If religious and spiritual identities have undergone something of a seachange in terms of when, where and how they are constituted, this is likely to be most significant for younger generations. Nonetheless, it also affects religiosity among other generations in interesting ways, through and beyond contact with young people.” (Hopkins et al., 2011: 317)
In the quotation above, Hopkins and colleagues specified the significance of understanding young people’s religiosity in terms of its significance not only for the young themselves but also for the religiosity of older generations. This shows the crucial role of intergenerational perspective in thinking through religious change. The weak/strong and positive/negative intergenerational transmission of religion indicates the vatality of religion. However, this perspective has been neglected by geographers. The existing research has mainly discussed different generations’ religious experiences separately, especially on children and young people (e.g. Hemming, 2009; Hopkins,
2007b; 2009a; Dwyer, 1999; 2009). The older and middle generation is largely ignored (Vanderbeck, 2007; Valentine et al., 2009: 287).
With regard to research on intergenerational transmission of religion, it has been generally agreed that parents have big influence on children’s religious belief and practices. Vermeer et al. (2012) studied the religious transmission in Netherland and found that juvenile church attendance is greatly affected by parental, especially maternal church attendance and is the main reasons of adult church attendance. In a similar vein, Dutch children’s God concepts were found largely informed by parents and teachers in religious schools (De Roos et al., 2001). In the United States, parents were also found playing as positive guides for youth’s religious orientation, behaviour and involvement (Cnaan et al., 2004). Moreover, the more educated and more affluent the parent(s) were found, the more likely that the youth will engage in religious practices. Religion was also used by parents to educate children in social values and was regarded as a kind of “social capital”. Korean Protestant immigrants in the United States were also found having been successful in transmitting their religion to their children (Min and Kim, 2005), even though not traditional Korean culture (discussed in section 2.5.1).
Apart from the positive results listed above, it is also found parental transmission sometimes does not lead to children’s increasing religiosity or religious practices. While they (2005: 12) positively asserted that “faith may change shape but does not fade away”, through examining the religious situation in Britain, Voas and Crockett (2005) found that believing and belonging are declining at the same rate and generational transmission of religion is weak.
The ways of intergenerational transmission of religion is deeply influenced by the religious and cultural traditions. Imitating parents is a main way of developing religiosity among the youth. In Peek’s (2005) research on second-generation young Muslims in the United States, formation of their religious identity has three stages: religion as ascribed identity, as chosen identity and as declared identity. The first stage is marked by young Muslims’ imitation of their parents, unconditional acceptance without introspection, limited knowledge on Islam, and unclear sense of religious identity when they are children and adolescents. During this stage, their religious identity was ascribed with their birth in the Muslim families and their religious identity was taken for granted (Peek, 2005: 223-230). It is evidenced in Min’s (2010) research that second generation Indian Hindus conduct many fewer religious practices than their parents and than peer Korean Christians. However, according to Min (2010) Indian Hindu immigrants do better in transmitting their cultural traditions and identity than Korean Christians. He further (Min, 2010: 211) argued that the groups with indigenous religions such as Indian Hindus, have
stronger foundation to transmit religious traditions among generations because they are motivated by the idea of preserving ethnic heritage. Indian Hinduism is quite similar to Tibetan Bon in many aspects. Firstly, both of them are quite tolerant to other thoughts and flexible in religious practices; secondly, they are practiced more at home, less in congregations; thirdly, they have a lot of deities and beliefs, and do not have a core scripture like the Bible for Christianity which is easy to access for ordinary laypeople.
Apart from ethnicity, values and world views can be intergenerationally transmitted through religion. Haynie and Pearce (2004) found that moral codes and social regulations could be transmitted to children through parental religious influence.
In all, ‘parents-to-children’ has been generally assumed the solely pattern of intergenerational transmission of religion. In actuality, the intergenerational transmission is not linear, uniform and unidirectional, but bumpy, mutual and multidirectional, and partial. Children also actively engage in accepting, rejecting or negotiating and generating the generational transmission. They even could influence the religious practices and beliefs of their parents, grandparents, siblings and friends. Religious beliefs might not be transmitted uniformly with religious practices. Other pairs of intergenerational transmissions of religion have not been given enough attention, such as grandparents/children, youth/youth, mother/children, father/children, teacher/students. Different pairs of intergenerational transmission of religion usually coexistent. Thus there is a need to compare different sources of religious transmission, such as the religious influence from father and mother, from non-familial age cohorts (such as teachers, schoolmates).
Young people’s sensitivity to changing locations might greatly change patterns of intergenerational transmission of religion, thus investigating the interruptions is particularly helpful in thinking through changing patterns of intergenerational transmission of religion. School education is one of crucial interruptions of the familial religious transmissions (see following section).