Analysis of National Youth Longitudinal Survey data examined the types of family formation transitions people experience. They found that women who frequently attend religious services or belong to conservative denominations were most likely to marry before cohabiting with a partner or having children. The paper was published in. Religious Science Research Journal.
Family-forming events are life events in which people create, expand, or redefine family units. Usually includes marriage, cohabitation, and childbirth. Decades ago, most women in the United States married without cohabiting. These days, however, approximately 75% of young women live with a partner at some point in their adulthood. Many people have children before marrying their partner.
Many factors determine what a person’s first family formation event will be like. These include cultural norms, personal values, relationship opportunities, education, and different life situations. One important factor is religion. Many religions encourage early marriage and prohibit cohabitation and childbearing outside marriage.
Study authors Man Hsu and Paula England wanted to investigate how marriage, as the first family-forming event, influences religion. More specifically, they wanted to know whether religiosity (as expressed by frequency of attending religious services) and membership in a conservative denomination predicted marriage as the first family formation event.
The authors analyzed data from waves 1 to 19 (1997 to 2019-2020) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Data were obtained from 4,333 women born between 1980 and 1984 and followed for a total of 615,451 person-months. The researchers used data from the study on the participating women’s marital or cohabitation status, reproductive history, religious service attendance, and religious denomination.
Religious denominations considered conservative include Baptists, Holiness (Nazarene, Wesleyan, Free Methodist), Pentecostal (Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Holiness), Nondenominational Christianity (including the Church of the Bible), Mormonism (LDS), Orthodox Judaism, and Islam.
As a result, only 14% of the women who participated had marriage as their first family-forming event. Among women who cohabited or married before childbirth, 51% reported attending religious services at least once a week when they were young. Among women who initially reported cohabitation, only 20% attended religious services at least once a week. This rate was 23% for women who had previously given birth (i.e. before marriage or cohabitation).
Among women who married first, 49% were conservative, compared to 29% of women who cohabited first. (Interestingly, 47% of women who gave birth first also belonged to conservative religions). Overall, women who belonged to conservative religious denominations and attended religious services more frequently were more likely to marry before cohabiting or having children, typically at around 22 to 23 years of age, compared to 24 to 27 years for women who cohabited and had children first.
Importantly, the researchers found that while religion delayed the age of first sex, it did not prevent the majority of women from having premarital sex. Among previously married women, 82% had sex before marriage. Overall, more than 90% of religious women and 94% of conservative women reported having sex before marriage. Because religion was found to encourage marriage even after women became sexually active, the authors suggest that religious communities may instill powerful “pro-marriage” cultural ideals that go beyond simply prohibiting premarital sex.
“We found that religiosity (frequency of religious service attendance) and support for conservative denominations encouraged cohabitation, marrying without having children, and marrying at a relatively young age,” the study authors concluded. “Religiousness and religious conservatism also abhor premarital sex, which is probably part of the way they encourage early marriage. However, most religious and religiously conservative women have premarital sex, and religions encourage marriage even after women have had sex. This suggests that some of the effects of religiosity and religious conservatism on marriage probably reflect a distinct pro-marriage cultural schema in religious discourse and practice.”
This research contributes to scientific understanding of factors related to how people form families. Although the researchers used extensive background controls to make causal inferences plausible, they note that unmeasured factors may still influence both religiosity and marriage, and strict causality cannot be conclusively proven.
The paper, “Religion influences whether U.S. women marry early, marry without cohabitation, and have children without marriage first,” was authored by Man Xu and Paula England.
