Parental Influence and Belief in God among Youth in the United States

• In Event: 165 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Religion and Adolescents

Abstract

The majority of the sociology literature regarding familial influences on religiosity examines either religious identification or composite measures of religiosity, but has not focused on what is arguably the central component of religiosity in the United States: belief in God. Psychologists have engaged with attachment theory to investigate religiosity but have been very limited by the nature of their data. The present paper uses data from the National Study of Youth and Religion to investigate how a young person’s relationship with his or her parents relates to the person’s belief in God, and specifically to reexamine the question of whether it is more securely attached youths who have a greater probability of believing in God (the correspondence hypothesis) or less securely attached youths (the compensation hypothesis). The results of a fixed-effects regression indicate that feeling closer to one’s parents is associated with a higher probability of believing in God, but there is not sufficient evidence that parental religiosity moderates that relationship. In addition, the present study does not find evidence that lacking a mother/father or that living with at least one parental figure affects belief in God. In sum, the present study finds evidence for the correspondence hypothesis but not for the compensation hypothesis.

Author

• Casey Philip Homan, University of California-Berkeley