say they know God exists, Cragun told me, whereas 30 years ago, that number was close to 70. Church attendance has also declined. It’s a tricky behavior to assess, since one study in the ’90s showed that while 40 to 45 percent said they attended services, only 22 percent really did. Time-use surveys can get us closer to the truth. According to Cragun’s read of them, on Sundays in 2021, about 18 percent of people did something religious, which is 12 percentage points lower than in the 1992–94 time-use surveys parsed by other researchers.
In some parts of the country, the shift is even more dramatic than these numbers would suggest. “In your more progressive states and cities,” Cragun said, “if somebody says, ‘Hey, I’m really religious,’ people are gonna look at him like, ‘Really? That’s weird,’ but certainly in the 1990s if you said, ‘I’m an atheist,’ shit was coming, right? People were gonna be worried about you.” There’s more evidence that the national religiosity default has switched in, of all places, the Knot. A representative of the wedding website told me that as late as 2009, 41 percent of surveyed couples hosted their ceremony in a synagogue, mosque, or other religious institution, and only 29 percent had a friend or family member officiate. By 2023, those stats had swapped about 25 points, with just 16 percent of weddings now held in a place of worship and more than 55 percent of officiants identified as a family member or a friend.
Over the years that church involvement has fallen, adolescent reports of anxiety and loneliness have risen. Competing culprits include smartphones, social media, decreased independence, and the way increasing economic inequality breeds different parenting and different expectations about how kids will use their time, including greater academic pressure. This causal tapestry is surely a surrealist one, which is to say, unclear and complicated, and more than one thread loosens as you tug. But we have good data around the ills of isolation, as well as the value of weak ties and reciprocity. Simply put, connection and belonging bolster health—and adolescents, in particular, require them for wellness. With a loss of organized religion comes a loss of in-person relationships, chief among them the thin ones (with people you don’t really know or don’t even really like) that make one’s overall social fabric thicker.
For an individual adolescent without religion, fewer sets of eyes are on the lookout for languishing and deprivation. After all, if Carol has never heard of you and your sisters, she’s not likely to offer a hug, let alone organize a MealTrain, when a car crash lands your single mom in the hospital. This effect scales when faith communities shrink and disband, because churches have long been central to philanthropic activity and volunteerism. Unaffiliated teens aren’t just left with less emotional and material support; they’re left with fewer opportunities to serve others and experience a sense of what psychologists call “mattering.” Also relevant, some argue, is religion’s capacity to bridge gaps in viewpoint, including generational gaps.
About a month ago, I got a hint of what would be lost were my family not involved in organized religion. Our 13-year-old son—6 feet tall and counting, with a jaw that’s changing shape by the day—asked if he could go to an annual gathering of Quakers who live in California, Hawai’i, Nevada, and Mexico City “with a friend.” The event was set to take place over six days, more than 400 miles from our house. I told him logistics would be difficult. For starters, he and his friend would need to find transportation and an adult chaperone. In response, his teeth clenched and pupils ascended. A tightly controlled shaking of his head iced the cake of exasperation with a hint of disdain as he said, “Mom, the friend I want to go with is Rolene.” Rolene is 76.
But the pros of organized religion aren’t just side effects of community. Researchers have documented statistically significant physical and mental health benefits of spirituality and what professors call “spiritual surrender.” In Shift, Kross argues that organized religion can improve wellness via multiple mechanisms. For starters, rituals like fasting, recitations, and pilgrimages “provide us with a sense of control during times when control is in short supply.” Similarly, by suggesting prayer or meditation, many religions “teach that emotions are within our control,” which both helps us regulate them and heightens our sense of agency. There’s also the way belief in a God or Gods can feel like unconditional love, bolstering one’s self-worth, and how faith can force us to use a wide-angle lens: “The belief in that higher, transcendent power helps people tap into a sense of both awe and connection. This gives people a broader perspective and reminds them that they aren’t necessarily the center of the story.”
In a similar vein, the “organized” part of “organized religion” tends to carve out time for reflection. For Quakers, Meeting for Worship involves copious silence and “queries” like this one from a meeting we attended in June: “How do we attend to the suffering of others in our local community, in our state and nation, and in the world community?”
Others who have tried to put a finger on the why behind the bump in health and resilience that religion confers, on average, land on a “sense of coherence.” First introduced in 1987, the hypothesis has become a constellation of words—such as “meaning” and “comprehensiveness”—which add up to the idea that religion can create an integrated worldview, a story of the world that makes sense of one’s place in it. When you find a set of religious values that aligns well enough with your own vision of a life well lived, it can provide scaffolding for day-to-day choices in a way that’s both comforting and functional.
In my article, I argued that Quakerism and the SPICES had offered me just that as a mom: a calming, simplifying guidebook for a well-tended childhood. After it went viral, I learned that a writer friend, Elissa Strauss, had constructed a similar argument in 2019. She maintained that the best parenting book—the one that offers the most sensible, replicable advice—is the Haggadah, the roughly 1,800-year-old religious text read during the Jewish holiday of Passover.
If, in addition to a variety of horrifying abuses and unsavory outcomes, faith traditions have historically provided a ready-made way to sort the parenting advice of third cousins and fishmongers (in today’s context, influencers and authors) into wheat and chaff, then my generation, along with the one on our heels, has been throwing a baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Sense of coherence theory, when combined with stats on mental health, suggests that this denunciation has left a lacuna that can’t be filled by science as a secular religion, or by consumerism or club sports or any of the other altars modern parents find themselves prostrate before.
And yet, there’s a lot of bathwater to contend with. Taking a historical lens, author Ruth Whippman told listeners of the Open to Debate podcast that “increased religiosity in a society tends to go hand in hand with … intolerance.” Dan Barker went further. Barker, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said, “Most religions are divisive and exclusive, in-group and out-group, demanding conformity of thought and conformity of action.” I can’t prove them wrong, and it’s certainly possible the dividends of organized religion aren’t worth its costs.
One of those is an underdiscussed displacement phenomenon. Right-wing Christian influencers—in addition to hawking products they say enhance female beauty and purity—argue that declining religiosity, tied as it is to “have it all” and “lean in” feminism, has made women miserable. Tradwives cite secularization as the cause of teen loneliness, ignoring all those other threads in the tapestry. White Protestants and Catholics tend to vote for people who blame atheists and other “nones” for more than just falling birthrates. This ideology’s electoral success has led to new rules, thanks to the judicial appointments that followed. One will allow conservative families to opt out of lessons that threaten to undermine their religious beliefs, such as those that use storybooks with LGBTQ+ themes, and has school districts scrambling to change their curricula and procedures. Another requires that states offering tuition assistance let parents direct those tax dollars to religious schools. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes a numerical cutoff for exempting college endowments from taxation that makes zero sense until you learn that it was designed to shelter a single ultraconservative school. These policies and others don’t just take a sledgehammer to the wall that has long separated church and state. Religion-as-conservatism also steers energy away from policies proven to help families and the economy, like paid parental leave, universal child care, and a meaningfully expanded child tax credit. Children lose.
During the English Civil War, the state religion, the Anglican Church, was challenged by the Puritans, who feared Catholicism. The conflict resulted in new, radical interpretations of divinity by the Diggers, the Ranters, and, yes, the Quakers. With most still believing that the function of government is to execute the will of a Christian God, politics was all religion-on-religion. Now, more than two centuries after the First Amendment erected that beleaguered wall by prohibiting “establishment of religion,” the primary line drawn is not between faiths and sects (though of course America still suffers from plenty of Islamophobia and antisemitism). Rather, most liberals are keeping theism out of it, while those advancing policies that drain coffers and impose intolerable conditions on some for the benefit of a few throw God’s name around.
I’d love to see parents and their children experience the connection, agency, transcendence, coherence, and mattering my family has gotten from religious participation. I’d also like to see more liberals unafraid to use theology to support their platform. After all, what is it to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” (Luke 14:13) if not DEI? Surely, making it harder to access SNAP and Medicaid isn’t following the lead of the God described in Deuteronomy 10:18: “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.” And yet, MAGA supporters have successfully laid claim to religion, leaving me worried that anyone heralding its benefits for parents could, in effect, be supporting Project 2025, no matter how many times I cite the “equality” bits of Corinthians.
And yet, my hand-wringing may not matter. Professor Cragun, the secularization expert, doesn’t accept the premise that religion meaningfully or uniquely boosts health. He pointed me to evidence of a U-shaped curve, with committed atheists experiencing the same heights of wellbeing as confirmed theists. “It’s the people in the middle,” he said, “the unsure,” who seem to be missing out on that small bump. (So small it’s around 1 percent, by Cragun’s read, which is why he said of one researcher suggesting that physicians recommend religiosity, “That’s fucking insane, is what that is.”) The U-shaped curve makes sense given what Cragun is learning about people who aren’t religious. For several years, he and others interviewed folks who tend community gardens and go hiking, hundreds of people across eight countries. “They’re finding a lot of identity and value and belief in nature,” he said. And that has helped clarify their “lifestance.”
In other words, people can form communities and adopt rituals without religion, and “nonreligious people have worldviews,” integrated worldviews that give their parenting direction and continuity. They don’t need religion. At least, that’s what Cragun believes.
He’s not technically wrong, but may be effectively so. The fact that secular community-building is possible doesn’t make it likely. It seems too much labor and luck are required for values-based, village-like networks to be common outside of organized religion. Journalist Jim Dalrymple II wrote a popular Substack entry explaining why he started going back to church as a parent. After growing up in a Mormon congregation and then becoming a religious “none,” he wrote, “I have not seen any organic friend group, parent organization, or social club (eg adult softball etc.) that comes even close” to that level of “village.” What about Burning Man? “Look, when I was 12, the dads in my congregation would drag us youths around on Sunday afternoons to bring the sacrament (bread and water in our church) to old ladies in nursing homes. Is that a typical Sunday activity for a Burner?” After deciding he didn’t need to believe to belong, Dalrymple went back to church to give his kids “a mental health seatbelt.” He recommended that parents seeking a community to help raise their kids “wrestle with the idea that one of the most obvious resources has been staring us in the face all along.”
Maybe Cragun and Dalrymple, together, have the right of it. Maybe we don’t need to conclude that parents need religion to suggest that they might stand to benefit from it. I’ll have to think that over when I get the house to myself tonight. My 16-year-old co-runs the Quaker Youth Leadership Program that her younger brother participates in, along with a bunch of friends and the kind, goofy older boys they all look up to. Those older boys are the sons of one of my dear friends, and also counselors at the Quaker camp her youngest sister and cousin are looking forward to attending in July. This evening, they’ll be preparing sandwiches for the souls sleeping on the street near the Meeting—feeling good about it, like Obadiah. That, plus the driving lesson a Meeting member is giving her afterward (my hair trigger with the imaginary brake hasn’t been great for our relationship), should give me time to answer my sister’s text about the child care provider at her Meeting, more than 1,200 miles away, who happens to be the brother of the man I’ve been working with on a project to support immigrants, the same project my son successfully championed at that gathering Rolene drove him to. From where I’m sitting, it truly does take a village.
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