National Religious Context and Familial Religiosity within a Jewish Framework

Abstract

Kelley and De Graaf studied the relationship between national and familial religiosity in 15 Christian societies. They found that secular people living in religious societies acquire more orthodox Christian beliefs than similar persons living in secular societies do. We examine whether their findings can be extended to societies that are not Christian by contrasting Jewish religiosity in the United States with Jewish religiosity in Israel. Extensive surveys of American and Israeli Jews enable us to examine the impact of similar and dissimilar societal religious contexts. The survey data indicate that the overall religious level of Israeli society is on a par with the United States. We find that there is an interaction effect. On the whole, Israeli Jewry has an enhanced level of religiosity which is higher than that of American Jews, even for those who belong to the American Orthodox denomination. Israeli secular Jews are found to acquire enhanced religiosity characteristics from their surrounding majority Jewish society. Secular American Jews do acquire Christian religiosity traits and display religious service attendance levels considerably below that of their surrounding Christian society.