Abstract
Based on pooled data drawn from a representative Taiwan Social Change Survey dataset, this article analyzes the pattern of transmission of religious belief from parents to adult children in Taiwan from 1999 to 2009. As a society imbued with diverse religious traditions, Taiwan as a region of China serves as an ideal point of departure to examine religious mobility beyond the Western and monotheistic world. The article has three main findings. First, there is a gendered pattern in exchange mobility. Mothers play a stronger role than fathers overall, but Christian families have an inverse situation. Sons are more likely to adopt their parents’ religious belief than daughters. Second, a parent’s capacity to transmit his/her religious belief greatly depends on the religious group to which he/she belongs. Daoism shows more robustness than other religions in transgenerational transmission, which contradicts the prediction drawn from religious economy theory. Third, religious communities significantly differ from each other in structural mobility. Buddhism has the highest retentive capacity for reducing religious switching, and folk religions have the highest attractive capacity to win over switchers from other religious communities.
Highlights
Passing religiosity from parents to offspring serves as a key mechanism to retaining the vitality of religions
Most results stem from the homogeneity of samples—white American Protestant or Catholic adolescents (Keeley 1976; D’Antonio 1985; Ellison and Sherkat 1993; Bao et al 1999; Hoge et al 1982; Gunnoe and Moore 2002)
Religious economy theory consists of two parts: the supply-side theories focusing on religious regulation and competition as well as the productive capacity of congregations (Finke and Stark 1992), and the demand-side theories focusing on the preference dynamics and individual-level choices (Sherkat and Wilson 1995). The former indicates that religious groups or denominations develop two types of strategies to decrease the risk perceived by consumers
Summary
Passing religiosity from parents to offspring serves as a key mechanism to retaining the vitality of religions. Literature review In principle, the similarities and differences between children’s and parents’ religious identities can be attributed to two distinct social forces: exchange mobility and structural mobility (Hu and Leamaster 2015) The former is meant to discover transmission mechanisms at the micro level, such as parenthood, gender, and ethnicity, that result in systematical religious inheritance or deviation across generations due to people’s choices. Religious economy theory consists of two parts: the supply-side theories focusing on religious regulation and competition as well as the productive capacity of congregations (Finke and Stark 1992), and the demand-side theories focusing on the preference dynamics and individual-level choices (Sherkat and Wilson 1995) The former indicates that religious groups or denominations develop two types of strategies to decrease the risk perceived by consumers. I expect that (1) religious groups with high distinctiveness will have higher rates of retention, (2) religious groups with little distance from secular society will have lower rates of retention and will lose members through switching, and (3) religious groups similar to a high number of other religious organizations will have lower rates of retention
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
