Religious Education in the Family

Religious Education in the Family is a work by Henry Frederick Cope on the role of the home in the religious formation of American Protestant children. The book extends Cope’s broader Progressive era religious education reform argument from the congregation and Sunday school setting into the family setting where children spend most of their time and where the most basic religious formation actually occurs.

The argument addresses what Cope considered a real failure of late-nineteenth-century American Protestant religious education. The conventional pattern had treated religious instruction as something that happened on Sunday mornings at the church Sunday school, with the rest of the week left to other matters. The result was that children received religious instruction in a setting disconnected from their regular daily lives and from the parental and family relationships that actually formed their character.

Cope argues that the family should be the primary setting of religious education, with the church Sunday school playing a supplementary rather than a primary role. Parents should be conducting daily religious instruction at home, should be modeling religious life through their own conduct, and should be integrating religious themes into the ordinary activities of family life rather than separating religion into Sunday morning compartments. The book provides practical recommendations on how parents can carry out this work.

The Progressive era family pedagogy that Cope draws on owed much to Horace Bushnell’s earlier Christian Nurture of 1847, the foundational American Protestant work on family religious education that had argued against the older evangelical pattern of dramatic adolescent conversion in favor of a gradual nurture of children within Christian families. Cope extends Bushnell’s argument with attention to the practical methods that early-twentieth-century American Protestant families could use.

The book reflects the moderate American Protestant assumptions of the period about family life, gender roles, and parental authority. Modern readers will find aspects of the framework dated, particularly the assumption of two-parent Protestant households with a particular gendered division of religious teaching labor.

The book is mostly of interest now to historians of American Protestant religious education and family life. It pairs with Cope’s other writings, with Bushnell’s Christian Nurture, and with the broader Religious Education Association literature of the Progressive era.