"According to the Gallup polling organization (which itself fits into the subject of this article, as George Gallup Jr. is an evangelical Christian who has called his work 'a kind of ministry'), 42 percent of Americans consider themselves evangelical or born again...."

(Source: Russell Shorto, "Faith at Work," The New York Times Magazine, October 31, 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/magazine/31FAITH.html .)

"An auto-parts manufacturer in downtown Philadelphia. An advertising agency in Fort Lauderdale. An Ohio prison. A Colorado Springs dental office. A career-counseling firm in Portland, Ore. The Curves chain of fitness centers. American Express. Intel. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The I.R.S. The Pentagon. The White House. Thousands of businesses and other entities, from one-man operations to global corporations to divisions of the federal government, have made room for Christianity on the job, and in some cases have oriented themselves completely around Christian precepts."

(Source: Russell Shorto, "Faith at Work," The New York Times Magazine, October 31, 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/magazine/31FAITH.html .)

The Power of Inherited Faith 

Religiosity has been consistently correlated with all sorts of social goods, from increasing one's likelihood of marriage and decreasing the likelihood of divorce to tempering juvenile delinquency and premarital sexual behavior. But those effects are even stronger when members of a family share the same faith commitments, judging from a study by Lisa D. Pearce of the University of North Carolina and Dana L. Haynie of Ohio State.

Analyzing a sample of 10,444 pairs of adolescents and their mothers from the 1995 and 1996 waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the sociologists found that the more that mothers and children shared the same level of religiosity, the less the children were delinquent. Where a mother or child was very religious and the other was not, however, child delinquency actually increased.

In their first of several multivariate analyses using binomial regressions, the researchers found that each unit increase in the mother's religiosity (determined by frequency of church attendance and perceived importance of religion) was associated with a 9 percent decline in her child's delinquency (measured by involvement in 14 different delinquent behaviors). A second test found that each unit increase in the adolescent's religiosity yielded a 6 percent reduction in his delinquency. A third model that tested for independent effects found that the mother's religiosity - but not the child's - remained statistically related to child delinquency, a dynamic the researchers theorized was due to the high correlation between maternal and child religiosity (r=.60).

A fourth test found that delinquency rates were lowest where both mother and adolescent were highly religious and highest when a child was not religious but whose mother was very religious or when the child was very religious and his mother was not. Lower risks of delinquency were also found where both mother and child reported being nonreligious, suggesting that "mother-child religious homogamy is at least as important as the effect of an adolescent's own religiosity on their subsequent delinquency."

Although the professors do not broach the theological implications, their study confirms a principle shared in both Jewish and Christian traditions that faith passes along generational lines and works best when children inherit their parents' faith commitments, rather than attempt to decide religious issues on their own.