Editor’s note – What follows is one believer’s account of losing a family’s Puritan inheritance of faith and finding a way back to it after a mother’s death and a divorce. The author ties this personal story to something larger: recent survey data suggesting young men are returning to religion in surprising numbers. We’re running this piece because the parable it leans on – the prodigal son – is one every generation needs retold, and because a family history of silence broken by grace is worth hearing.
A Culture Drifting from Faith
The child who has much may be at greater risk of giving in to temptation. Witness the generations as they march through the 21st century: as material wealth has increased and as life opportunities have unfolded like a flower, we seem to find that religion, spirituality, prayer, faith and belief are in continual decline.
Given freedom to do and dare, to learn and grow, to actualize the impulses of our dreams, we find many young Americans keeping their trucks and cars shiny, piercing body parts and painting arms and legs with tattoos. But they are not praying. A once central part of life: the personal faith journey, leading families and communities to greater understanding of the wisdom of God, seems relegated to a backseat in daily life. We find the most recent generations- generation X, Y and Z- most wayward: some have faith, most do not.
A Family History Comes to Light
In my own story, the story of my family, there may be some clues as to how we got here and some guidance as to the passage back.
I confess that I too was once part of this drift of secular denial. I was an extreme environmentalist. I knew there was a god, a being that I found most in the mountains and the forest. But guidance in seeking and finding, especially through the teachings of Christ, I had rejected. My father, an air force pilot, and his larger family of teachers and engineers all relegated Christian worship to a quaint artifact. Something once so central to life had become lost. The crucial light that must be held high if one is to see has become obscured.
An Ancestor Who Walked Away
This spring, Mom died. I got a text at work: “I need to talk to you.”
She had gone to urgent care for mild shoulder pain after raking the driveway. A CT scan revealed cancer throughout her body: liver, lungs, spine, everywhere. I returned home. In two months she was dead.
The summer unfolded: we buried her, and my brother and I set about taking care of Dad and organizing the household to carry on. Going through her papers, I found snippets of family history and put together the pieces. I realized that my first forbearers who came to the New World were Puritans: Protestant Christians who had left England in order to practice their religion in freedom. How a people who had crossed an ocean to place God and religion at the center of life had become a people who were successful in the secular world but had no discernible religion or faith was a curious riddle.
A clue presented itself in one lost newspaper clipping from the late 1800’s: an ancestor had been causing a commotion in a nearby town and had been placed in the jail. This was my father’s great-grandfather, Joseph, who had inherited a farm and property from his father, a surveyor and lawyer. He had two children with his wife. When the children were young, he had “run off,” leaving family and farm. He had disappeared to carouse and brawl and, I suppose, tramp about. Dad’s grandfather had been raised by his mother and his maternal family in the hills of Connecticut.
Joseph’s abundance had sparked a kind of spiritual collapse: this family born of the Puritans who had done well materially had lost faith and its centrality in life. There were no crosses or symbols in the home: no time was spent in prayer or even the discussion of faith.
It seems that in rejecting what had passed to him, by rejecting the bonds of family, of human obligation, of “righteousness,” he had engendered a kind of alienation from the foundations of religion that had once guided the lineage. This had occurred alongside the secularization of western society generally, as the bells and whistles of material progress and of science had obscured and replaced the essentially religious goals of life.
Editor’s note – Family history rarely explains itself in a straight line, but the instinct here is sound: unrepented sin in one generation can harden into practiced unbelief in the next. Scripture calls this exactly what it looks like – a hardening of the heart (Hebrews 3:13).
This secularity continued in my own life. Religion was something to be ignored and even feared.
Finding My Way Back to God
After my divorce, I understood that the very center of my life was missing. I realized that if you are not going toward God you are going further into darkness, thrashing about and doing the works of the evil one.
Editor’s note – The line “if you are not going toward God you are going further into darkness” is not just a turn of phrase. It echoes John’s Gospel closely: there is no neutral ground between light and darkness (John 1:5).
For me, a new chapter opened when I heard the silent calling of the cross on top of a nearby church, and one Sunday morning, I entered. A new world opened: the world of faith. My true journey had begun.
I believe a similar new chapter to the story is opening in American history. If we look Biblically, we might discern a new wind stirring the waters of culture.
The Prodigal Son, Then and Now
In the story of the prodigal son, which Jesus tells his disciples in Luke (15:11-32), we find a son who has much: love of a father, abundance, lands, and family. The young man rejects this and gives in to temptation, going off to a foreign land, carousing, and spending his family wealth on prostitutes. When he has nothing left, the prodigal son comes to his senses, realizes that his father is the fount of abundance, and returns home. This occurred in my own life and there are indications that this prophecy of Jesus is being realized now among the people.
Young Men Are Coming Home
A surprising 2026 Gallup poll, part of a long-running survey of American faith, found that 42 percent of young American men say that “religion” is an important part of life, up from 28 percent in 2022.
Editor’s note – Numbers like these should be read carefully; polling on religious sentiment among young men has shifted before and can shift again. But even a hesitant turn toward God is worth noticing and worth praying over.
The change is led by a surge among young men who have been emasculated by a culture chasing the chimera of sexual bliss, romantic notions of the security of wealth, prominence, and career. All this is so much sand in the sea when the truth must be confronted.
Perhaps this change is a signal that young men have come to their senses and realized that there is something much more important that is missing from their lives.
Perhaps young men are looking to build their lives upon a rock that does not wash away.
It is fitting that men, as the traditional protectors of the faith, tasked with leading the family and the community toward God are picking up where we left off those centuries ago, just as I picked up those a few years ago to lead myself and my family back to where it belongs: in the light. Perhaps the prodigal son has returned.
A Word from the Editor
Every family carries some version of Joseph’s story – a moment when someone set down what had been carried at real cost and walked away. The good news found on a Sunday morning is the same good news offered to any prodigal, in any generation: the Father is already watching the road, ready to run (Luke 15:20).
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: You write that going toward God is the only alternative to walking further into darkness, and that is the same stark choice Scripture puts before every reader who picks up your story. You place your own homecoming inside the parable of the prodigal son, and that choice lets readers see their own family history as unfinished rather than lost.