Change in Religious Affiliation and Family Stability

Relations between change in religious affiliation and family stability are examined using a sample of wives in highly stable marriages. Hypotheses regarding the stabilizing effect of common religious affiliation are largely supported. As predicted, change to a common religious affiliation is most frequently toward the affiliation of the spouse having the greater amount of education. These findings indicate the reciprocal nature of influence between religious and secular variables-an obvious point sometimes forgotten by scholars. Initial religious difference between spouses is considerably greater than is indicated in the literature. The usefulness of studying interdenominational as well as interfaith marriages is demonstrated. 8ociologists have become increasingly concerned with the importance of religion in understanding behavior in contemporary society. Indeed, Lenski1 has reported that variables associated with religious group membership exert as much influence on the attitudes and behaviors of urban Americans as does position in the social class structure. Whether additional study will support Lenski's findings remains an open question; however, that religion should have important effects on other variables does seem to us most plausible. Religion as a variable has been stressed in studies dealing both with mate selection and the subsequent adjustment of the married pair after marriage.2 It has proven to be a surprisingly powerful measure in such studies, despite poor operationalization in most studies. The crudeness of operational treatment of religious variables may be illustrated as follows. First, studies sometimes classify all Protestants in a single category, thus implicitly assuming that Protestants of all denominations are more similar to one another than they are to Catholics, Jews, or agnostics. Yet a Unitarian probably is more similar in the content of his beliefs to an agnostic than he is to a Baptist, a Lutheran, or many other Protestants. Second, the respondent's religious affiliation at time of study is frequently interpreted as an indicator of his lifelong affiliation, an assumption of stability which is often not warranted.3 In fact, it is probably more reasonable to assume that a child reared in a Republican family will remain a Republican as an adult than it is to assume that he will practice the same religion as an adult that he followed as a child. To avoid these pitfalls, we examine interdenominational differences as well as interfaith differences between spouses, and we treat current religious affiliation as a variable rather than assume it accurately reflects lifelong membership. * Support of the University Research Council of the University of Nebraska for the part of this report contributed to by N. Babchuk is gratefully acknowledged. 1 Gerhard Lenski, "The Sociology of Religion in the United States: A Review of Theoretically Oriented Research," Tire a part de Social Compass, 9 (1962), pp. 307-337, and The Religious Factor (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963). 2 Hollingshead contends that "Next to race, religion is the most decisive factor in the segregation of males and females into categories that are approved or disapproved with regard to nuptiality." August B. Hollingshead, "Cultural Factor in the Selection of Marriage Mates," American Sociological Reizvew, 15 (October 1950), p. 622. Also see Robert F. Winch, The Modern Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), pp. 702-703. 3 Lenski notes that although 85 percent of the white Protestants and Catholics in his sample reported that they and their spouses held the same major faith (i.e., Protestantism or Catholicism), a check on their religious backgrounds revealed that only 68 percent had been reared in the same faith (op. cit., pp. 54-55). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 05:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms