Religiosity and fertility: how strong a connection?

Abstract

Among the major findings of demographic research has been the persis tent fertility differences associated with membership in certain religious and ethnic groups. In the United States, Catholic fertility is clearly higher than Protestant fertility as shown by many studies such as Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell (1959); Whelpton, Campbell, and Patterson (1966); and Ryder and Westoff (1971). Abroad, the same sort of Catholic lead over Protestants persists as reported by Day (1968). In Lebanon, Yaukey (1961) finds Moslems with higher fertility than Christians; in Israel, Lazerwitz (1971) reports a range of Israeli fertility with Moslem and Druze leading, followed by Oriental Jews, then Christian Arabs, with the lowest fertility found among Western Jews. Faced with such overwhelming evidence of religious and ethnic group fertility differences, it was natural for researchers to turn their attention to discerning whether variations in strength of religious and ethnic involvement within religious and ethnic groups were also associated with significant fertility differences. Here the evidence to date is both less abundant and less decisive. Lazerwitz ( 1970) reports that he could find no general associations between levels of Chicago area Protestant or Jewish identification and family size or child-spacing. Further, his measure of religious and ethnic involvement could explain no more than eight percent of the variance in present fertility, three percent of the variance in expected, future child bearing, and 11 percent of the variance in birth-order spacing. Wilson and Bumpass (1973: 593) use a dummy variable regression technique on Catholic fertility data and report that mean fertility increases sizably as one goes from Catholics who never attend communion to those who attend at least once a week. Their full model, containing age, marital duration, parity, education, income, work experience, and frequency of communion, explains just 25 percent of Catholic fertility variation. Cohen and Ritterband (1979) use 1964 and 1968 panel data from the study of 1961 United States college graduates done by Davis (1964) to explore