Denominations and Religious Intermarriage: Trends among White Americans in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Trends in religious intermarriage are examined for denominations in six marital cohorts of white Americans over the twentieth century. Log-linear analyses of national cross-sectional data indicate significant denominational differences in the trends-Conservative Christians appear to have avoided the increasing rates of religious intermarriage experienced by each of the other religious and denominational groupings examined. The effect of college attendance on intermarriage is also examined. The analysis findings are supportive of the interpretation of colleges as "marriage markets" from which individuals select marital partners. No support is found for the interpretation that college is a secularizing institution which erodes values regarding religious endogamy, or for the hypothesis that teenage marriages are more likely to be exogamous. A review of the research literature on religious intermarriage indicates a flurry of activity in recent years. This resurgence of interest is partially a result of the increasing availability of data on religion; the early deficit of census information on this aspect of social life is being gradually eliminated by the accumulation of national survey data. Still some limitations in the data remain. For example, because individual national surveys typically have too few cases for each of the Protestant denominations to be analyzed separately, many analysts have had to use the overly general categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Furthermore, much of the data on religion includes information on the respondent's (and their spouse's) religious identification at the time the interview was conducted, but not prior to marriage. Since about half of the intermarriages in the U.S. lead to conversion, analyses based solely on contemporary religious identification underestimate intermarriage rates by half (Yinger, 1970). In this paper we examine patterns of interdenominational marriage among U.S. marital cohorts in the twentieth century. We also investigate the influence of college attendance on interdenominational marriage rates, and find that religious intermarriage rates for those who attend college may be better explained by a theory of "marriage markets" than by the hypothesis that higher education has a secularizing influence. Before turning to these analyses, however, we first turn to a review of some the previous work on religious classifications, denominations, and intermarriage, and then to an examination of issues related to religious intermarriage trends in the marital cohorts of the recent U.S. population.