Family Faith: Exploring the Effects of Marriage and Parenthood on Religiosity in a Longitudinal Sample of Americans

Amid changing patterns of religiosity, marriage, and childbearing in American society, recent studies report mixed findings on the links between religion and family. This paper uses longitudinal data from 2000 to 2021 to investigate the effects of family formation on religiosity in the United States. Specifically, it leverages multiple rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), a survey of over 8,000 Americans born between 1980 and 1984. Fixed effects regressions are employed to examine the sample of respondents with changes in religiosity across survey waves. All in all, the findings suggest that marriage and parenthood both increase religiosity. Becoming married is associated with higher religiosity along multiple dimensions, though it increases attendance more among men than women. Becoming divorced is associated with lower religiosity but manifests differently in men and women. Becoming widowed is associated with higher attendance. Moreover, an increase in the number of children is positively associated with religious attendance and importance of faith, mostly among women. For both men and women, the duration of parenthood is broadly associated with higher religiosity along multiple dimensions. In sum, despite the evolving nature of family and religion in the U.S., the two social institutions remain deeply linked.