Parental Control, Age, and Religious Practice

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Previous research revealed significant declines in religious practice with age for adolescents from Baptist, Catholic and Mainline Protestant denominations. In the present study we extend that research to determine whether other characteristics of adolescents' religiosity and whether parental religiousness and parental control have an effect on that decline. In that regard, we show that while parental religiosity and adolescents' religious belief are strongly related to religious practice, neither affects the decline in practice with age. We also find that the decline in religious practice with age does vary jointly across categories of religious experience and parental control. In a recent paper (Sloane and Potvin, 1983) we showed that among adolescents the relationship between age and religious practice is conditional upon religious denomination. Younger boys and girls are more likely to be high on religious practice than older adolescents among Baptists, Catholics and mainline Protestants. The reverse, however, is true among sectarians and adolescents who have no formal religious affiliation or who identify with non-Christian groups. In this paper we attempt to explore further the negative relationship between age and religious practice that exists among the major denominations. Adolescent church membership within the major denominations is often a simple extension of parental membership. In our own sample 95 percent of all adolescents have the same denominational affiliation as their mother or father. This is not surprising. According to Harms (1944), the young child's religion is simply an extension of parental religion and it is only later in life that the child discovers the religious institution and becomes capable of personal religious decisions. The extent to which the child's religious practice is the result of such personal decisions, however, remains problematic. The simple transference from identification with the parents to identification with their religious institution does not necessarily imply a change in the nature of the relations involved. Both forms of identification may fall into the same general pattern of relations based on constraint or authority (see Piaget, 1932:95-96). Children often go to church because their parents wish it. This may not be a problem at the younger ages of adolescence but as the adolescent matures, relations of mutuality and cooperation become more important in defining their self-identity. At this stage of life adolescents begin to co-construct systems of beliefs and meanings which may well affect religious practice (Potvin and Lee, 1982).