Religion, Economics and Demography

The Effects of Religion on Education, Work, and the Family

Evelyn Lehrer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415762113
• eBook ISBN: 9781135990657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Using the tools of economics, this book analyses how religion affects decisions and outcomes in a wide range of areas, including education, employment, family size, entry into cohabitation and formal marriage, the choice of spouse and divorce.

In each case, the relationships are rigorously quantified based on multivariate statistical analyses of large scale US data. The results show, for example, that when people marry outside their faith, there is an increase in the probability of divorce, the magnitude of the adverse effect depending in part on the ecumenical/exclusivist nature of the two religions. Other analyses show that youth who grow up with some religion in their lives are less likely than their counterparts with little or no religious involvement to drop out of high school or enter cohabiting arrangements at a young age. Overall, both religious affiliation and the extent of participation in religious activities are found to have far-reaching implications for economic and demographic behaviour.

The book contains a wealth of data illustrating how the religious and secular realms of people's lives are intimately intertwined. With its economic perspective, it offers new ways of thinking about these relationships and is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in the role of religion in education, work and the family.

Part I
The role of religion in marriage and divorce

1
Religion as a determinant of marital stability *

Although a growing literature on the determinants of marital stability has accumulated over the past two decades (e.g., Becker et al. 1977; Castro-Martin and Bumpass 1989; Schultz 1991), the role of the religious affiliations of husband and wife has received little attention.¹ This issue has not been studied in depth in part because until recently, there were no large data sets containing for each partner detailed information on both religion and marital history. The National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), conducted in 1987–88, provides a unique opportunity to quantify the effects of religion on the likelihood of marital dissolution.² The survey includes a main sample of 9,643 men and women of all marital statuses, representative of the US population age 19 and over. In addition to abundant socioeconomic and demographic information for the respondents and their first spouses (where applicable), the survey documents marital histories as well as the religious identification of each partner, before and after the respondent’s first marriage.³

We use these data to analyze how the religious composition of unions influences the likelihood of marital breakup. A more refined set of religion variables is employed here than in previous studies; our specification permits quantification of differences in stability among various types of intrafaith unions, as well as of the extent to which out-marriage is a destabilizing force for members of each major religious group. In addition, whereas most previous analyses have relied on logit or probit regressions, or on simple cross-tabulations, proportional hazards models are used here.⁴ Further, we exploit the richness of the information on religion in this survey to analyze an issue that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been studied empirically: the relationship between conversion and the probability of marital dissolution.

Analytical framework

The stability of a marriage depends in complex ways on a wide range of factors. The first section below analyzes the effects associated with the spouses’ religious affiliations. The second section contains a brief overview of other influences that are known to be important.

The effects of religious composition on marital stability

Religion is a complementary marital trait for which the mating of likes is optimal (Becker 1974). This complementarity arises in part because marital companionship is enhanced when individual spirituality can be shared and is inhibited when the partners must look outside the marriage for religious intimacy. Similarity in the religious beliefs and practices of husband and wife implies that the spouses can participate jointly in religious observances both at home and in the church. Religion also influences many activities beyond the purely religious sphere, including the education and upbringing of children, the allocation of time and money, the cultivation of social relationships, the development of business and professional networks, and even the choice of place of residence. Clearly, households in which the partners differ in their preferences and objectives in this area would be characterized by reduced efficiency and potentially more conflict.

Other things being equal, the complementarity of religion as a marital trait implies that heterogamous unions would display more instability than homogamous unions. Yet compatibility between partners of different faiths may vary with the specific religions involved, depending in part on the similarity in beliefs and practices of the two religions, and in part on the mutual tolerance embodied in their respective doctrines. Following Kelley (1972), we view religious groups as ranging along an “exclusivist–ecumenical” continuum defined by the clarity with which they draw their membership boundaries. At one extreme, “exclusivist” religious groups are those with clear, strictly enforced membership criteria, frequently with proscriptions against out-marriage and sometimes even shunning of nonmembers. At the other extreme, “ecumenical” groups tend to have few membership criteria, often vaguely stated and weakly enforced, and place relatively little importance on religious group boundaries. The location of the spouses’ religions along this continuum would influence the stability of an interfaith marriage: the closer to the ecumenical end of the spectrum, the less the marital stress and hence instability that can be expected.

Other dimensions of religious doctrine and ritual have implications not only for the consequences of out-marriage but also for differences in stability across various types of homogamous unions. Religions differ in the importance of family-centered ritual (as distinct from that which is either individual or church-centered), as well as in the compatibility between their practices and beliefs and the customs in the larger society. For religious groups in which such compatibility is low and the role of the family is central, intrafaith unions are expected to be highly stable, and the destabilizing effects of out-marriage particularly pronounced. In addition, relatively high costs of dissolution and correspondingly high marital stability are expected for homogamous marriages involving religions with proscriptions against divorce.

Apart from differences between religious groups, variations in preferences among individuals and couples also play a role. Couples differ in the weight they place on shared activities, including religious observance, and individuals differ in the priority they give to religion and to religious compatibility as a marital trait. These factors influence the degree to which differences in religious beliefs and practices affect stability adversely. Similarly, the extent to which religious complementarities are a stabilizing force for a homogamous marriage depends in part on the importance attached to religion by each of the spouses.

Another factor in the case of intrafaith unions is whether the marriage is ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The role of religion in marriage and divorce
• Part II The role of religion in female labor supply and fertility
• Part III The role of religion in education and well-being
• Part IV A revised analytical framework, conclusions, and directions for future research
• Author Index
• Subject Index