Religion and Families

An Introduction

Loren D. Marks, David C. Dollahite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781848725454
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317804956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first multidisciplinary text to address the growing scholarly connection between religion and family life. The latest literature from family studies, psychology, sociology, and religion is reviewed along with narratives drawn from interviews with 200 racially, religiously, and regionally diverse families which bring the concepts to life. Written in a thought-provoking, accessible, and sometimes humorous style by two of the leading researchers in the field, the book reflects the authors' firsthand experience in teaching today's students about religion's impact on families. Prior to writing the book, the authors read the sacred texts of many faiths, interviewed religious leaders, and attended religious services for a wide array of faiths. The result is an accurate and engaging account of why and how families are impacted by their religion. The pedagogical features of the text include boldfaced key terms defined in the glossary, text boxes, chapter conclusions, summary points, and review questions.

Religion and Families:

• Examines several denominations within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
• Reviews findings from racially and ethnically diverse families, from traditional and diverse family forms, and examines gender and life-course issues.
• Addresses the impact of one's religious involvement on longevity, divorce rates, and parenting styles.
• Considers demographic, family-, couple-, and individual-level data that relate to prayer and other sacred practices.
• Presents a balanced treatment of the latest research and a new model for studying family and religion.
• Explores the "whys," "hows," and processes at work in the religion-family connection.

The book opens with a discussion of why religion and family connections matter. Chapter 2 defines religion and presents a new conceptualization of religion. Empirical research connections between religion and marriage, divorce, family, and parent-child relationships are explored in chapters 3 through 6. The interface between religion and the family in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are reviewed in chapters 7, 8, and 9. Chapter 10 explores the unique challenges that religion presents for diverse family forms. Prayer as a coping mechanism for life's challenges such as death and disability are explored in chapter 11. Chapter 12 examines forgiveness in the context of marriages and families. The book concludes with a review of the book's most important themes and findings.

Intended as a text for undergraduate courses in family and religion, the psychology or sociology of the family, the psychology or sociology of religion, pastoral/biblical counseling, or family and youth ministry, taught in human development and family studies, psychology, sociology, religion, social work, pastoral counseling, and sometimes philosophy. This book also appeals to family therapists and counselors.

1
Why Religion Matters to You Right Now and in Your Future Family

Why does this book on Religion and Families matter enough that you should take the time to read, ponder, and consider the central issues we want to discuss with you? In this initial chapter, we will briefly offer you several reasons why the religion and family connection matters to you now and in your future family. We are not trying to get preachy on you, but we do have some fascinating discoveries to share. Who knows, some of them may even influence your life. They have certainly influenced ours.

In this opening chapter, we hope to pique your curiosity, but we will spend the remainder of the book offering you a deeper and more probing view of the ideas and connections we can only introduce here. We sincerely hope you will not only read but also carefully consider the best and most meaningful ideas we present.

Why Does the Religion-Family Connection Matter to Us on a Personal Level?

Before we explain why the connection between religion and families matters to you, we would like to briefly explain how and why this connection has come to matter to us both personally and professionally. As a college freshman, Loren was playing basketball (and occasionally studying) at a state school in Oregon. After his freshman year, something happened. He decided to do some volunteer missionary work, spending a large share of his time in inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His 24 months there were spent carefully observing, interacting with, and learning from a variety of (predominantly African-American) families from several faiths and living in an array of life situations. A take-home message for Loren, as a young man from rural Oregon, was that there were two factors that seemed to elevate the lives of those with whom he worked. Those factors were: (a) authentic engagement in a religious faith, and (b) a motivated college education. These are points to which we will later return.

At 18 years of age, Dave was a carefree California boy whose religion of choice was tennis. His “saints” were tennis stars Bjorn Borg and Stan Smith, not Peter and Paul. However, Dave was introduced to, read, and pondered some sacred religious texts that influenced him deeply enough that he went through a religious conversion of both belief and action. After a year of intense religious study, he made the decision to do some voluntary mission work in the Boston, Massachusetts area. This was both a life-enriching and life-changing experience for him. From closely observing thousands of individuals in hundreds of families, he learned that how people approached their deepest beliefs strongly influenced their most valued relationships. He also learned that those families that put their faith at the center of their family lives seemed better able to deal with a number of challenges than families with little or no faith involvement.

Why Does Emerging Adulthood Matter to Us?

If you will pardon the personal notes, the vitally important point is that, for both of us, the college years and “emerging adulthood” (as this stage is currently called in the social sciences) were transformative. We began these years absorbed in non-religious and non-academic interests—basketball and tennis—but we both experienced times of reflection and uneasiness and, at times, a search for something “more” and a desire to figure out who we really were. We both went through changes and the intensification of hope, faith, and a desire to connect with and serve others. Those changes impacted our subsequent academic interests and foci—we both emerged from our voluntary missionary and outreach service with a desire to study families. Our volunteer religious service also significantly influenced our decisions regarding whom and how to marry, as well as our philosophies of life and how to best pursue happiness. Today, we are both in long-term marriages. Loren and Sandra have been married since 1995 and have five children. Dave and Mary have been married since 1983 and have seven children and three grandchildren.

We also share an abiding interest in and love for emerging adults. We have taught a combined total of nearly 200 college courses on family life to young adults and are both convinced that (professionally speaking) we have the best job in the world. Additionally, roughly five combined decades of our lives have been spent in voluntary involvement with youth and emerging adults in community and faith community settings away from our university campuses. Emerging adults matter deeply to us, which leads us to an additional point.

If you have taken an introductory-level psychology or human development class, you are likely aware that one of the few points of consensus among leading psychologists is that “during the first six years, the template for life is set down” (Doherty, 2001, p. 43). We agree with this well-established perspective, but we are additionally convinced that during the stage of emerging adulthood, we make several central decisions that relate to religion, family, and identity—and that some of these decisions echo and resound throughout the remainder our lives. If the first six years of life are when the blueprint or template for life is sketched, it is often during the college years that early but vitally important aspects of building take place. This conviction represents one primary motive for accepting the invitation to write this book for you.

Why Does the Religion-Family Connection Matter to Us on a Professional Level?

As we have explained, we have a personal interest in the religion and family connection as well as a deep, personal investment in emerging adults. However, what led us to care enough about the connection between religion and families to write this book? We would like to answer that question in a way that will frame the remainder of this text.

In 1995, Dave was a young professor and Loren was an undergraduate student in family studies. One day after class, Dave extended an invitation to Loren to work with him on a research project that was examining families with children who had special needs. Loren gratefully accepted the invitation.

As we studied these families with a special needs child, we learned that (particularly when a child is born with a profound disease or disability) the eventual divorce rate and likelihood of the father moving out of the family picture were discouragingly high. After some consideration, we decided that rather than focus on the reasons many fathers left these difficult situations, we might be able to learn something of significance by interviewing fathers who stayed. With the help of a kind woman who served as a director of a services center for children with special needs and their families, we began interviewing fathers who had remained closely supportive of their wife and child(ren) in the face of heartbreaking challenges. We asked these fathers several questions about the source of their strength—and we received several recurring answers. Those answers, across several research articles we eventually wrote, included: (a) God, (b) their wife and marriage, (c) spiritual beliefs, (d) religious practices including prayer, and (e) their faith community (Dollahite, 1998, 2003; Dollahite, Marks, & Olson, 1998, 2002; Marks & Dollahite, 2001). There was an agnostic father or two who did not frame their ongoing commitment in terms of the Divine, but most of the dads (if we talked with them long enough) allowed us to step onto what we have now come to call “the sacred ground” of their inner world (Marks, 2004). One father, Luke,¹ whose son had severe mental and physical delays and was not likely to ever walk, was one example. Luke shared with us a sacred “vision” he had that kept him going. He said:

After this life is over, we will meet the Savior, and my son, Robert, will be there, and he will be perfectly normal and alert and the child of God that I hoped he would be. He will look at me and say, “Thank you for taking care of me, for doing the things that you did.” I think about the long-term perspective after this life when we meet the Savior, and he looks at you and says, “You did a good job as a father,” and when Robert will say to me that I did good.

(Marks & Palkovitz, 2007, p. 221)

This vision was especially powerful to Luke because Robert, his son, could not speak.

Another father Loren interviewed was unforgettable. We will call him Brad. Brad and his wife had a son with some special needs. Then, several years after the birth of their son, they had triplet daughters who were born severely premature. One of the triplets died shortly after birth. The other two survived but had significant developmental delays in addition to visual and hearing problems. Our home-based interview was extended due to frequent and chaotic interruptions from a series of mild “emergencies” involving the girls, then age two. (Brad had given his wife a rare “night off” with her friends). Brad cared for his girls with a patience and easiness of manner that seemed to evenly counter the visible chaos of an exceptionally challenging parenting situation. At the conclusion of the interview, Loren (unable to restrain himself) blurted, “I know you are a man of faith, but don’t you ever shake your clenched fists at the heavens and say, ‘Why, God? Why!?’”

Brad looked at a point off in the distance that only he could see and said, “I did once.”

“Well, do you feel like you got a response?”

“Eventually.”

“Please, tell me what it was …”

Again, Brad looked at the distant point visible only to him. And then he softly replied, “God told me that I will live into the answer.”

Please think about that response for a while. Then think about it a little longer. We have been thinking about it for almost 20 years.

There are times when God asks nothing of his children except silence, patience, and tears.

—Charles Seymour Robinson

Why do we study and write about the religion and family connection? One initial answer is that because of parents like Luke and Brad we found ourselves in a situation where we had to do so. We asked these parents what mattered most to them and to their families, and they told us. As social scientists we were bound to report what we found. However, if that is what started us down the road of inquiry, it is not a sufficient explanation for why we continued down the religion and family road for two additional decades and conducted in-depth interviews with another 200 families around the United States. A more complete and honest answer may be that we continue to ask questions because, like Brad, we too are struggling and striving “to live into our own answers.” This book is a continuation of that quest for the right questions… and maybe some answers.

Not an Answer Book but a Question Book

This book is not an answer book. It does, however, provide insight into the lives of diverse families from various faiths as they wrestle to find and “live into” answers that provide hope and meaning. We hope that this book will be different from any you have previously read and that you will learn much that will be of worth to you. Although we will not be dispensing many answers, we will be asking a number of questions that we believe are worth asking. The answering is left to you.

Among the most important questions we will ask are those that the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, called “the Terrifying Questions”—terrifying in that they can be frightening and terribly difficult to answer. Perhaps the most central of all of the Terrifying Questions is: “When I die, is it all over, or is there something more?”

Our objectives in this book are unique in a couple of ways. First, we want to delve much deeper than most books or textbooks—indeed, life does not get much deeper than the Terrifying Questions. A second objective is to have some fun. We believe the two can be mutually inclusive. If we can think deeply together and laugh warmly together, we all win. In the text and text-boxes scattered throughout this book, we will invite you to think and sometimes just to laugh.

The BIG Questions

With all due respect to Aristotle, we prefer to rename the “terrifying” questions of life as the BIG questions.² The BIG questions have to do with existential mysteries about h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• 1 Why Religion Matters to You Right Now and in Your Future Family
• 2 What in the World Is Religion?
• 3 Does Religion Matter to Families?
• 4 Why Does Religion Matter in Marriage?
• 5 The Influence of Religious Beliefs in Marriage
• 6 Parenting in Faith—What Research Has Found
• 7 Parenting and American Families of Faith
• 8 Muslim Families in the United States
• 9 Jewish Families in the United States
• 10 Religion and Diverse Family Forms
• 11 How Religion Influences Coping with Stress and Challenges in Families
• 12 Forgiveness, Faith, and Families
• 13 What We Have Learned and What We Hope You Will Take with You
• Glossary
• Author Index
• Subject Index