Religious Identity and Family Ideologies in the Transition to Adulthood

This article examines how religion shapes family ideologies in young adulthood. Using the 31-year Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children (N = 909), we find relationships between mother's religious characteristics when her child was born and the child's own family ideologies in young adulthood. Further, multiple dimensions of young adults' religious identities are independently related to their family ideologies, suggesting unique influences of both religious service attendance and the importance of religion. Our results vary across time and family ideologies in interesting patterns, but relationships between religion and attitudes are remarkably consistent. From early in life, mothers' and children's religious characteristics shape family ideologies in ways likely to help explain relationships found between religion and family behaviors. Key Words: attitudes, family, intergenerational transmission, religion, young adulthood. Comprehensive theoretical models describing forces shaping family behaviors frequently recognize the importance of attitudes, values, and beliefs in the process (Ajzen, 1988; Fricke, 1997). These family ideologies are not fully determinant but contribute to a schema of available and preferable options (Swidler, 1986). Research has shown associations between family ideologies and subsequent family formation behavior (Axinn & Thornton, 1992, 1993; Barber, 2000). Due to the importance attitudes, values, and beliefs hold for family behavior across the life course, understanding how these ideologies are shaped over time teaches us more about what leads to a variety of family outcomes. One often identified propagator of specific family ideologies is religion (Christiano, 2000; Dollahite, Marks, & Goodman, 2004; Mahoney, Pargament, Swank, & Tarakeshwar, 2001). Various religions and religious subgroups have family ideologies that are directly and indirectly conveyed through religious dogma and structures (Edgell, 2005; Gay, Ellison, & Powers, 1996; Wilcox, 2004). Thus, religious affiliation, religious service attendance, and the personal importance of religion have all been shown to relate to various family attitudes (Mahoney et al.). This article expands our understanding of the relationship between religion and family ideologies in four key ways. First, most studies focus on one dimension of religion (e.g., affiliation, attendance, or importance) or create a composite, but we theorize about each dimension of religion separately and compare the relationships between each and a given family attitude. second, we take a life course approach to religious identity and its influence, examining how religious exposure in childhood may relate to religious affiliation, practice, and salience in adulthood, and may still have independent relationships with family attitudes in adulthood. Third, rather than focus on one family attitude or a composite, we explore how multiple dimensions of religion relate to six different attitudinal components of family ideology (from issues of sex and reproduction to marriage and household gender dynamics). These attitudes represent the main aspects of family formation becoming salient to emerging adults (Arnett, 2004; Rindfuss, 1991). Comparing how multiple dimensions of religion relate to each family attitude separately allows us to assess religion's role in attitude formation for different family attitudes. Fourth, we examine religion's relationship with these six family attitudes at multiple points in early adulthood: ages 18,23, and 31, exploring whether religion's influence changes over time. In the pages that follow, we theorize the relationship between multiple dimensions of religion across the early life course and six specific attitudes about family behaviors. Then we describe and employ survey data from the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children, a two-generation, 31-year panel study with an 80% retention rate, to test our hypotheses. …