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When I was a kid, my family didn't go to church. My parents were intellectuals whose estrangement from organized religion happened long before I was born. But when my only sibling, a brother nearly four years older than me, declared himself an Evangelical Christian at the age of 17, they took it as an attack, a betrayal of their liberal values. Seeking a place where they could nurse their wounds and maybe show him they were willing to meet him on his journey part-way, they joined a mainline Presbyterian church in an affluent part of town with a worldly, well-educated congregation.

Of the three of us, my father was the most reluctant churchgoer. If my mother slept in on Sunday morning or was out of town, he'd find something else to do, and it was rare that he had much to say about the service on the car ride home. He resisted becoming an elder in the church until the pressure from my mother was too intense. And most egregiously to me, he never sang. He wasn't musical, unlike my mother, my brother and me, but it still seemed so cold of him not to join in the hymns. In the midst of all of those other fathers with their unabashed baritones and basses, he refused to even move his lips silently to the words.

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One of the advantages of writing a book about being a parent is that it gives you an opportunity to make use of all the stories you've been collecting on your children ever since the moment they were conceived. In Between a Church and a Hard Place: One Faith-Free Dad's Struggle to Understand What it Means to be Religious (Or Not), I ranged widely in my exploration of the history, sociology and psychology of religion. But I must admit that subject that was most enjoyable was my kids' thoughts on faith. Their spiritual musings were a bottomless well of material for me as an author, and I returned to it again and again as I wrote. For two years, I compiled these adorable anecdotes on my computer desktop, peppering my wife for minute details I couldn't remember while imagining the joy and laughter they would produce in my dear readers.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, when the following conversation was overheard in October, after my manuscript was already complete. My son, who is seven, was sitting on the floor of the den in our home, playing with a toy truck. His 5-year-old sister, sitting idly nearby, was muttering under her breath, until he stopped her. "I know what you're doing," he said , irritated. "You're praying for me to play animals with you. Quit praying." But she refused, without actually denying that she was seeking divine help getting her big brother's attention. "I'm just praying for people to be good, but it never works," she said. "That's because God isn't real," he lectured. This from a child who had talked openly about believing in the Man Upstairs since he was a toddler. Now it was her turn to testify. "Yes he is," she replied. "God is everywhere. He's just dead."

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Last month, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life published a fascinating report on the religious lives of the Millennial generation. In it were loads of survey data showing that young adults today are not only less religious than their elders, they're less religious than their elders were when they were young adults. For instance, only one in four Millennials claims an affiliation with a faith, compared to 20 percent for Gen Xers in the 1990s and 13 percent for Baby Boomers in the late 1970s, and fewer than one in five Millennials say they go to church regularly.

On first blush, these figures fit the recent pattern of grim news for God (Remember the Newsweek cover last year on "The Decline and Fall of Christian America"?) But in fact, Pew found that Americans born after 1980 believe in The Man Upstairs and engage in daily prayer in similar proportions as their parents and grandparents did when they were in their 20s. And on some measures, such as the intensity and importance of their religion, Millennials report higher levels of devotion.  

In Between a Church and a Hard Place, I describe the debate among sociologists about the secularization of American society. Some point to data like these as evidence of the waning power and significance of religious institutions that has already emptied pews across Europe. Others argue that organized faith is alive and well in the United States and that young Americans will gravitate back to it, as they always have, when they start their families.

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Andrew Park is one of our guest bloggers during the week of March 8th. If you have any questions for Andrew Park, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about Between a Church and a Hard Place:

At age thirty-five, Andrew Park hit a parenting snag. Teaching his children about ethics, good manners, and how to shoot a free throw posed no problem. When they started asking about religion, he came up empty-handed. Raised in a faith- free family where teenage rebellion meant being born again as an evangelical Christian (as his brother did), Park always believed he'd be a nonbeliever. (And his lapsed Christian wife thought the same.) But when his children ask if God is real, he knows it is his responsibility to try and find the answer. Between a Church and a Hard Place is the often funny yet deeply tender story of that quest. It follows the author as he tries to reconcile his upbringing with the demands and liabilities he faces as a young father. He realizes with alarming clarity that if he doesn't provide some answers, someone else gladly will.

As he searches for middle ground, Andrew Park addresses the hot-button questions surrounding faith and freedom and explores the polar reaches of religion in America. Along the way he uncovers what it means to embrace faith-or not-while still being a good role model, and more important, still being true to himself.