Religion, Gender, and the Hispanic Experience in the United States: Catholic/Protestant Differences in Religious Involvement, Social Status, and Gender-Role Attitudes

Abstract

This research explores Catholic/Protestant differences in religious involvement, social status, and gender-role attitudes among Hispanic men and women in the United States. A central issue addressed is whether examination of gender resolves some existing issues concerning the consequences of the pattern of Hispanics shifting from Catholicism to new forms of Protestant affiliation in the United States. A secondary analysis of data from the 1972-1998 General Social Surveys in the United States, analyzed within gender categories, asks whether the effects of Protestant affiliation are differentiated by gender. An additional issue is whether the effects of Protestantism show any important parallels to patterns observed in Latin America. The results suggest several important differences in the effects of Protestantism by gender: compared to their Catholic counterparts, Protestant women are more likely to have heightened religious involvement, Protestant men are more likely to have distinctive social status patterns and, both male and female Protestants have highly conservative, rather than liberal, gender-role attitudes. These results point to no generalized effects of Protestant affiliation among peoples of Spanish-origins in the Western Hemisphere, and suggest that the growth of Hispanic Protestantism in the United States represents a revival of popular religion, a longstanding form of cultural resistance among disenfranchised Spanish-origin populations throughout the Americas.