People Raised by Religious Hypocrites More Likely to Become Atheists at Younger Age

A recent study has found that children of parents who less consistently model the tenets of their faith are more likely to become an atheist at a younger age.

The study, published by the journal Religion Brain & Behavior, featured data from surveys of thousands of atheists who were asked about the age they no longer believed in God or Gods.

The respondents were also asked about the "credibility-enhancing displays" (CRED) of their parents as well as other factors that might have played a role in their decisions to abandon theism.

According to PsyPost.org, the researchers found that when parents engaged in more credibility-enhancing displays of their faith — such as treating other people with kindness in accordance with a faith in Christ or feeding the homeless — their children became atheists at a higher age than parents who did provide provide as many credibility-enhancing displays to their children.

As past research has suggested that exposure to credibility-enhancing displays is an "important variable" for predicting who does and does not become a religious believer, the researchers sought to make more clear if credibility-enhancing displays impact when a person rejects religious beliefs they held during childhood.

The research uses a large sample of formerly believing atheists to draw up two analyses that assess the "ability of CREDs to predict the age at which an individual became an atheist."

In the first analysis with a sample size of 5,153 atheists, the researchers found that credibility-enhancing displays of faith are "positively associated with a delay" in the age of atheism and stated that "family-level religious variables" moderate this relationship. Those family-level variables include religious importance, religious choice and religious conflict.

In its second analysis with a sample size of 3,210, the researchers found that credibility-enhancing displays "remained a stable predictor of Age of Atheism," even while controlling for demographics, parental quality, religious variables, relational variables, and institutional variables.

"Overall, while findings support a robust relation of CREDs to atheistic outcomes even when controlling for many other variables that influence religious transmission processes, they also highlight the importance of considering how such other variables modify the impact of CREDs on (non)religious outcomes," the research states.

The study was led by Joseph Langston, a researcher at the Atheist Research Collaborative and a PhD student at Victoria University in New Zealand. Other authors of the study include David Speed, assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada; and Thomas J. Coleman III, a researcher at the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Laboratory at Coventry University in England.

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