Religious Pathways During the Transition to Adulthood: A Life Course Approach

RELIGIOUS PATHWAYS DURING THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD:

A LIFE COURSE APPROACH

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Jonathan P. Hill, M.A., B.A.

David Sikkink, Director

Graduate Program in Sociology

Notre Dame, Indiana

December 2007

RELIGIOUS PATHWAYS DURING THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD:

A LIFE COURSE APPROACH

Abstract

by

Jonathan P. Hill

Empirical studies have identified late adolescence and early adulthood as a period

of the life course marked by relatively high levels of change in religious belief, practice,

and identity. Young people are most likely to decline in religious service attendance, but

they are also likely to disaffiliate, convert, or change particular religious beliefs during

this phase of the life course. Despite this, researchers have paid little attention to the

social sources of these changes with the exception of the study of family formation and

religious participation. This work in this dissertation begins to address this important

arena of religious change by establishing a general life course framework which

emphasizes the exogenous social forces that constrain and enable actors in their religious

worlds. Primary focus is given to two substantive areas: (1) the influence from religious

socialization and context in early adolescence on later pathways of religious participation,

and (2) the influence from higher education on religious participation, beliefs, and

affiliation.

Jonathan P. Hill

These research questions are primarily analyzed through panel data in the

National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the National Longitudinal Survey

of Youth 1997 surveys. Several key findings emerge. Religious participation in the form

of religious service attendance follows multiple pathways in late adolescence and early

adulthood. Decline in attendance is most common during adolescence, while the

proportion declining in their early twenties is approximately equal to the proportion

increasing in attendance. Further analysis reveals that religious traditions, household

religious socialization, and peer church attendance in early adolescence influence the

relative risk of decline versus stability during the transition to adulthood. Conversely,

demographic characteristics such as gender and race, along with residing in the South,

during early adolescence are key predictors of who increases religious attendance during

late adolescence and early adulthood.

Analysis of the influence of education attainment on religious practice, belief and

affiliation finds no overall decline in belief and affiliation as a result of higher education.

Further analysis reveals that college educated Catholics do not follow this general trend

and are more likely to have lower salience of faith and disaffiliate. Educated African

Americans, conversely show an increase in salience of faith and a lower likelihood of

disaffiliation. College type also matters with students attending Catholic and mainline

Protestant affiliated colleges declining in attendance more than students at other public

and private colleges and universities. A comparison with the birth cohort that attended

college during the late 1960s and early 1970s reveals that college had a stronger

secularizing effect in the past.

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For my wife, Cinthia.

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CONTENTS

Figures................................................................................................................................ vi

Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................... viii

Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Overview........................................................................................................... 1 1.2 The Transition to Adulthood............................................................................. 3 1.3 Conceptualizing Religious Change in Social Context ...................................... 5 1.4 Methods of Inquiry ........................................................................................... 9 1.5 Organization of the Dissertation ..................................................................... 11

Chapter 2: Early Adolescent Influences on Religious Participation During the Transition to Adulthood........................................................................................ 15 2.1 Overview......................................................................................................... 15 2.2 Mapping Religious Service Attendance Trajectories ..................................... 16 2.3 The Growth Mixture Model............................................................................ 19 2.4 Data ................................................................................................................. 21 2.5 Analysis........................................................................................................... 21 2.6 Life Course Influences on Attendance Trajectories........................................ 26

2.6.1 Religious Traditions............................................................................... 27 2.6.2 Religious Socialization .......................................................................... 28 2.6.3 Ecological Contexts ............................................................................... 29 2.6.4 Social Resources and Environmental Stability ...................................... 30 2.6.5 The Mediating Influence of Life Course Events in Early Adulthood.... 31

2.7 Data ................................................................................................................. 32 2.8 Measures ......................................................................................................... 33

2.8.1 Measures of Religious Socialization...................................................... 34 2.8.2 Measures of Social Resources and Stability .......................................... 34 2.8.3 Measures of Ecological Context ............................................................ 36 2.8.4 Measures of Life Course Events in Young Adulthood.......................... 36

2.9 Plan of Analysis .............................................................................................. 39 2.10 Results........................................................................................................... 40 2.11 Discussion..................................................................................................... 50

2.11.1 Religious Tradition .............................................................................. 50 2.11.2 Religious Socialization ........................................................................52 2.11.3 Resources, Stability, and Context ........................................................ 54 2.11.4 Direct Versus Indirect Effects.............................................................. 56

2.12 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 56

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Chapter 3: Higher Education and Change in Religious Identity and Practice.................. 59 3.1 Overview......................................................................................................... 59 3.2 Religion and College in Sociological Perspective .......................................... 61 3.3 Past Research .................................................................................................. 62 3.4 Differential Effects of College on Religion .................................................... 65

3.4.1 Gender.................................................................................................... 65 3.4.2 Academic Field ...................................................................................... 66 3.4.3 Catholicism ............................................................................................ 67 3.4.4 Conservative Protestantism.................................................................... 68 3.4.5 African-Americans................................................................................. 70

3.5 Data and Methods ........................................................................................... 71 3.5.1 Data ........................................................................................................ 71

3.6 Methodological Issues .................................................................................... 72 3.7 Dependent Measures....................................................................................... 73 3.8 Independent Measures .................................................................................... 73 3.9 Results............................................................................................................. 77

3.9.1 Religious Service Attendance ................................................................ 77 3.9.2 Importance of Faith................................................................................ 80 3.9.3 Frequency of Prayer............................................................................... 83 3.9.4 Religious Disaffiliation.......................................................................... 85

3.10 Discussion..................................................................................................... 88 3.11 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 91

Chapter 4: Religious Participation During College: Do Religious School Make a Difference?............................................................................................................ 93 4.1 Overview......................................................................................................... 93 4.2 Church Attendance and Higher Education ..................................................... 94 4.3 The Relationship Between Institutional Identity and Student Religious

Practice .......................................................................................................... 97 4.4 Differential Effects by Religious Tradition, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity ...... 99

4.4.1 Religious Tradition ................................................................................ 99 4.4.2 Gender.................................................................................................. 100 4.4.3 Race/Ethnicity...................................................................................... 101

4.5 Data and Measures........................................................................................ 103 4.5.1 Analytic Strategy ................................................................................. 104 4.5.2 Measures .............................................................................................. 104

4.6 Methods......................................................................................................... 107 4.6.1 Random Effects Modeling ................................................................... 107 4.6.2 Fixed Effects Modeling........................................................................ 109

4.7 Results........................................................................................................... 110 4.7.1 Effects from College on Service Attendance....................................... 110 4.7.2 Institutional Differences in Service Attendance .................................. 111 4.7.3 Conditional Effects .............................................................................. 120

4.8 Discussion..................................................................................................... 125 4.8.1 The Big Picture .................................................................................... 126 4.8.2 Religious service attendance at conservative Protestant schools......... 127

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4.8.3 Religious Service Attendance at Catholic and Mainline Schools........ 129 4.8.4 Evangelical and Catholic Students....................................................... 130 4.8.5 Differences by Gender ......................................................................... 132 4.8.6 Differences by Race/Ethnicity ............................................................. 132

4.9 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 133

Chapter 5: Conclusion..................................................................................................... 135 5.1 Emerging Themes ......................................................................................... 135 5.2 A Quantitative Agenda for the Study of Religion Over the Life Course...... 138

Appendix A: College and Religiosity by Birth Cohort...................................................142 A.1 Overview...................................................................................................... 142 A.2 Religious Climate on Campus...................................................................... 142 A.3 Data .............................................................................................................. 145 A.4 Analysis I: Higher Education and Religious Outcomes in the GSS

1972-2004.................................................................................................... 145 A.5 Analysis #2: Higher Education and Religious Change in the YPSPS

1965-1973.................................................................................................... 149 A.6 A Comparison with Recent College Graduates ........................................... 151

Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 156

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FIGURES

Figure 2.1: The Unconditional Growth Mixture Model ................................................... 20

Figure 2.2: Ten Class Unconditional Growth Mixture Model Estimating Religious Service Attendance Between Ages 20 and 24 ...................................................... 23

Figure 2.3: Four Class Growth Mixture Model Estimating Religious Service Attendance Between the Ages of 16 and 20 ............................................................................ 24

Figure 2.4: Four Class Growth Mixture Model Estimating Religious Service Attendance Between the Ages of 20 and 24 ............................................................................ 25

Figure 4.1: Annual Church Attendance By College Type (Random Effects) ................ 112

Figure A.1: Weekly Religious Service Attendance Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion.......................................................................................................... 147

Figure A.2: No Religious Affiliation Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion ....... 147

Figure A.3: Bible “Book of Fables” Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion......... 148

Figure A.4: Strong Religious Affiliation Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion . 148

Figure A.5: Pray Daily Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion............................. 149

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TABLES

Table 2.1 Descriptive Statistics......................................................................................... 38

Table 2.2 Frequency of Class Membership By Religious Tradition .............................. 41

Table 2.3 Likelihood of Declining Attendance Versus High Attending Stability Age 16-22........................................................................................................................... 43

Table 2.4 Likelihood of Increasing Attendance Versus Low Attending Stability Age 16-22........................................................................................................................... 48

Table 3.1 OLS Regression Predicting Frequency of Church Attendance Age 22-25 ...... 78

Table 3.2 OLS Regression Predicting Importance of Faith Age 22-25............................ 81

Table 3.3 OLS Regression Predicting Frequency of Prayer Age 22-25 ........................... 84

Table 3.4 Logistic Regression Predicting No Religious Affiliation age 22-25 ................ 86

Table 4.1 Descriptive Statistics....................................................................................... 108

Table 4.2 Random and Fixed Effects Predicting Annual Religious Service Attendance111

Table 4.3 Fixed Effects Regression Predicting Annual Religious Service Attendance . 114

Table 4.4 Fixed Effects Regression Predicting Truncated Annual Religious Service Attendance .......................................................................................................... 118

Table 4.5 Fixed Effects Regression Predicting Truncated Attendance By Religious Tradition, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity ............................................................... 121

Table A.1 The Effect of Degree Completion on Religious Attendance, Affiliation, and Belief about the Bible 1965-1973 ............................................................... 150

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J.

Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by a grant P01-

HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with

cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R.

Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in

obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population

Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524

(www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth/contract.html).

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CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Overview

Commentators of American religion have frequently focused on the distinction

between religion as it exists in doctrine, liturgy, and historical traditions, and religion as it

lived out in everyday experiences (Roof and McKinney 1987; Wolfe 2005). While the

religious lives of ordinary citizens draw from doctrine and tradition, they do by being

filtered through the lens of broader cultural motifs, individual social roles, and social

structural position. This dialectic between ideas about ultimate reality and the concrete

social realities that constitute individual experience provides a nexus of rich exploration

for the social scientist. This circumscribed area of study is one of the key distinguishing

marks between the sociologist of religion and the theologian. While the theologian is

concerned with the actual attributes of ultimate reality, the sociologist describes how this

reality is perceived among the population and the social consequences of these

perceptions, saying nothing of their truth or falsehood.

Because of this focus on lived religion, sociologists find that religious knowledge,

beliefs, and practices are constantly in flux as society changes. Individuals traverse the

many relationships, institutions, and cultural systems that situate ideas about religion and

its place within the public and private spheres of American society. Religious ideas and

rituals are not determined by these social characteristics, but neither are they entirely free

to develop without them. Describing how religion is lived and understood within the

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social cleavages of race/ethnicity (e.g. Emerson and Smith 2001; Hammond and Warner

1993; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; Patillo-McCoy 1998), gender (e.g. De Vaus and

McAllister 1987; Miller and Stark 2002; Sullins 2006), and social class (e.g. Niebuhr

1929; Roof 1979; Park and Reimer 2002) has occupied much of the sociology of religion.

Sociologists have also focused on how religion interacts with institutions such as

education (e.g. Peshkin 1988; Sikkink 1999), the family (e.g. Edgell 2005; Wilcox 2004),

and the state/politics (e.g. McVeigh and Sikkink 2001; Sherkat 1998), as well as cultural

influences from mass media (e.g. Hoover 2006), therapeutic individualism (e.g. Bellah et

al 1985), and sexual liberation (e.g. Regnerus 2007).

There has been far less attention given to intra-individual changes in religious

practices, beliefs, and identity within the sociology of religion. Certain phases of the life

course such as adolescence have received renewed attention in recent years (Smith and

Denton 2005). There is also a small literature on aging (Bahr 1970; Krause 2006) and a

slightly larger literature on religion and the family lifecycle (Myers 1996; Stolzenberg,

Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995). Nevertheless, this leaves a large swath of intra-individual

religious change unexplored. Using a similar framework of interaction between religious

ideas and social life, one can generate hypotheses concerning changes in religious

meaning, and how beliefs and practices are altered, as individuals progress through the

social arrangements that constitute the life course. Key socializing institutions such as

the family and education take on different meaning and arrangements as individuals age.

In adolescence, peer networks become highly salient. Disposable income and the legal

ability to drive an automobile rapidly increase the slate of choices available to the young

person. Having a successful careers and the establishing a family of procreation remain

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key goals in early adulthood. Death of parents, relationship with grown children and

continued economic gain are important social aspects of later adulthood. And finally,

impacts of physical health, death of a spouse, and institutions of assisted living and

nursing homes are principle features of late life. As the social world of the individual

changes with age, we have little understanding of the impact from these changes on

religious understandings and practices.

The most rapid changes in religious practice and belief accompany the period of

late adolescence and early adulthood. During this phase young people are more likely to

decline in attendance (Smith et al 2002; Uecker, Regnerus, and Vaaler 2007; Willits and

Crider 1989), disaffiliate (Caplovitz 1977; Sherkat and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sherkat

1994), convert (Smith 2006), and alter other religious beliefs and practices (Uecker,

Regnerus, and Vaaler 2007). Despite popular interest in the subject (particularly from

religious advocates) and scholarly interest from other fields (such as developmental

theories in psychology), the subject has received little attention in the field of sociology

outside of a literature on religion and family formation. The documented religious

changes that occur for many young people, coupled with the rapidly changing social

world of the emerging adult, make this a ripe area for sociological analysis.

1.2 The Transition to Adulthood

Although the concept of transitioning from youth to adulthood might appear

relatively uncomplicated, the task of identifying the core indicators of this transition in

the social scientific literature remains somewhat contentious. Within the context of the

United States, researchers have traditionally used markers such as leaving the family of

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origin, completing education, starting a full-time job, getting married, and having

children as key moments that move adolescents into adult roles (Shanahan 2000). The

ordering and spacing of these events have changed over time with recent birth cohorts

exhibiting less normative ordering and more spacing between these traditional

demographic markers (Buchman 1989; Rindfuss, Swicegood, and Rosenfeld 1987).

Although some expectation concerning the ordering and timing still exists, the normative

restraints have been loosened and off-timed transitions hold far less stigma than in the

past (Settersten 2003).

Because of these changes, some scholars have argued that demographic

transitions matter less than subjective understandings of the self as mature and

independent (Arnett 1998; Barry and Nelson 2005). Arnett (2004) has coined the term

“emerging adulthood” as the period of the life course following adolescence, but prior to

full adulthood, which is characterized by few normative expectations and relative

independence from social responsibilities. The appearance of this new phase in the life

course is made possible by the movement toward later family formation as well as

economic independence (Arnett 1998; Rindfuss 1991). During this period between

adolescence and adulthood, much of the identity work involved in becoming an adult is

undertaken. This perspective holds that the criteria for adulthood are found in subjective

understandings of independence from parents and accepting responsibility for one’s

actions as opposed to demographic transitions.

I adopt a perspective that affirms the importance of both the subjective

understanding of the self as well as the importance of the social arrangements and role

transitions that characterize the transition to adulthood. There is recent empirical

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research that suggests these two perspectives may both be important and mutually

reinforcing (Shanahan et al 2005). While I do not regularly use the term emerging

adulthood in this dissertation, I do not object to the concept entirely. Rather, I choose to

focus on how the self is situated within social structures and institutions that both

constrain and enable certain identities and actions. Although much of this dissertation

uses crude survey measures of religious belonging and practice to assess intra-individual

change, it is still important to have an understanding of the underlying social processes

that guide these changes. I outline this perspective below.

1.3 Conceptualizing Religious Change in Social Context

Within the human sciences, theories of intra-individual religious change have

been most dominant in psychology (Pascarella and Terenzini 1991). This is not

necessarily due to a large interest in religion and spirituality among psychologists as

opposed to sociologists. Rather, psychology takes as its primary unit of analysis the

individual. Along with the frame of reference grounded in the individual, psychology has

had a long history of the study of individual development rooted in the biological

metaphor or growth and maturation (Baltes, Staudinger, and Lindenberger 1999). It is

through this lens of the structural developmental paradigm that theories of intra-

individual religious change have garnered the most attention.

Drawing heavily on both Piaget (1954) and Kohlberg (1969; 1981), psychologist

James Fowler (1981) has applied stage theory specifically to the development of faith.

Fowler hypothesizes that individuals progress through increasingly complex and

differentiated understandings of “ultimate reality” as they age. The final destination of an

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individual varies, with some only progressing through the most elementary stages of

development. Fowler’s theory is meant to be universal in its applicability and valid

regardless of the specific content of one’s faith tradition. This universalistic claim, both

its cross-cultural and cross-faith dimensions, has come under serious criticism in recent

years (Day 2001; Streib 2001). Moreover, empirical work has questioned the validity of

claims to universal dimensions of faith that can be separated from the particularities of

any faith tradition (Leak et al. 1999).

Developmental stage theories have come under attack both within psychology

(Baltes et al. 1980; Baltes et al. 1997) and from sociology (Dannefer 1984). While the

critiques are varied, some key problems seem worth noting. First, the biological

metaphor of growth and maturation may be inappropriate, especially when the object of

interest (such as religion or faith) is distinct from physiological development. While

individuals develop biologically based changes in cognitive and sexual function as they

age, it is unwise to couple this tightly with cultural systems pertaining to super-empirical

reality. As humans develop complex, symbol-laden, socially-constructed systems of

ideas and beliefs, these ideas and belief contain emergent properties that cannot be simply

reduced to biological functioning. If our primary goal is to understand how humans

interact with these systems as they age, shift life roles, and transgress institutional

boundaries, theories that take their cue from biological change will necessarily be limited

in their usefulness.

It is also arguably beyond the purview of empirical science to distinguish

between qualitatively higher and lower understandings of the individual’s relationship to

this reality. By adopting these lower and higher stages, the researcher confines an

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individual’s belief and value trajectory toward a pre-defined end. Moreover, when the

primary attention is given to changes within the individual, contextual influences are

usually an afterthought. Dannefer (1984) has argued that ontogenetic formulations, such

as those found in developmental stage theories, are inherently antithetical to the notion

that the phenomenological reality for the individual is socially constructed.

To integrate social reality back into the study of intra-individual religious change,

I adopt the language and methods of the life course. Even though no truly unified

schematic of the life course exists (George 1993), the work of Glen Elder (1994, 1998)

provides the clearest conceptualization of the life course paradigm from the North

American perspective (Marshall and Mueller 2003). In this perspective, the life course

consists of multiple age-graded trajectories (e.g. economic, familial, religious, and

educational) that are acted upon by exogenous social forces, and in turn act upon one

another. Within this framework the importance of historical contingency, interconnected

lives, and human agency are all emphasized. This method, which probably best defines

life course research, begins with social forces that act upon the individual and traces the

mechanisms by which differential life outcomes are constrained and enabled by these

forces (Elder 1996).

This focus on exogenous social forces provides a corrective to many of the

problems associated with developmental stage theories. Taking the social reality as a

starting point and hypothesizing how individuals alter their religious identities, beliefs,

and practices within this social reality effectively combats the reduction of the social to

the individual in developmental theories. The social world is not something to be

8

explained away or ignored from this perspective – it is fundamental to the distinctive

forms that intraindividual change takes.

At the same time, basing the method of inquiry in social structures runs the risk of

appearing fragmented, as one must choose to make salient certain aspects of the

individuals’ social worlds while minimizing or ignoring other aspects. Empirical

relationships are established, patterns emerge, but the bigger picture often remains

elusive. Much of this is the result of the complex nature of the social world that

developmental theories often ignore or oversimplify. While individuals are highly

complex, they still remain integrated into a single self which acts and is acted upon. If

the self is the frame of reference, as it is in stage theories, hypothesized changes can be

neatly packaged as matters of individual agency. This does not mean that the processes

hypothesized in developmental stage theories are somehow oversimplified. They may

actually be quite complex. However, it does mean that by virtue of the individual as

referent, theories of intra-individual change will necessarily appear more holistic than

theories that focus on the self contained within the social.

Social reality, conversely, is diffuse and has no immediate referent. In order to

gain theoretical leverage on the social world, sociologists use multiple conceptual

categories (e.g. symbols, culture, structure, institution, capital, and fields). These

categories can be thought of as useful heuristics; ways of obtaining analytic leverage

from social life. Yet, these concepts are not simply dimensions of a single concept (i.e.

“the social”). Rather, these concepts are often qualitatively distinctive from one another

with the underlying logic of each drawing from different metrics. This essential non-

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confluence makes a singular understanding of the self as contained in social context

difficult to pin down.

Nevertheless, to the extent that the social is handled non-reductively, I believe

that our understanding of the individual will be more realistic. In this regard, the life

course method, with its loosely connected tools and concepts, is flexible enough to gain

insight from the complex social webs that individuals are embedded in.

1.4 Methods of Inquiry

This dissertation uses nationally-representative panel data to establish the broad

contours of religious life during the transition to adulthood. Data from the National

Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent

Health, and the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study are used to map intra-individual

patterns of change from adolescence into young adulthood.

There are several advantages and disadvantages to using survey data to

understand changes in religion over time. If we establish that any picture of reality the

social sciences are able to provide is necessarily limited in scope, it is useful to locate

what the inherent boundaries are in a given research method. At the same time, a given

method is likely to have a particular analytic traction that distinguishes it from other

methods. By identifying the strengths and limitations of statistical analysis with panel

data, I hope to establish what sort of claims the work in this dissertation can validly

establish.

Carefully collected survey data is an excellent tool to map the general landscape

of social phenomena. The proper collection of data insures that we are able to use

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statistical tools to make inference about the population with some degree of certainty.

Moreover, survey questions are worded and administered in a consistent way that allows

for a high degree of reliability in the constructs being measured. These properties allow

us to confidently construct a picture of the major contours of social reality. However,

many of the characteristics that allow for this confidence in measurement and inference

are the same ones that limit what kind of constructs can be measured.

Underneath these broad contours are complex webs of human identity, social

structure, and cultural systems that are difficult to measure with the blunt instrument of

survey data. Human beings generally understand themselves and their motivations in

terms of narrative (MacIntyre 1981; Smith 2003; Taylor 1989). Survey data, however,

pulls apart narrative coherence into usable chunks of data that can be manipulated via

statistical techniques. The loss of narrative coherence in the data means that the

quantitative research must carefully place a plausible narrative back into the explanation

of the data after it is analyzed. This is a delicate process and often results in necessary

simplifications. Nevertheless, charting the broad contours is an important first step in

understanding social phenomena because it supplies the broad context under which more

in depth study of motivations and meaning can occur.

The methods of this dissertation, then, focus on uncovering some of the major

contours of religious life during late adolescence and early adulthood. Much of what is

described, analyzed, and tested in the chapters to come should be very generative for

further research that more narrowly focuses on the specific motivations, structures, and

cultural tools that enable and constrain social actors and their religious worlds during

these decisive years of the life course. This does not mean that the chapters to come are

11

silent concerning these matters. These processes which underlie the empirical findings

are addressed in the theoretical foundations of each chapter as well as the post hoc

interpretation of the analyses. It is my hope, however, that the research presented in this

dissertation provides part of the larger framework for continued work on the religious

lives of young people.

1.5 Organization of the Dissertation

I have written this dissertation in the form of three scholarly articles with the

present introduction and a concluding chapter. Due to its organization as scholarly

articles, there remains some discontinuity as well as overlap between chapters, as each of

the three substantive chapters stand on their own and do not assume the reader has read

the other chapters. Furthermore, the chapters are not designed to provide a complete

overview of the many markers and transitions during the movement from adolescence to

adulthood. Rather, the chapters focus on narrowly defined areas such as religious

influences from the family of origin and the effects of higher education. The influence

from family formation on religion is not examined as there is already a robust literature

available on the subject. Part of the function of the concluding chapter, then, is to draw

together emerging findings and themes within the chapters, as well as to situate the work

done in this dissertation within the larger project of using panel data to map religious

practice and belief from a life course perspective.

Chapter two examines trajectories of religious service attendance between ages

sixteen and twenty-four using growth mixture modeling with the National Longitudinal

Study of Youth 1997. Using five waves of data from 2000 to 2004, I identify broad

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patterns of stability, growth and decline during these ages. Once the patterns are

established, I identify key influences from early adolescence that constrain the later

patterns of religious worship attendance. More specifically, I measure the influences

from early adolescent parental, peer, and school religious socialization on the probability

of moving from a stable pattern of attendance to a pattern of growth or decline during the

transition to adulthood. I also test hypotheses that predict religious stability during the

transition to adulthood to depend upon local contexts defined by religious markets, class

structures, and racial distributions. The influence of home and neighborhood stability on

later religious trajectories is also explored in this chapter.

Chapters three and four focus on higher education and religious identity and

practice. As higher education expands, attending college has become more normative in

the transition to adulthood. In 2005, approximately sixty-nine percent of high school

graduates enrolled in a two or four year college in the fall semester immediately

following their graduation, compared to less than fifty percent in 1980 (U.S. Department

of Education, National Center for Education Statistics 2007). Higher education has also

been widely assumed to undermine traditional sources of moral authority and contribute

to individual level secularization (Caplovitz and Sherrow 1979; Hunter 1983; Wuthnow

1988). Despite all of this, there has been very little recent research focusing that focuses

on the influences from college on religion.

Chapter three compares students who attend and graduate from four year colleges

and universities to young people who do not continue their education after high school.

In order to examine if change in religious identity and practice change depending on

education attainment, I study change in indicators of religious service attendance,

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importance of faith, frequency of prayer, and religious affiliation over time in the

National Study of Adolescent Health. This chapter uses indicators that were collected

during the students junior and senior year of high school (in 1994 and 1995) and the same

or similar measures six or seven years later (in 2001 and 2002). Examining differences

by educational trajectories allows inference concerning the effects of higher education on

religious change. This chapter also examines differences by subpopulations defined by

religious tradition, race, gender, and college major. Appendix A uses data from the

cumulative General Social Survey (1972-2004) and the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel

Study (1965-1973) to compare the findings from Chapter 3 to earlier birth cohorts.

Chapter four focuses on institutional effects on religious change while students

are enrolled in college. While the previous chapter attempts to quantify the differences in

religious change between college graduates and non-college graduates, this chapter

focuses on the differences between currently enrolled students’ religious change based on

college characteristics (e.g. religious tradition, elite status, and student body

characteristics). The key research question addressed in this chapter concerns how well

students fare religiously at religious schools versus secular schools. Data come from the

National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Similar to the analysis undertaken in

Chapter 3, I examine differential effects by subpopulations characterized by religious

tradition, race/ethnicity, and gender.

Chapter five concludes the dissertation by drawing together several key themes

across the three substantive chapters and integrates these findings with extant research on

family formation to provide a broader picture of religious practice and identity during the

transition to adulthood. I then turn to an agenda for future research on religion during

14

adolescence and early adulthood, suggesting some fruitful areas of inquiry. Lastly, this

chapter outlines further areas of life course studies and religion outside of the transition to

adulthood that would benefit from broad quantitative analysis using panel data.

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CHAPTER 2:

EARLY ADOLESCENT INFLUENCES ON RELIGIOUS PARTICIPATION DURING

THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD

2.1 Overview

Religious belief and practice in late adolescence and early adulthood arguably

constitute the most critical stage in the religious life course. During this phase young

people are more likely to decline in attendance (Smith et al 2002; Uecker, Regnerus, and

Vaaler 2007; Willits and Crider 1989), disaffiliate (Caplovitz 1977; Sherkat and Wilson

1995; Wilson and Sherkat 1994), convert (Smith 2006), and alter other religious beliefs

and practices (Uecker, Regnerus, and Vaaler 2007). Moreover, religious beliefs and

behaviors during this juncture continue to predict later levels of religiosity in adulthood

(Myers 1996; Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, Waite 1995). Nevertheless, most research has

focused on just one or two years during this period of the life course, or focused

exclusively on events such as declining attendance, disaffiliation, or conversion. An

overall map of religious trajectories during this phase of the life course has not been

adequately specified. Additionally, most studies have focused exclusively on adolescent

religion (Smith and Denton 2005) or the religious life of young adults (Wuthnow 2007).

Because of this, an understanding the continuities and discontinuities in religious life

during the transition to adulthood is not well understood.

16

This chapter begins to address these shortcomings by focusing on the patterns of

religious participation during the transition to adulthood. Drawing on a life course

perspective, this paper argues that (1) prior research analyzing religious practice has not

adequately mapped the overall trajectories of religious service attendance during this

period of the life course. And, (2) religious traditions, religious socialization, and key

dimensions of social context during early adolescence increase the likelihood of traveling

particular trajectories of religious participation during the transition to adulthood.

This format of this chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, I use a

growth mixture modeling method with panel data to estimate trajectories of service

attendance using five consecutive years of attendance data for respondents from ages

sixteen to twenty-four. In the second section, I model early adolescent influences on

which trajectory is traveled during late adolescence and early adulthood. Specifically, I

employ multinomial logit models to test whether key characteristics of families, peers,

and social context during early adolescence increase the relative risk of declining and

increasing religious participation during the late teenage years and early twenties.

2.2 Mapping Religious Service Attendance Trajectories

Emerging research on religiosity during adolescence and young adulthood finds

that participation in religious services declines at a substantially steeper rate than other

forms of private religious practice and belief (Uecker and Regnerus 2007; Smith et al

2002, Wallace et al 2003; Willits and Crider 1989; King, Elder, and Whitbeck 1997).

The Monitoring the Future survey estimates that the proportion of students who attend

weekly drops from 43% to 33% between the 8th and 12th grade. Uecker, Regnerus, and

17

Vaaler estimate that as much as 69% of adolescents who attend religious services at least

once a month attend less frequently in young adulthood. Likewise, Willits and Crider

calculate that 60% of youth report attending less frequently in early adulthood compared

to their adolescent years. Overall, it is clear that a decline in religious participation is a

common occurrence as individuals enter late adolescence and early adulthood.

Nevertheless, several key problems plague current estimates of religious service

attendance for young people. First, the most common multivariate techniques are geared

toward the analysis of mean levels of change only. However, analyzing mean level

change often masks patterns of decline and growth. Ozorak (1989) has suggested that

religiosity during adolescence may become more polarized. Likewise, Johnson (1997)

has proposed that religious belief and practice may become polarized during college.

Neither hypothesize is testable using methods that only assess mean levels of change over

time. Moreover, mean trends may or may not be “typical”; there is simply no way of

knowing without using different methodology. For example, although we know from the

Monitoring the Future survey that the percentage of students who attend religious

services weekly drops ten percentage points between 8th and 12th grade, we do not know

if this is because approximately ten percent of the student body moved from a state of

weekly attendance to one of less than weekly attendance. This finding could also be due

to forty percent of the student population declining from weekly attendance and thirty

percent beginning to attend weekly. These two hypothetical scenarios paint very

different pictures of religious participation during adolescence.

Studies that use panel data have the advantage of being able to estimate individual

level change over time. Using panel data allows the researcher to distinguish between the

18

two hypothetical explanations for the ten percent decline in religious participation in

adolescence. Even so, typical estimates using panel data carry some distinct

shortcomings. Most research has used two waves of data to characterize change religious

participation over time. Such methods, however, are sensitive to the length of time

between waves. For example, Uecker, Regnerus, and Vaaler (2007) find that 69% of

adolescents who attend monthly have lower levels of religious participation

approximately six or seven years later (between Waves I and III). However, Regnerus

and Uecker (2006) find that only 6% of adolescents report a substantial decrease in

religious service attendance (defined as decreasing at least two categories in the measure)

over a period of approximately one year (between Waves I and II). One would suspect

that they would have found considerably less occurrences of substantial religious decline

if the period between interviews was one month as opposed to one year. Both findings

are accurate pictures of religious change over the age span measured, but both only

represent a fraction of the total picture.

In addition to the problem of length of time, estimating the degree of change is

also a complicated matter when using only two waves of panel data. While we may

know that a certain percent decline in religious attendance between certain ages, this does

not tell us anything about the degree of decline. If a substantial proportion of young

people stop attending services altogether, this is a very different matter than if young

people simply drop slightly in their frequency of attendance with age. Of course,

examining mean change is one way to get a sense of the degree of change – but the

shortcomings of such a strategy have already been established. Alternatively, the

researcher could simply create a table of frequencies for every possible combination of

19

change or stability between waves. Of course, with a variable measured with eight

categories (such as the measure of church attendance used in this chapter), this would

require having thirty-six possible trajectories. Such a method probably needlessly

complicates the picture and makes further multivariate analysis using these trajectories

difficult.

2.3 The Growth Mixture Model

When more than two waves of data are available, more powerful methods can be

used to model and group individual trajectories. The present research uses growth

mixture modeling (GMM) to uncover the dominant trajectories of attendance for

adolescents and young adults. The GMM method is able to estimate the dominant

trajectories of religious practice during late adolescence and early adulthood. GMM

combines the power of latent growth curve analysis and latent class analysis. Unlike

standard growth curve analysis which makes the assumption that individual trajectories

deviate from one grand growth curve, growth mixture modeling assumes that individuals

deviate from multiple normative trajectories (or alternatively, that we are sampling from

distinct subpopulations that have qualitatively different growth patterns). These different

classes of trajectories are a latent function of the data, so no a priori assumptions

concerning how individuals change religiously are necessary.

Figure 2.1 presents the basic structure of an unconditional GMM model. The

general model is similar to a latent growth curve model, where the observable variables

measured over time are assumed to be a function of unobservable intercept and slope

terms. The addition in a GMM is a latent class variable, “c”. The latent class variable is

20

a nominal level variable that identifies the probabilistic membership in a set of

subpopulations. The intercept and slope terms are fixed across categories of “c”.

Random, individual-level, deviations from the intercept and slope terms are still allowed

in a growth mixture model. For additional information concerning GMM, please consult

Muthén (2004)

Figure 2.1 The Unconditional Growth Mixture Model

The GMM method fits the life course framework better than a standard latent

growth curve model. From the life course perspective, individuals follow trajectories that

are socially patterned by time, place, and social networks. This patterning generates

recognizable normative pathways of change at the aggregate level (Elder 1994). From

the standpoint of the individual, trajectories of change may take on innumerable forms.

However, from the life course perspective we recognize the social structuring of these

trajectories and the reality that normative pathways develop as social worlds constrain

Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5

i s q

c

21

individual action. By estimating multiple, distinctive trajectories of change at the

aggregate level, the GMM framework better captures these paradigmatic features of the

life course framework.

2.4 Data

Data come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97).

The NLSY97 is a nationally representative panel survey of youth, sponsored and directed

by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the National Opinion Research

Center at the University of Chicago, with assistance from the Center for Human Resource

Research at The Ohio State University (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of

Labor 2006). The survey was first administered to 12 to 16 year old youth in 1997 and

has followed up annually with the most recent available wave in 2004. An additional

supplemental sample of Black and Hispanic youths was also conducted. The full number

of respondents from the representative sample and the over sample is 8,984.

Approximately 84% of the original respondents have been retained in the 2004 survey.

In the present research, data are primarily used from the base 1997 survey as well as

surveys conducted between 2000 and 2004. Supplementary geocode data have been used

to identify the respondents’ county of residence.

2.5 Analysis

Annual measures of religious service attendance are measured on an eight point

scale ranging from zero (never attend) to seven (attend everyday). In order to estimate

how trajectory membership varies with age, I analyze two subsets of the full NLSY97

22

sample. The first subset is comprised of respondents who age from 16 to 20 between

2000 and 2004 (N = 1,730). The second subset is comprised of respondents who age

from 20 to 24 between 2000 and 2004 (N = 1,605).

Class membership is estimated for each sample subset. There is not a set rule for

determining the correct number of latent classes in GMM. The Bayesian information

criterion (BIC) or adjusted BIC are commonly used. Other special statistics that rely on

bootstrapping methods are often used as well - the most reliable being the Bootstrap

Likelihood Ratio Test (see Nyland, Asparouhov, and Muthén 2006). However, it is also

important to use prior knowledge and side information to best determine the number of

latent trajectories in the data.

Using the BIC statistic and BLRT, as many as ten latent classes can be estimated

from the data. Figure 2.2 displays a GMM with ten latent trajectories estimated between

the ages of 20 and 24. However, this large number of latent trajectories proves unwieldy

for further analysis and is unnecessarily refined. The majority of estimated trajectories

can be classified in broader terms as moving from high attending to low attending or vice

versa. Moreover, class membership is very low for several of the trajectories. In order to

simplify the model, but still retain critical information, I estimate a four class GMM for

each subset of the sample.

Figure 2.3 and Figure 2.4 present the four class model for the two age groups.

Several important findings emerge. First, a majority of individuals have fairly stable

levels of church attendance in both age groups, although the percent of individuals who

are in a low attending state significantly out number those in the high attending

23

Figure 2.2 Ten Class Unconditional Growth Mixture Model Estimating Religious Service Attendance Between Ages 20 and 24

trajectory. Only 13.9% of the population age 20 to 24 can be classified as attending

approximately weekly over the entire five years measured. Secondly, approximately

twice the proportion of respondents can be classified as declining in attendance between

the ages of 16 and 20 compared to 20 and 24 (21.4% versus 12.1%). Focusing on just the

first age group, the mean level of decline is also slightly steeper between ages 16 and 18

than it is between ages 18 and 20. Lastly, growth in attendance is more evident between

the ages of 20 and 24 compared to ages 16 to 20 (12.7% versus 8.6%).

Some key implications of these findings emerge. For one, it appears that for the

recent birth cohort measured in the NLSY97, leaving a religious community has little to

24

Figure 2.3 Four Class Growth Mixture Model Estimating Religious Service Attendance Between the Ages of 16 and 20

do with leaving home and attending college. If this were the case, we would probably see

a substantial decline after age 18. However, this data suggests that the steepest decline is

actually between age 16 and 18. And, by the early twenties, patterns of decline are as

likely as patterns of increasing attendance. It is important to note, however, that the

reasons for this decline, while adolescents are presumable still residing with their parents,

are not clear. It still may be, as Hoge, Johnson, Luidens (1994) have suggested, that the

encounter with liberal values that are different from that of their household of origin are

detrimental to religious participation. Adolescents who are capable of driving and

working may be already be sufficiently cut off from the adult world that leaving home

and going to college are not drastic shifts in experience (see Smith and Denton 2005:184

Weekly

Once or Twice

18.7%

21.4%

8.6%

51.3%

25

Figure 2.4 Four Class Growth Mixture Model Estimating Religious Service Attendance Between the Ages of 20 and 24

for discussion of structural disconnect from the adult world). On the other hand, it may

also be that the “cultural broadening” associated with leaving home is non-existence for

most youth. Rather, the mundane tasks of negotiating work, school, and personal

relationships may what dominant the lifeworld of adolescents and young adults

(Clydesdale 2007).

It is also important to note the increasing attendance trajectory is not a common

experience, but neither is it rare. As the data suggest, increasing attendance is more

common during the early twenties than it is during late adolescence. While family

formation may be partially responsible for this increase in the early twenties, there is

cursory evidence to suggest that graduating from college may also contribute to this rise

in religious participation (see Table 4.2 for evidence of this influence). Regardless of the

Weekly

Once or Twice

13.9%

12.1%

12.7%

61.3%

26

social sources of this increase, the overall focus on religious decline during young

adulthood conceals the fact that approximately one in eight young adults are becoming

more active in religious communities. Further research on this group of emerging adults

seems warranted.

2.6 Life Course Influences on Attendance Trajectories

Although a majority of young people maintain stable levels of church attendance

during the transition to adulthood, substantial minorities display movement into and out

of religious communities. One of the fundamental emphases of the life course

perspective is individual continuity over time. Life experiences are cumulative and past

states shape future trajectories (McLeod and Almazan 2004). This is arguably the

primary contribution of the life course paradigm, which attempts to combat the standard

cross-sectional snapshots of population so common in quantitative research.

From this perspective, we would expect that the social characteristics of the

young person’s environment in early adolescence constrain future action. Moreover,

from their social location individuals would be expected to develop orientations and

strategies of actions that make future pathways in the life course more or less probable.

Drawing from the research on adolescent religiosity and the intergenerational

transmission of religiosity, I outline several key expectations concerning the influence

from religious traditions, religious socialization, social stability, and neighborhood

context in early adolescence on later pathways of religious participation. I also explore

whether these influences have a direct effect on later pathways, or whether they primarily

27

function through altering the probability of key life course events in early adulthood such

as educational attainment and family formation.

2.6.1 Religious Traditions

Religious traditions vary in their ability to attract and retain members.

Conservative Protestants and other “strict” churches (Iannaccone 1994) are able to retain

their members into adulthood at a greater rate than either Catholicism or mainline

Protestantism (Sherkat 2001; Smith 1998). Individuals are also less likely to switch out

of conservative Protestantism than other Christian religious traditions, and this likelihood

has decreased over time. In fact, most of the proportional increase in conservative

Protestantism over the last several decades is due to increasingly high retention rates and

relatively greater levels of fertility (Hout, Greeley, and Wilde 2001).

There are many possible reasons why conservative Protestants are better able to

retain their members over time. Using economic theory, Iannaccone (1994) suggests that

the strict rules that often times accompany congregational life in conservative Protestant

churches effectively screen out free riders and generate more efficient levels of collective

religious production. Smith (1998) argues that evangelicals have historically maintained

a tension between being engaged with the culture and distinct from it at the same time.

This combination of engagement and distinction generates subcultural solidarity that

makes evangelicalism thrive. Ammerman (1987) illustrates how a distinctive

congregational culture and theological beliefs among fundamentalist Christians is capable

of generating a meaningful world view that encompasses the lives of congregants.

For these reasons, I expect that evangelicals will be less likely to decline in

attendance during the transition to early adulthood compared to other religious traditions.

28

At the same time, growing up affiliated with a conservative Protestant denomination is

expected to decrease the stability of those infrequent attendees, resulting in a greater

relative probability of increasing attendance.

2.6.2 Religious Socialization

Apart from the church, there are three primary sources of religious socialization:

parents, peers, and schools. Research has typically identified parents as the primary

agents of religious socialization during youth (Erickson 1992; Ozorak 1989; Smith and

Denton 2005). Parental knowledge, belief, and behavior concerning religion provide the

framework from which the young person must navigate through his or her own religious

world. The literature on the intergenerational transmission of religious belief has fairly

consistently concluded that parental religious practice (and maternal practice in

particular) is one of the most robust predictors of offspring religiosity (Myers 1996). In

addition to parental church attendance, religious activities in the home are also an

indicator of household socialization processes and impact measures of youth religiosity

(Erickson 1992).

The other agents of religious socialization have received less attention in the

literature. The influence from peers on all spheres of life grows considerably in

adolescence (Youniss and Smollar 1985). The voluntary time spent with peers is greater

than the equivalent time spent with parents during the adolescence years (Furman 1989).

Consistent with this, research on the religion of peers does indicate that peer religiosity

has influence over religious practice during adolescence (Erickson 1992; Regnerus,

Smith and Smith 2004). Nevertheless, it is not clear whether peers exert any long term

influence over religious participation, or if, alternatively, peer influence is primarily

29

related to social comparison processes that are largely contemporaneous and fleeting in

nature.

The stated goal of many religious schools is to provide an explicitly moral and

religious education that counters the secular education available in public schooling.

And, many parents who oppose public schooling hope that religious alternatives function

in just this way (Sikkink 1999). Nevertheless, there is mixed evidence concerning the

estimated effectiveness of religious institutions in the religious socialization process.

Erickson (1992) finds that religious education does influence adolescent religiosity.1

Regnerus, Smith, and Smith (2004), on the other hand, find no discernable influence from

religious schooling on measures of adolescent church attendance. As with peers, it is an

open question as to whether any long-term religious effects exist from religious

schooling.

It seems likely that the most enduring effects on religious pathways in young

adulthood will come from the religious socialization of parents. The sustained influence

from peers and religious schools is expected to be milder, if any influence exists at all.

2.6.3 Ecological Contexts

Adolescents are embedded in local structures that shape their social world. The

social ecology defined by religious composition, class structures, racial distributions, and

urbanicity might be expected to alter the available stock of religious knowledge, customs,

and beliefs. Arguments noting the regional nature of religious commitment in the United

1 Although this may be partially due to the inclusion of congregational religious education (e.g. Sunday school) in his measure of religious education.

30

States point to these demographic characteristics as evidence for why the South is

particularly religious while the Northeastern and Western United States is not (Hunter

1983). While local contexts are certainly not expected to dictate the content of religious

belief and practice, young people are likely to develop religious ideas and practices that

are congruent with the environment they occupy. Because of this, the push to regularly

attend religious services would be expected to be prominent in areas with large

evangelical populations, high proportions of ethnic and racial minorities, and rural

communities. These environments are expected to provide religious examples and shared

cultural repertoires that nurture religious life in the transition to adulthood as well as the

social capital to more efficiently monitor behavior and punish nonconformity.

2.6.4 Social Resources and Environmental Stability

Research concerning the intergenerational transmission of religious belief and

practice has documented measures of household social capital as influencing the

successful parent-offspring transfer of religiosity. In particular both family structure

(Biblarz and Raftery 1993; Myers 1996) and the quality of parent-child relationships

(Bao et al. 1999; King, Elder, and Whitbeck 1997) influence adolescent levels of

religiosity. Measures of human capital in the form of parental educational attainment,

however, have shown mixed effects in the literature. Hoge, Petrillo, and Smith (1982)

find no relationship between parental education and a measure of theological belief.

Myers (1996) finds that father’s educational attainment is positively related to a

composite index of offspring religiosity; while mother’s educational attainment is

negatively related to the same measure. Smith and Sikkink (2003) find that father’s

education is positively related to offspring retention in the same religious tradition, but

31

only for mainline Protestants. In addition to the conflicting results, none of these studies

directly measure religious participation – the outcome of interest in the present study.

No known studies have documented the influence from neighborhood stability on

religious outcomes for youth or young adults. However, several possible expectations

can be developed from related literature. Studies have found that as individuals become

mobile, they break social ties resulting in lower levels of religious participation

(Wuthnow and Christiano 1979; Welch and Baltzell 1984). Residential turnover in a

geographic area has the same effect. As the proportion of individuals who move into and

out of a geographic area increase, social networks at the congregational level are broken

and it becomes more difficult to maintain a vibrant religious culture (Welch 1983; Finke

1989). We might suspect that young people would be more likely to decrease religious

participation in areas marked by high residential turnover.

At the same time, we might suspect that other forms of neighborhood instability

increase the likelihood of joining and participating in religious communities. Freeman

(1985) and Cook (2000) have both suggested that young people may join churches in

unstable neighborhoods as a deliberate way to avoid deviance and gang life. By

becoming involved in a church, young people can generate alternative social networks

that provide resources and direction toward positive life outcomes. Nevertheless, it is not

clear whether living in an unstable neighborhood during early adolescence would affect

pathways of religious participation that occur several years later in the life course.

2.6.5 The Mediating Influence of Life Course Events in Early Adulthood

Extant research on the life course and religious change has identified education

(Cohen 1983; Cornwall 1989; Gaede 1977; Mueller and Johnson 1975; Roof 1978) and

32

family formation based influence (Bahr 1970; Mueller and Cooper 1986; Roozen et al.

1990; Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995) on religious practice in early adulthood.

Parents, peers, and social environments all play a part in shaping educational and family

related outcomes in young adulthood. Many of the influences hypothesized to influence

differing pathways of religious participation would also be expected to influence these

other life events in young adulthood. It is quite possible, then, that any enduring

influence from social location in early adolescence on religious participation is mediated

through these key life course events in young adulthood. Alternatively, the measures of

social location in early adolescence may have a distinct impact on later religious

pathways apart from education and family related life course events.

2.7 Data

In order to measure the influence of early adolescence on religious pathways in

early adulthood, the independent variables are primarily drawn from the 1997 wave of the

NLSY97. Due to skip patterns in the data, several key variables measuring family life

were only administered to respondents between the ages of twelve and fourteen in 1997.

Thus, the final models are limited to these respondents (N=5,254). The NSLY97 also

contains a survey given to a parent or guardian who resided with the youth in 1997 from

which several variables are utilized.2 A small number of variables measuring life course

events in early adulthood are also drawn from the 2004 wave of the NLSY97.

2 A biological parent was given preference as the parental informant. If a biological parent was unavailable, preference was given to adoptive parents, stepparents, legal guardians, foster parents, and parental figures in this order. Preference was given to the mother before the father. The majority of parent questionnaires were completed by the respondent’s biological mother.

33

The 2000 Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS 2000) has

been merged with the NLSY97 data to obtain county level measures of religious

adherence and denominational market share. The 2000 RCMS contains information on

religious members and religious adherents for 149 major religious bodies in the United

States.

2.8 Measures

The dependent variable is the categorical latent variable that measures the

underlying class membership in one of four distinct religious trajectories: (1) High-

attending stability, (2) Low-attending Stability, (3) Declining attendance, and (4)

Increasing attendance. In order to simplify the presentation of the models, only results

from certain categorical comparisons in the multinominal logit portion of the growth

mixture model are presented in the models.

Religious tradition is measured by grouping the self-reported denominational

affiliation of respondents into categories that approximate those established by

Steensland et al (2000). Religious tradition is coded into the following categories: (1)

Catholic, (2) Mainline Protestant, (3) Evangelical, (4) Jewish, (5) Other Religion, and (6)

No Religion.3 Respondents, age twelve to fourteen in 1997, closely identified their

religious affiliation with that of the household parental informant. The only substantial

difference in affiliation between parents and children was the greater proportion of youth

who claimed to have no religious affiliation (11.5% of youth versus 6.9% of parents).

3 The Protestant denominations reported in the NLSY97 are relatively unrefined when compared to the categorization scheme utilized in the General Social Survey. Because of this, creating a category for historically Black Protestant denominations was not possible.

34

2.8.1 Measures of Religious Socialization

Several variables are included in the models that measure the religious influence

of parents, peers, and schools in early adolescence. The annual level of parental religious

service attendance is measured on an eight point scale that ranges from “never” to

“everyday”. In addition to this measure, I also include a measure of the frequency of

family religious activity. Respondents were asked to estimate the number of days in a

typical week that the family did something religious together. The influence of peer

religious activity is measured by the estimated proportion of students in the respondent’s

grade at school who regularly attend church services. This item contains five response

categories ranging from “almost none” to “almost all”. Although this item does not

measure the influence from the respondent’s primary network of friends, it does tap into

the degree to which the adolescent perceives church attendance to be normative among

his or her peers. Lastly, I include two dichotomous variables that measure whether the

respondent’s school they presently attended (or most recently attended) in 1997 could be

classified as (1) a private Catholic school, or (2) a non-Catholic religious school.

2.8.2 Measures of Social Resources and Stability

Several variables are included which measure the degree of family resources and

neighborhood stability. At the household level, family structure is measured by a

dichotomous variable that indicates whether or not the respondent lived with both

biological parents during early adolescence. Parent’s educational attainment is measured

by the sum of the highest grade completed by the respondent’s residential mother and

father. If either the mother or father was absent, the remaining parent’s attainment was

weighted to equal that of two adults. Household income was measured in thousands of

35

dollars. The natural log of household income is used in the models to account for the

strong positive skew in the variable. Lastly, two composite scales, one measuring the

parent-youth relationship (primarily the emotional supportiveness of the parent toward

the youth),4 and one measuring the degree to which parents monitor the behavior of the

youth5, are included in the models. Both scales are created from items in the youth

questionnaire in 1997. Separate scales for residential mothers and fathers, as well as non-

residential mothers and fathers, are included in the NLSY97 data. In the present analysis,

I use the mean of the residential parents for both the parent-youth relationship scale and

the parental monitoring scale. For more information on the validity and reliability of

these scales, please consult Appendix 9 of the NLSY97 codebook supplement.

Several indicators of neighborhood stability are also included as covariates. The

degree of residential turnover is measured by the percent of the county population age 5

years and older in 1990 who were residing in the same house in 1985. This measure is

included in the geocode supplemental data to the NLSY97 and is derived from the 1994

County and City Data Book (CCDB) prepared by the U.S. Census Bureau. I also include

two indicators of crime. One is a measure of “serious crimes” per 100,000 individuals 4 The parent-youth relationship scale consists of the sum of scores on eight items. Three of the items involve likert categories indicating the youth’s agreement with the following statements: (1) I think highly of him/her (2) S/he is a person I want to be like (3) I really enjoy spending time with him/her. The answers ranged from “strongly disagree” with a score of 0, to “strongly agree” with a score of 4. Five additional questions measure the perceived frequency of supportive parental activity. The youth was asked to respond to the following statements: (4) How often does s/he praise you? (5) How often does s/he criticize you or your ideas? (reverse coded) (6) How often does s/he help you do things that are important to you? (7) How often does s/he blame you for her/his problems? (reverse coded) (8) How often does s/he make plans with you and cancel for no good reason? (reverse coded) Responses to these items were measured on a scale of “Never” with a score of 0, to “Always” with a score of 4.

5 The parental monitoring scale was created by summing the scores to four survey items. Respondents were asked to respond to the following four questions: (1) How much does he/she know about your close friends, that is, who they are? (2) How much does he/she know about your close friends’ parents, that is, who they are? (3) How much does he/she know about who you are with when you are not at home? (4) How much does he/she know about who your teachers are and what you are doing in school? The responses ranged from “knows nothing” coded as 0, to “knows everything” coded as 4.

36

(measured at the county level). This measure is also included in the geocode supplement,

derived from the 1994 CCDB. From the youth questionnaire, I also include the number

of days the respondent reports hearing gunshots in his or her neighborhood during a

typical week.

2.8.3 Measures of Ecological Context

I include several indicators of the social context of the adolescent between the

ages of 12 and 14. I use the standard census categories of region which categorizes the

state of residence as Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. I also include several county-

level indicators of race (percent of the population that is Black and percent of the

population that is Hispanic), the median level family income, and the percent of the

county that can be classified as urban as opposed to rural. All of these variables are

included in the geocode supplement and were obtained from the 1994 CCDB. Lastly, I

include two measures of the religious affiliation of the county population. Using the

2000 RCMS data, I include measures of the rate of evangelicals per 1,000 individuals and

the rate of Catholics per 1,000 individuals. Evangelical affiliation is determined by

adherence to particular denominations associated with evangelicalism. For more

information, please consult Jones et al (2002).

2.8.4 Measures of Life Course Events in Young Adulthood

In order to measure the direct versus indirect effect of social location in early

adolescence (age 12-14) on later religious pathways of participation, I include several

indicators of important life course events that have been singled-out in the literature to

influence religious participation. Educational attainment is measured by two

37

dichotomous variables. The first indicates whether the respondent had graduated with a

bachelor’s degree or a higher degree in 2004. I also include a variable that measures

whether the respondent has attended at least some college or graduated with an

associate’s degree or its equivalent by 2004. Research has demonstrated that college

graduates with a bachelor’s degree or more are more likely to attend religious services

regularly compared to those with lesser degrees or no academic degrees (Uecker,

Regnerus, and Vaaler 2007). Nevertheless, while students are enrolled in higher

education, their religious service attendance temporarily declines. Due to the age of the

sample in 2004 (age 20-22), only a small percentage of the had graduated with a BA or a

higher degree. See Chapters three and four for a more detailed analysis of higher

education and religious participation.

Prior studies have also demonstrated the importance of marriage and family for

religious participation. Variables measuring whether the respondent has a biological

child living in the household, as well as a variable indicating whether or not the

respondent is currently married or has even been married, are included in the final

models. Research has also demonstrated that engaging in cohabiting relationships prior

to marriage is associated with declining levels of religious service participation

(Thornton, Axinn, and Hill 1992). A variable indicating whether the respondent has ever

been in a cohabiting relationship is included in the analyses. Missing data are handled

via multiple imputation methods.6 Descriptive statistics for all variables are listed in

Table 2.1.

6 The ICE software program available in STATA was used to impute missing values (Royston 2005). ICE uses a maximum likelihood procedure to fill in the most likely values for missing data. In regression analysis, the standard errors of the regression coefficients are correctly computed by statistically including

38

TABLE 2.1

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Mean Std.Dev. Range Church Attendance 2000 2.526 2.161 0 to 7 Church Attendance 2001 2.353 2.077 0 to 7 Church Attendance 2002 2.059 1.985 0 to 7 Church Attendance 2003 2.023 1.975 0 to 7 Church Attendance 2004 1.855 1.910 0 to 7 Latent Class 1 to 4 Catholic 0.302 0 to 1 Evangelical 0.359 0 to 1 Mainline Protestant 0.215 0 to 1 Jewish 0.011 0 to 1 Other Religion 0.020 0 to 1 No Religion 0.115 0 to 1 Age 13.008 0.816 12 to 14 Female 0.483 0 to 1 Black 0.270 0 to 1 Hispanic 0.208 0 to 1 White Non-Hispanic 0.495 0 to 1 Other Race 0.035 0 to 1 Frequency of Parental Church 3.166 2.034 0 to 7 Frequency of Family Religious Activity 1.648 2.027 0 to 7 Frequency of Peer Church Attendance 1.838 1.138 0 to 4 Attends Catholic School 0.038 0 to 1 Attends Non-Catholic Religious School 0.021 0 to 1 Lives with Both Biological Parents 0.523 0 to 1 Parents’ Educational Attainment 24.751 5.694 2 to 40 Household Income (natural log) 3.479 0.987 0 to 5.511 Parental Emotional Support 24.717 4.710 2 to 32 Parental Monitoring 9.393 3.343 0 to16 Residential Turnover 47.391 8.664 19.6 to 73.400 Frequency of Gun Shots 0.548 1.346 0 to7 Frequency of Serious Crime 5.784 2.878 0 to 16.031 Midwest 0.223 0 to 1 West 0.371 0 to 1 South 0.230 0 to 1 Northeast 0.176 0 to 1 Percent Black (County) 14.558 15.513 .037 to 75.796 Percent Hispanic (County) 10.673 15.231 .3 to 85.2 Median Family Income (County) 35.330 8.795 12.136 to Percent Urban (County) 75.409 43.067 0 to 100 Evangelical Rate (Per 1,000 county 143.92 118.982 0 to 809.585 Catholic Rate (Per 1,000 county 221.22 152.609 0 to 695.877

a degree of uncertainty for the values that have been imputed. To avoid losing these and other respondents, most missing values have been imputed.

39

TABLE 2.1 (continued)

BA or More 0.028 0 to 1 Some College 0.474 0 to 1 Biological Child in Household 0.189 0 to 1 Ever Cohabit 0.300 0 to 1 Ever Married 0.101 0 to 1 N 5254

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997

2.9 Plan of Analysis

I address the influence of early adolescent influences on religious participation

pathways in two ways. First, in order to understand how different religious traditions fare

among the four class trajectories presented in the first part of this chapter, I examine the

frequency of class membership by religious tradition. This is presented in basic

frequency tables. Then, I present multivariate models that contrast specific trajectory

categories.7 Specifically, I present multinomial logit models that examine predictors of

being in the declining attendance class versus the high stable attending class. I also

present a set of multinomial logit models that examine the predictors of being in

increasing attendance class versus the low stable attending class. These models are then

compared to the expected influences from religious tradition, religious socialization,

7 Although covariates can be included within the growth mixture modeling framework, the number of covariates in the present analysis makes the computation of such a model problematic. In order to test for consistency between a correctly specified GMM with covariates and the multinomial logit models presented in the tables, I compared a GMM with covariates for religious tradition to the first models in Table 2.3 and Table 2.4. Effect size and statistical significance were nearly identical, with the exception of Jewish youth not being significantly different from the omitted category of evangelical youth in either model.

40

family and neighborhood resources and stability, contextual influences, and life course

events in early adulthood.

2.10 Results

Table 2.2 presents the frequencies of class membership by religious identification.

Several contrasts are particularly noteworthy. Among the three largest religious

traditions of Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and evangelical Protestantism, there is

only a slight difference in the proportion that fall into the declining attendance category

(with evangelicals being slightly less likely to be in this class). Somewhere between one

out of four and one out of five young people who claimed an affiliation with one of the

major Christian traditions will decline substantially in their religious participation

between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. On the other hand, Jewish adolescents,

individuals with no religious affiliation, and individuals who adhere to other religions are

relatively unlikely to be in the declining category in young adulthood compared to those

with a Christian affiliation. For those in other religions, and especially for those without

a religious affiliation, this is likely due to low levels of overall religious participation

(evidenced in the low proportions who participate regularly between the ages of 16 and

22). However, Jewish youth are actually more likely than Catholics to regularly attend

worship services, suggesting that it is not simply overall low participation that keeps

Jewish young adults out of the declining attendance class. Still, some caution should be

exercised interpreting this finding, as the overall number of Jewish youth in the sample is

only 47.

41

TABLE 2.2

FREQUENCY OF CLASS MEMBERSHIP

BY RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Latent Class Catholic Evangelical Mainline Jewish Other No Religion

Total

Decreasing 375 24.48%

406 22.22%

267 24.88%

2 4.26%

10 11.49%

50 21.52%

1110

Stable-Low 825

53.85% 749 41.00%

514 47.90%

35 74.47%

59 67.82%

478 80.88%

2660

Increasing 110

7.18% 183 10.02%

71 6.62%

1 2.13%

8 9.20%

41 6.94%

414

Stable-High 222

14.49% 489 26.77%

221 20.60%

9 19.15%

10 11.49%

22 3.72%

973

Total 1532 1,827 1073 47 87 591 5157

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997

Table 2.2 also presents the proportion of respondents from each religious tradition

that are best classified as increasing their religious participation in young adulthood.

Here we find less overall differences between religious traditions when compared to the

increasing attendance class. The exception may be among Jewish youth who seem

particularly unlikely to increase attendance during the late adolescent and young adult

years (although once again this is based on a small sample). Overall, evangelicals are the

most likely to increase in attendance, with those from other faiths following close behind.

Those with no religious affiliation are nearly as likely to substantially increase their

religious service attendance as those who adhere to the mainline Protestant and Catholic

42

traditions. However, once we consider the number of low, stable attending non-affiliates

(approximately four out of five non-affiliates fit this description), the relative proportion

in the increasing category is still low compared to other groups. Analyzing the table in

this manner would suggest that only around one in eleven 16 to 22 year non-affiliates

move from a state of low attendance to a substantial increase in attendance. The

equivalent comparison for evangelicals would be almost one in four. Overall, this table

reveals that those adhering to a Christian religious tradition between the ages of 12 and

14 have far less stable religious trajectories in late adolescent and early adulthood

compared to other religious groups and non-religious youth.

Table 2.3 presents a series of multivariate models that assess the relative risk of

an individual having his or her attendance trajectory being classified as declining versus

being classified as high attending and stable. It is important to remember conceptually

that these models do not predict whether a single individual switches from one trajectory

to another. Rather, each individual can be probabilistically categorized as belonging to

one trajectory or another. Nevertheless, those in the declining category are necessarily

declining from a state of high attendance. Whether their prior state was that of stable,

high attendance is not known. Nevertheless, they provide a useful comparison category

to those who do not decline, but maintain high levels of religious participation during the

transition to young adulthood. Table 2.3 and Table 2.4 are both estimated using

multinomial logit regression with coefficients displayed as odds ratios.

In the first model of Table 2.3, I include only covariates that identify the youth’s

religious tradition between the ages of twelve and fourteen, omitting evangelicals as the

reference category. The results, as would be expected, mirror the relative distributions

43

TABLE 2.3

LIKELIHOOD OF DECLINING ATTENDANCE

VERUS HIGH ATTENDING STABILITY

AGE 16-22

(1) (2) (3) (6) Religious Traditiona Catholic 2.035** 2.030** 1.784** 1.721** Mainline Protestant 1.455** 1.407** 1.397** 1.415** Jewish 0.268+ 0.253+ 0.219+ 0.215+ Other Religion 1.204 1.030 1.081 1.159 No Religion 2.737** 2.679** 1.708* 1.549 Individual Characteristics Age 0.832** 0.827** 0.871* Female 0.807* 0.791** 0.867 Blackb 0.893 0.936 0.881 Hispanicb 0.832 0.871 0.848 Other Raceb 1.197 1.175 1.167 Religious Socialization (Age 12-14) Frequency of Parental Church Attendance 0.876** 0.895** Frequency of Family Religious Activity 0.881** 0.885** Frequency of Peer Church Attendance 0.883** 0.911* Attends Catholic Schoolc 0.944 0.952 Attends Non-Catholic Religious Schoolc 0.745 0.674 Social Resources and Stability (Age 12-14) Lives with Both Biological Parents 0.791* Parents’ Educational Attainment 0.998 Household Income (natural log) 1.087 Parental Emotional Support 0.982 Parental Monitoring 1.001 Residential Turnover 0.995 Frequency of Gun Shots 0.976 Frequency of Serious Crime 1.006 Contextual Influence (Age 12-14) Midwestd 0.863 Westd 0.917 Southd 0.980 Percent Black (County) 0.993 Percent Hispanic (County) 0.995

44

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 NOTE: Multinomial Logistic Regression; Coefficients are Odds Ratios; aReference group is Evangelical; bReference group is White; cReference Group is all Non-Religious Schools; dReference group is West; eReference Group is High School Degree or Less +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed test) seen in Table 2.2. Those who claimed to have no religious affiliation during early

adolescence were the most likely to experience relative decline versus high attending

stability. Among religious groups, Catholics were approximately twice as likely as

evangelicals to experience relative decline while Jewish adolescents and young adults

were the least likely. Those from other religious traditions were not statistically different

from evangelicals.

Including individual level control variables in Model 2 does little to alter these

initial differences by religious tradition. Older respondents (measured by whether they

were twelve, thirteen, or fourteen in 1997) were less likely to decline in attendance

compared to being in the high attending category. This corroborates Figures 2.3 and 2.4

which display a substantial decrease in membership in the declining attendance category

for the older group of respondents. Consistent with other research documenting the

religious difference between males and females, females are less likely to be in the

TABLE 2.3 (continued)

Median Family Income (County) 1.007 Percent Urban (County) 1.001 Evangelical Rate (Per 1,000 county residents) 1.000 Catholic Rate (Per 1,000 county residents) 1.001 Life Course Events (Age 20-22) BA or Moree 0.555* Some Collegee 0.632** Biological Child in Household 0.713* Ever Cohabit 1.725** Ever Married 0.573** N 5254 5254 5254 5254

45

declining category versus the high stable attending category when compared to males.

No statistically significant differences by race were found.

Model 3 includes the bulk of the predictors that measure the social location of the

individual during early adolescence. An examination of the primary agents of religious

socialization reveals that families as well as peers influence the relative risk of decline in

late adolescence and early adulthood. Individuals who had attended a religiously

affiliated school were not significantly different from other adolescents who attended

other public and private schools. The variables designed to measure social resources and

stability were mostly ineffective predictors of the relative risk of decline during the

transition to adulthood. The one exception to this is the variable measuring family

structure. Respondents who resided with both biological parents between the ages of

twelve and fourteen were at less risk of later declining attendance. Emotional support

from parents also lowered the likelihood of decline, but this was only significant at the

.10 level. Measures of neighborhood instability were non-significant. Lastly, the broader

social context, primarily measured at the county level (with the exception of geographic

region), were mostly non-significant predictors of relative risk of declining attendance.

Respondents residing in counties with large African American populations appear to be

slightly less likely to be in the declining category versus stable high attendance. Region,

median family income, urbanicity, and the distribution of religious adherents at the

county level do not predict the relative risk of decline.

The inclusion of these variables designed to account for the social location of the

youth in 1997 alter the effect size for Catholics and those without a religious affiliation.

In both cases, the difference between these groups and evangelicals becomes smaller.

46

Separate analyses confirm that this is largely due to parental religious attendance for

those without a religious affiliation and primarily due to the frequency of family religious

activities for Catholics.

Model 4 in Table 2.3 includes variables measured in 2004 (when respondents

were between the ages of twenty and twenty-two) that tap into key life course events in

early adulthood. As expected, higher educational attainment, having children, and

getting married are all associated with a lower relative risk of decline, while cohabiting is

associated with an elevated risk of declining religious practice. The inclusion of these

indicators of life course activities does little to influence the effect of religious tradition.

The only exception to this is the group without a religious affiliation drops from being

slightly significantly different from evangelicals, to no longer being significantly

different (although the effect size still suggests they are at 55% higher risk of decline, we

can not be confident that this difference is true in the population). This suggests that the

effect of religious tradition on later risk of decline is largely a direct effect, unmediated

by later key life course events. One of the most striking findings concerns the effect of

gender on relative risk of decline. A substantial portion of the difference between males

and females, according to Model 4, can be attributed to differences in life course events

related to education, marriage, and children. Separate analyses find that having a child

and attending at least some college largely account for the differences in the relative risk

of decline between males and females.

Table 2.4 examines predictors of the relative risk of increasing attendance versus

low attending stability between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. Several differences

exist by religious tradition according to Model 1. Specifically, compared to evangelicals,

47

all groups are at less risk of a relative increase in attendance (although those from non-

Christian and non-Jewish faiths were not statistically different from evangelicals). Those

at the least risk were Jewish youth, followed by those with no religious affiliation.

Catholic and mainline Protestant affiliates were nearly half as likely to belong to an

increasing attendance class versus low attending stability.

Model 2 includes individual level covariates. Unlike in Table 2.3, age group is

not a significant predictor of relative increase. Females are more likely to be in the

increasing attendance class relative to low attendance, while non-Hispanic whites (the

reference category) are relatively less likely than African Americans and Latinos to be in

the increasing religious participation category.

Model 3 includes variables measuring religious socialization, social resources and

stability, and contextual influences. Neither peer church attendance nor the religious

affiliation of the school attended during early adolescence predicts the relative risk of

belonging to the increasing attendance trajectory. However, both family measures of

religious practice (parent’s attendance and frequency of family religious activities)

increase the likelihood of increasing religious practice versus remaining at a stable low

level of attendance. Family structure does not appear to alter the relative risk of increase,

while having educated parents increases the likelihood of remaining at a low stable level

of attendance. No other family or neighborhood measures of resources and stability

predict the relative likelihood of increasing attendance. The particular variables chosen

to measure contextual influence on the relative risk of increasing religious participation

were all non-significant, with the exception of geographic region of residence. Those

who resided in the South between the ages of twelve and fourteen were 87.7% more

48

TABLE 2.4

LIKELIHOOD OF INCREASING ATTENDANCE

VERSUS LOW ATTENDING STABILITY

AGE 16-22

(1) (2) (3) (4) Religious Traditiona Catholic 0.546** 0.616** 0.624** 0.738+ Mainline Protestant 0.565** 0.691* 0.696* 0.783 Jewish 0.117* 0.178+ 0.200 0.325 Other Religion 0.555 0.909 0.897 1.070 No Religion 0.351** 0.408** 0.519** 0.587** Individual Characteristics Age 1.046 1.045 1.014 Female 1.467** 1.501** 1.513** Blackb 2.033** 1.824** 1.720** Hispanicb 1.669** 1.583** 1.486+ Other Raceb 0.498 0.485 0.512 Religious Socialization (Age 12-14) Frequency of Parental Church Attendance 1.090** 1.085* Frequency of Family Religious Activity 1.101** 1.087** Frequency of Peer Church Attendance 1.029 1.010 Attends Catholic Schoolc 0.955 1.286 Attends Non-Catholic Religious Schoolc 0.596 0.662 Social Resources and Stability (Age 12-14) Lives with Both Biological Parents 1.035 Parents’ Educational Attainment 0.972* Household Income (natural log) 1.056 Parental Emotional Support 0.998 Parental Monitoring 0.996 Residential Turnover 1.003 Frequency of Gun Shots 1.024 Frequency of Serious Crime 0.988 Contextual Influence (Age 12-14) Midwestd 1.431+ Westd 1.066 Southd 1.835* Percent Black (County) 1.000 Percent Hispanic (County) 1.000

49

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 NOTE: Multinomial Logistic Regression; Coefficients are Odds Ratios; aReference group is Evangelical; bReference group is White; cReference Group is all Non-Religious Schools; dReference group is West; eReference Group is High School Degree or Less +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed test)

likely to increase their attendance versus those whose residence was in the Northeastern

United States. Those who lived in the Midwest were 46.1% more likely to increase

attendance compared to those who lived in the Northeast.

The addition of variables measuring life course events related to education and

family formation in Model 4 do not substantively alter the relationship between any of

the other independent variables and the relative risk of increasing religious attendance.

Those who graduate from college with at least a bachelor’s degree are approximately

twice as likely to experience a relative increase in attendance versus those who did not

attend college at all. Having a biological child in the household does not influence the

likelihood of following an increasing attendance pathway in early adulthood. It is highly

likely that the majority of parents in this data (age twenty to twenty-two) had children

that were quite young at the time of their interview. Past research has identified

TABLE 2.4 (continued)

Median Family Income (County) 0.991 Percent Urban (County) 1.001 Evangelical Rate (Per 1,000 county residents) 0.999 Catholic Rate (Per 1,000 county residents) 0.999 Life Course Events (Age 20-22) BA or Moree 2.071* Some Collegee 0.887 Biological Child in Household 1.141 Ever Cohabit 0.707** Ever Married 1.876** N 5254 5254 5254 5254

50

increasing patterns of religious service attendance when children reach school age, but

not prior to this (Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995). Lastly, cohabiting reduces the

likelihood of being in the increasing attendance class, while being married increases the

likelihood of being in the increasing class.

In Model 4, with the inclusion of the full set of covariates, the effect from

religious tradition is considerably lessened from the effect size estimated in Model 1.

Catholics are the only religious tradition to remain slightly significantly different from

Evangelicals (at the .10 level). Those without a religious affiliation are still the least

likely statistically significant category of individuals to be classified in the increasing

attendance class versus the low attending class. The inclusion of individual demographic

characteristics, measures of family religious activity, and region of residence explained a

substantial portion of the difference between religious traditions.

2.11 Discussion

2.11.1 Religious Tradition

The religious traditions measured in the NLSY97 play different roles in religious

retention versus religious uptake in late adolescence and early adulthood. Between the

Christian traditions of Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and evangelical Protestantism

there exists statistically significant differences in the relatively likelihood that individuals

will decline in attendance versus maintaining high levels of religious participation.

Jewish youth seem to be at far less risk than even evangelicals for this relative risk of

religious decline, although caution should be taken in this finding, given the low number

51

of Jewish youth available in the sample. The overall difference between the religiously

affiliated and the non-affiliated is not statistically different when we examine this relative

risk of decline.

This finding suggests that there is something about evangelicalism, beyond

demographic characteristics and family religious practice, which keep youth involved in

church to a greater extent than other Christian traditions during the critical years of late

adolescence and early adulthood. Lytch (2003) argues that the congregational level

processes of religious socialization and religious experience work in tandem to shape

youth loyalty to religious traditions. The particular combination of strong socialization

into the particular rituals, beliefs, and religious language of a tradition is cemented as

one’s own during personal religious experience. Those congregations and traditions that

are better able to give young people the religious tools to interpret religious experience as

salient to their sense of self and identity would be expected to retain individuals into

young adulthood at higher rates. Denominations that are classified as evangelical (the

majority being Southern Baptist in this analysis), are arguably more effective in this task.

Evangelicals have developed a vibrant subculture in the United States, one which

includes a distinct terminology, sanctions against nonconformity, and an emphasis on

individualist commitment and experience. Socialization into the particularities of this

subculture commonly includes the expected cues and signals of religious experience

along with language with which to interpret this experience. In this way, the

congregational experience of a young adolescent in an evangelical congregation would

likely be distinct from that of a mainline Protestant or Catholic congregation.

52

Religious tradition, however, matters less in accounting for the difference

between those who do not regularly attend and those that increase their attendance

substantially during the transition to adulthood. With the exception of a slightly

significant difference between Catholics and evangelicals, the primary cleavage is

between those who maintain a religious affiliation and those who do not. Religiously

affiliated youth, including those who are non-practicing, likely have a greater degree of

exposure to specific religious cultures and their accompanying stories, beliefs, and rituals.

This knowledge, then, would be expected to reduce the traversable cultural boundaries

necessary in gaining entrance into a religious community. The particular effectiveness of

this process between religious traditions, however, can largely be accounted for by

gender, race, family religious practices, and regional culture.

2.11.2 Religious Socialization

The primacy of parental religious socialization and household religious practices

was confirmed in the analyses presented here. Parental religious service attendance

during early adolescence is a strong predictor of the religious pathways a young person

takes as they develop a more autonomous self. However, beyond the frequency of church

attendance, youth who report frequent religious activities in the home are also

substantially influenced by this in their decisions to participate in a religious community

during the transition to adulthood. This suggests that there is something additional

beyond simple modeling behavior that influences religious participation. Young people

appear to internalize faith practices partly due to religious life being reinforced in the

household. These influences from parents, as expected, act to reinforce the likelihood of

retention in a religious community for the youth. However, these parental practices also

53

act to decrease the likelihood of maintaining a low, stable attendance pattern in late

adolescence and early adulthood. This suggests that it is difficult for a young person to

maintain a pattern of religious participation that conflicts with that of their household of

origin, even as they enter the relatively autonomous stage of early adulthood.

Early adolescent peer involvement in religious communities appears to exert some

degree of lasting influence over religious retention. To the extent that young adolescents

perceive their peers (defined as youth in the same grade who with whom they attend

school) participating frequently in religious services, they themselves are more likely to

maintain their own religious participation stably into young adulthood.8 Although

parents are arguably the most important lasting influence from early adolescence, the

enduring influence from peers appears to extend beyond the sphere of popular culture to

the sphere of religious practice. This particular finding suggests that future research

would benefit from specifying more precisely the impact from peers on the religious life

of young people. Nevertheless, no lasting influence from peers on those who

substantially increase their religious service in early adulthood is found in this analysis.

It is likely that immediate social networks and contemporaneous peer culture exert a

larger influence on the decision to join a religious community, as opposed to the decision

to stay in a religious community.

No long-term effect on religious participation patterns from attending a religious

school between the ages of twelve and fourteen could be found. Although the difference

8 The variable measuring peer attendance does not measure the attendance of the respondent’s group of primary friends. Rather, the variable taps into the perception of the frequency of religious service attendance for all similarly aged youth attending his or her school. Because of this, the measure may be capturing what the respondent thinks the norm is regarding church attendance for young people in his or her community. Undoubtedly this is influenced by the respondent’s own friendship network, yet it is not narrowly focused on this dimension of peer attendance.

54

between those attending a non-Catholic religious school (with a likely conservative

Protestant affiliation) and a non-religious school were moderate in effect size, no

statistically significant difference was found (perhaps due to the low numbers of

respondents attending such schools). Although many schools have as a stated goal to

provide religious education, in a society that places great import on education for its

utility in the market, even religious schools are likely to be dominated by educational

programs primarily designed to enroll the majority of their students in higher education

and, ultimately, achieve occupational and economic security. The time a typical student

spends learning geometry and studying British literature likely dwarfs any time spent

learning theology or religious rituals. Although a more directed study of conservative

Protestant schools may be able to trace the influences of religious education into early

adulthood, this analysis suggests that schools are less significant for later religious

pathways when compared to the household, congregation, or peer group.

2.11.3 Resources, Stability, and Context

Overall, most of the variables measuring social resources and environmental

stability were poor predictors of religious pathways in early adulthood. Even so, the two

variables that did seem to have an influence were both measures of household

characteristics, as opposed to neighborhood characteristics. Family structure, specifically

living with both biological parents in early adolescent, reduces the likelihood of dropping

in attendance versus staying in church. This finding, consistent with the research on the

intergenerational transmission of religious practice (Myers 1996), is likely due to the

difficulty of successful religious socialization with only one parent. Having highly

educated parents, however, reduces the likelihood of becoming active in a religious

55

congregation during early adulthood. Past research on the transmission of parent-

offspring religious values has obtained mixed results when examining the influence of

parent’s education on the likelihood of successfully transmitting religiosity (Hoge,

Johnson, and Luidens 1994; Myer 1996; Smith and Sikkink 2003). The inconsistent

results may be partly due to the different mechanisms at work. Having highly educated

parents reduces the likelihood of beginning to regularly attend religious services, but it

has no influence on the likelihood of retaining those who already attend. At the same

time, if the respondent graduates from college, he or she is more likely to increase their

attendance. These counteracting forces may be partially accounted for by cohort

differences in the influence of higher education on religious practice (see Appendix A).

The measures of geographic context also had little influence over later pathways

of religious participation with the exception of geographic region. Living in the

Midwestern and Southern United States increases the likelihood of becoming active in a

religious congregation during the transition to early adulthood. Extant research identifies

high rates of religious participation in these regions for both adults (Finke 1989) and

adolescents (Smith and Denton 2005). Moreover, regional differences in religious

participation persist even despite continued geographic mobility across regions

(Iannaccone and Makowsky 2007; Smith, Sikkink, and Bailey 1998). However, the

analysis presented in this chapter indicates that this regional influence is not due to the

proportion of the population that is evangelical, the geographic distribution of race, the

wealth of residents, or the lower levels of urban population in the South and Midwest.

Southern culture and institutions in particular (and perhaps to a less extent the culture and

institutions of the Midwest) do not appear to provide the support for stable, low religious

56

participation as is the case in the Northeastern and Western United States. However, the

mechanisms that keep individuals in church once they attend regularly do not appear to

be related to regionalism.

2.11.4 Direct Versus Indirect Effects

The analysis presented in this chapter largely corroborates the evidence

regarding the religious influence of education and family formation (see Chapters 3 and 4

for more on higher education and religious practice and belief). Most of the significant

predictors from early adolescence have a direct effect, unmediated by these life course

indicators in early adulthood.

The differences in religious retention between men and women are one exception

to this finding. Once life course events in early adulthood are controlled for, the

differences between men and women were no longer significant. This result is important

because it suggests that women are not less likely to decline in religious particpation

during early adulthood because of firmly rooted gender differences cemented in early

childhood socialization (Thompson 1991), or because they are less prone toward risky

behavior (Miller and Stark 2002), but rather because a larger proportion of women now

attend higher education compared to men along with the added religious responsibilities

of raising a young child for some women.

2.12 Conclusion

This chapter makes several key contributions to our understanding of religious

participation during the transition to early adulthood. Past research has typically

57

analyzed mean changes in religious service participation, or, alternatively, identified the

proportion of young people who report increasing or decreasing attendance over some

predefined period of time. Unfortunately these methods are plagued by certain pitfalls.

Analyzing mean change often times masks important patterns of growth and decline

while measuring the proportion who are stable, increase, or decrease is not able to convey

the degree of growth or decline, and it is sensitive to the time frame between

measurements. To provide a better map of change in religious participation during this

period of the life course, I use growth mixture modeling along with five waves of data on

church attendance to uncover latent patterns of religious participation trajectories

between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.

This research also has the advantage of using concurrently collected panel data

as opposed to retrospective life histories. Although the latter have distinct advantages,

they are often times plagued by an individualist interpretation of life events that masks

the social influences on individual action. Moreover, studies that have used panel data

have not typically focused their analysis on the key ages of late adolescence and early

adulthood, when changes in religious practice are most likely to occur (for an exception

see Uecker, Regnerus, and Vaaler 2007).

Lastly, this study expands the focus outward from family or origin and family of

procreation influences. Although families are a critical part of the religious lifecycle, the

adoption of the life course framework draws our attention to the myriad social influences

of networks and ecological contexts on patterned trajectories of change. One of the

shortcomings of the present study is the broad county-level measures of context

employed, possibly underestimating the effects of the proximate context. Greater

58

precision in measurement is necessary to better specify the influence from ecological

context on religious outcomes. Future research would also benefit from the introduction

of more direct measures of social networks and congregational life. Understanding the

social influences outside of the family will greatly expand our understanding of religion

during this key juncture in the life course.

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CHAPTER 3:

HIGHER EDUCATION AND CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND PRACTICE

3.1 Overview

Sociologists of religion have long recognized that religious beliefs and practice

vary over time with the changes in social arrangements that constitute the individual life

course (Bahr 1970). Recent research on life course transitions and religion has focused

primarily on the Family Life Cycle model; namely that marriage and childbearing bring

about increases in religious participation (Bahr 1970; Mueller and Cooper 1986; Roozen

et al. 1990; Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995). Nevertheless, it is recognized that

the increases in religious service attendance typically brought about by family formation

are commonly preceded by a period in late adolescence and early adulthood marked by

low levels of religious practice (Bellah et al. 1985; Roozen 1980; Wilson and Sherkat

1994). While this period of decline in religious practice is widely acknowledged in the

popular culture, and more formally documented in sociological research, little is known

about the processes that produce this decline. The purpose of this chapter is to focus on

the religious effect of one highly formative institution in the transition to adulthood – the

university. Higher education has been targeted as a primary secularizing agent in the

sociological literature (see Caplovitz and Sherrow 1977; Hammond and Hunter 1984;

Hunter 1987; Roof and McKinney 1987; Wuthnow 1988) as well as among concerned

religious advocates (see Budziszewski 1999; Campolo and Willimon 2002; Nye 2005;

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Wheaton 2005). Despite this, the impact of college on religious identity and practice has

not been specified adequately, looming larger in anecdotal accounts and a priori

assumptions.

The intent of this research is to re-examine the relationship between higher

education and religious belief and practice in light of both methodological advances in

the social sciences and the changing nature of higher education. As higher education

continues to expand, the importance of understanding how college shapes students’

attitudes and beliefs becomes ever more crucial. Past research has documented that

college students become more politically tolerant, display an increase in altruistic values,

and support civil rights and values to a greater extent (see Pascarella and Terenzini

1991:276-280). Despite this, recent research on religious beliefs has been relatively

scarce (Johnson 1997; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005).

This chapter corrects for this oversight by examining nationally-representative,

longitudinal data for changes in religious salience, practice, and identity over the college

years. Specifically, changes in religious service attendance, frequency of prayer, self-

rated importance of faith, and religious affiliation are assessed over a six year period

ranging from high school to young adulthood. Moreover, the design used in this study

incorporates a control group of non-college graduates that is essential for separating the

effects of educational attainment from more general maturational and life course effects

associated with early adulthood. Further discussion of the methodological advantages

will be addressed shortly, but first we direct our attention to some broader theoretical and

empirical issues that shape our understanding of the effect of college on religious identity

and practice.

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3.2 Religion and College in Sociological Perspective

Sociologists of religion have primarily discussed the effects of higher education in

the context of secularization (Hammond and Hunter 1984; Hunter 1987; Roof and

McKinney 1987; Wuthnow 1988). In most of these studies, the actual college

environment is not explicitly examined, but rather implicitly assumed to undermine

traditional religious belief. With the adoption of the Bergerian language of “pluralism”

and “plausibility structures”, these sociological accounts contend that the encounter with

alternative ideas and lifestyles on campus (i.e. pluralism) undermines the foundation of

dogmatic religious beliefs (Berger 1967). The expansion of higher education, therefore,

contributes to an overall secularizing influence in society.

Of course, with the questioning and refinement of secularization theory among

sociologists (see Stark and Finke 2000; Warner 1993), it is appropriate to reconsider how

powerful an effect the college environment has on the plausibility of religious belief.

Berger (1999) has himself acknowledged that religious belief may be more resilient than

he once theorized. Moreover, Smith (1998) has argued that certain aspects of modern

pluralism may actually serve as fodder for social psychological cohesion within religious

communities. From this perspective, college campuses could be rife breeding grounds

for subcultural solidarity. Similarly, Hammond and Hunter (1984) find that evangelicals

on secular campuses appear to be maintaining their faith more than evangelicals on

religious campuses. They posit a similar explanation as Smith, hypothesizing that

minority identities require more active maintenance than dominant identities, resulting in

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a stronger overall identity. These alternative conceptualizations of the interplay between

pluralism and religion warrant a fresh examination of the relationship between higher

education and personal religious identity.

3.3 Past Research

Quantitative research on the effects of higher education on religious belief and

practice has been relatively sparse over the past few decades. Prior to the decade of the

1970s, numerous studies were accumulated by social scientists exploring this particular

relationship (for a review see Feldman and Newcomb 1969:23-28), but the number of

studies since then has dropped off to a small handful (Johnson 1997). While the early

studies were frequent, what they were able to conclude was tentative at best and often

plagued by inadequate methodologies and limited samples that placed a damper upon

claims to causality and inference to the larger population. An examination of the studies

reviewed by Feldman and Newcomb (1969) reveals small samples selected from single

colleges and universities with only a few having longitudinal data. Most of these studies

use a college population to study cross-sectional differences between freshman and

seniors, finding seniors less orthodox in their belief, more skeptical about God, and less

trustful in the institution of the church as compared to freshman. Despite the lack of

generalizability, the studies were numerous and consistent enough to establish what was

considered a moderate secularizing effect of college on students.

With the growth of large-scale survey research in the 1970s, sociologists began

using general population surveys to examine the relationship between years of education

and religiosity among the general population. Though the studies are fewer in number

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than the prior research, the evidence from these general population surveys concur with

the conclusions of the college population studies: orthodox religious belief is lower

among the college educated (Cohen 1983; Gaede 1977; Hunsberger 1978; Roof 1978).9

More recently, two key studies have used panel data to examine educational

attainment and changes in religious belief and practice. Using data from the Youth-

Parent Socialization Panel Study (YPSPS), Sherkat (1998) concludes that college

graduates are less likely to have traditionally orthodox views of the Bible, less likely to

pray, and no different from those with lower educational attainment in their frequency of

religious service attendance. Using the same data, Sherkat and Wilson (1995) and

Wilson and Sherkat (1994) also find that college graduates are substantially more likely

to disaffiliate from organized religion entirely. Likewise, Funk and Willits (1987)

examine changes in belief about God and religion over an eleven year period and find

that those respondents who graduate from college display more secular change in belief

than those who did not.

While these panel studies are probably the most complete of their kind, the data is

also dated. The first wave of the YPSPS data is a nationally representative sample of

high school seniors in 1965. The data that Funk and Willits analyze is originally drawn

from high school sophomores residing in Pennsylvania in 1970. Research has

documented the changing demographic backgrounds of college students (Dougherty

1997; Hout 1988), the changing attitudinal and religious beliefs of undergraduates (Astin

9 The effect of higher education on religious service attendance remains one notable exception to this trend (Cohen 1983; Gaede 1977; Mueller and Johnson 1975; Petersen 1994; Roof 1978). One post hoc explanation for this anomaly focuses on the social status rewards associated with attendance. According to this account, higher education brings with it status expectations that are manifest in religious service attendance as well as other voluntaristic behaviors (Petersen 1994). An alternative account suggests the opposite causal influence; positive associations with adults and peers among frequent church goers may actually encourage continuing with schooling versus other life course paths (Loury 2004).

64

1997; Hoge et al. 1987; Moberg and Hoge 1986), and the movement of religiously

sympathetic faculty into prestigious positions (Schmalzbauer 2003; Schultze 1993).

Because college campuses are likely different in a myriad of ways from the late 1960s

and early 1970s, caution should be taken in inferring the results of these studies to recent

college attendees.

The ethnographic work of Cherry, Deberg, and Porterfield (2001) underscores the

point that college campuses may be religiously and spiritually different from the near

past. The authors conducted studies of four major universities in the United States to

assess the vitality of religion on American campuses. Contrary to what past sociologists

hypothesized, they found religion to be alive and well on college campuses. A variety of

religious traditions were practiced at the schools and interest in religion from an

academic perspective was high. However, in accordance with what Robert Wuthnow

(1998) has observed about religion in the United States more generally, most of the

undergraduates could be classified as religious seekers, not religious dwellers. In other

words, these students more freely constructed their religious identities from available

religious symbols without regard for more traditional denominational separations. The

students also preferred to refer to themselves as “spiritual” as opposed to “religious”.

Nevertheless, the authors were surprised at the popularity of evangelical parachurch

groups on two of the campuses. These ethnographic observations paint a picture that is

far more complex than past sociological theories associated with secularization would

allow.

65

Although some recent literature casts doubt on declining religious practice and

identity due to educational attainment, I will nonetheless draw the first hypothesis from

the best quantitative studies available. Therefore:

H1: Declines in religious practice, salience, and identity among recent

college graduates will be significantly larger compared to non-college

graduates of similar age.

3.4 Differential Effects of College on Religion

3.4.1 Gender

An alternative avenue of study has examined how the college experience may be

predicated on the specific characteristics of the students, and how this, in turn, may affect

religious behaviors and beliefs. Several studies have examined the differences between

college-age males in females. Fairly consistently, this research finds that religiosity

declines more among males as compared to females (Astin 1978; Frantz 1971; Funk and

Willits 1987; Trent and Medsker 1968). Extant research has continually reinforced the

near “universal” difference in religiosity between males and females (Beit-Hallahmi

1997; Bensen et al. 1989; Miller and Stark 2002). Females are expected to retain

religious belief and practice because of a greater investment in such beliefs and practices.

From a young age, females are more likely than males to be socialized into the role of

caretaker of the family. Therefore characteristics such as nurturing and submissiveness

develop to a greater degree in females as opposed to males (Mol 1985). These particular

66

characteristics are more conducive to religious belief and adherence to religious

institutions (Thompson 1991).

Nevertheless, one might suspect that the progressive institution of higher

education may quell this tendency toward sex differentiation regarding religion. Gender

convergence has emerged among 12 of the 18 “values” questions adminstered by CIRP in

its annual freshman survey (Astin 1997). Women have also moved into the traditionally

male-dominated fields of science and engineering at a rapid rate worldwide (Ramirez and

Wotipka 2001). The increasingly similar experiences of males and females in college

may serve to negate the “universal” difference in religiosity. In fact, only two studies

were identified by Pascarella and Terenzini (1991) that tested for statistical interactions

between gender and college education, and neither of these studies found significant

differences in sex-based college effects (see Frantz 1971; Funk and Willits 1987). Thus,

my second hypothesis:

H2: College graduates will display significantly more gender similarity in

religiosity than non-college graduates.

3.4.2 Academic Field

Past research on faculty has documented differential rates of church attendance

and religious beliefs among the various disciplines – with irreligiousness highest in the

social sciences and humanities (Hoge and Keeter 1976; Lehman and Shriver 1968; Stark

and Finke 2000; Wuthnow 1989). While some of this research has suggested that there is

something inherent about the disciplines themselves that cause these differences, there is

also conflicting evidence that suggests religious belief or lack of belief occurs prior to

entrance into the particular discipline (Thalheimer 1965). For students, no published

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study could be found that explicitly examined changes in religious belief by college

major. Nevertheless, college major has been examined as an influence on political

attitudes and values. Research has documented that students in the social sciences and

humanities exhibit gains in liberalism, even after controlling for initial political status

(Abravanel and Busch 1975; Bachman 1972; Solmon and Ochsner 1978; Spaeth and

Greeley 1970). It seems likely, then, that the social sciences and humanities may exhibit

a secularizing effect on students as their values become more liberal. Thus, I frame my

third hypothesis with the expectation that college graduates will differ by college major:

H3: College graduates who majored in the social sciences or

humanities will secularize more than college graduates with other

majors.

3.4.3 Catholicism

There may also be reason to suspect that a disparity between Catholics and

Protestants exists in the effects of higher education on religiosity. Caplovitz and Sherrow

(1977) documented much lower rates of apostasy among Catholics than Protestants

among a sample of college graduates in 1961. However, by 1969 Catholics and

Protestants had virtually identical rates of apostasy. More recent research on religious

switching has suggested that Catholics are more likely to drop out of religion altogether

than switch to some form of Protestantism (Sherkat and Wilson 1995). If higher

education engenders demand for a more autonomous, anti-institutional style of religion as

the ethnographic reports from Cherry et al. (2001) suggest, this may pose more of a

problem for Catholics than Protestants. Catholics, having their religious beliefs more

intimately entwined in the institution of the Church itself, may abandon some of these

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beliefs as anti-institutional attitudes are embraced during the college years. The arguably

more rigid nature of the Catholic Church as opposed to Protestant denominations may not

allow Catholics to reject the Church and hold onto religious belief as easily as some

Protestants would be able to.

On the other hand, Greeley (1977) has made the argument that many American

Catholics are able to reject certain aspects of the Church’s teachings, yet remain loyal to

Catholicism and its sacramental tradition as a whole. Dillon (1996) demonstrates that

Catholic college students, even among the most elite universities, are essentially no

different than American Catholics as a whole when it comes to their rejection of certain

teachings but their continued identification with the Church and its traditions.

Again, despite counter evidence, I structure the hypothesis with the expectation

that educational attainment affects Catholics differently:

H4: College education will have a greater secularizing effect for

Catholics than non-Catholics.

3.4.4 Conservative Protestantism

Conservative Protestant groups have been documented to have lower educational

attainment when compared to other religious groups (Beyerlein 2004; Darnell and

Sherkat 1997; Sherkat and Darnell 1999).10 The conservative Protestant emphasis on a

literalist or semi-literalist interpretation of scripture, disagreement with modern scientific

accounts of human origins, and emphasis on traditional sources of moral authority

10 Beyerlein (2004) makes the case that this is solely due to the influence of Pentecostals and fundamentalists. Those belonging to evangelical denominations had reported levels of educational attainment similar to other religious groups.

69

seemingly clash with the scientific rationalism that has become dominant in the realm of

higher education (Hunter 1987; Marsden 1996; Smith 2000). It is little wonder that

conservative Protestants may view avoiding higher education as an important strategy in

the maintenance of their faith.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that secular higher education may not be as

detrimental to conservative Protestant faith as once thought. Wuthnow (1988:187)

documents that between 1960 and 1972 the proportion of evangelicals who had attended

college tripled. Moreover, McConkey (2001) tracks a weakening of the negative

relationship between evangelical identification and educational attainment between the

years 1988 and 1998. Responding to Hunter’s (1983) findings that evangelicals are less

educated, Smith (1998) finds that self-identified evangelicals have higher educational

attainment than fundamentalists, liberal Protestants, Catholics, and those with no

religious affiliation (Smith 1998:76). Additionally, the research by Darnell and Sherkat

(1997) and Sherkat and Darnell (1999) use data in which the majority of their

respondents would have attended college in the late 1960s. It is difficult to know whether

or not their conclusions are still relevant for a younger generation of conservative

Protestants. All of this suggests that conservative Protestants may not be shirking higher

education as in the past.

Still, my fourth hypothesis is structured with the prevailing assumption that higher

education is detrimental to conservative Protestant faith:

H5: College education will have a greater secularizing effect on

Conservative Protestants in comparison to other religious groups.

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3.4.5 African-Americans

The overwhelming majority of black religious adherents belong to one of seven

major Black Protestant denominations (Roof and McKinney 1987; Steensland et al 2000).

Roof and McKinney (1987) estimate that 85% of black Christians belong to a historically

black denomination while Lincoln and Mamiya (1990) estimate that more than 80%

belong to these denominations. While the Black Church has always occupied a unique

niche in the history of American Protestantism, their theological emphasis on a literalist

interpretation of scripture and traditional sources of moral authority most closely

resembles white evangelicals (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; Steensland et al 2000). In this

regard, we might suspect that Black religious adherents will have similar difficulties as

other conservative Protestants with the secular milieu of higher education.

Nevertheless, minority status may function to strengthen black identity, as racial

categories provide salient markers for group identity on heterogeneous campuses. Those

students that have been raised in the Black Church may draw upon their religious identity

and accompanying theology and symbols to help them negotiate their identity as a

minority student. In this manner, the socializing processes associated with the college

experience may actually provide an opportunity for deeper religious engagement.

Despite the possibility that minority status on campus could solidify black

religious identity, the following hypothesis reflects the traditional assumption that the

college campus will be detrimental to the more conservative religious beliefs of many

blacks:

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H6: Educational attainment will more negatively affect the religious

practices and identity of African-Americans in comparison to other

races.

3.5 Data and Methods

3.5.1 Data

The data in this analysis come from the National Longitudinal Study of

Adolescent Health (Add Health) (Udry 2003). Add Health was mandated by congress

and funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) and 17

other federal agencies. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University

of Chicago conducted the fieldwork, consisting of interviews with adolescents, their

parents, friends, siblings, school administrators, and romantic partners. The data are

nationally representative and longitudinal. Wave I of the survey contains adolescent

respondents in grades 7-12, interviewed between April and December of 1995. The

adolescents were surveyed again approximately one year later between April and August

of 1996. The most recent wave of interviews (Wave III) was completed between August

2001 and April 2002 when respondents were 18-26 years of age. Additionally, only

those students in grades 11 and 12 in Wave I, who were also surveyed in Wave III are

used. Restricting the data in such a way allows for an adequate number of respondents to

graduate from college prior to the Wave III collection of data. The final number of

respondents used in this analysis is 4,259.11

11 It is important to point out that the Add Health dataset draws its sample from students currently enrolled in secondary schools. Due to high school drop-outs, the data is not nationally representative of all

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3.6 Methodological Issues

There are two central aspects of the design of this study that substantially improve

our confidence in the results. First, the longitudinal design corrects for past research

done with large-scale, cross-sectional secondary data sources, such as the General Social

Survey, in which the issue of self-selectivity on the outcome of study is always a

problem. For example, it is difficult to know whether higher education really causes

decreased orthodoxy and increased church attendance, or whether these outcomes are

simply artifacts of changes that were in the works before entrance into college. While

researchers attempt to control for this possibility in cross-sectional data, longitudinal data

containing information on the outcome at two separate time points is ideal (In this

particular case, religious data collected prior to college attendance and then immediately

after college graduation is best.).

Secondly, the data were collected from high school juniors and seniors, and this

provides us with a control group that does not graduate from college. Both longitudinal

and cross-sectional data collected from college freshman make it difficult to assess

whether changes in religious belief and practice are actually the result of maturation or

life-course processes associated with early adulthood as opposed to causal effects

associated with college attendance. Perhaps young adults go to church less because they

have left the family home, not because of the college environment. This is difficult to

parse out without a non-college control group. In addition, historical events (e.g.

September 11, 2001) could leave their mark on all students and falsely be attributed to the

college environment without a control group.

secondary school-aged youth. Additionally, it should be noted that attrition of approximately 27% of the total sample occurred between Wave I and III of the data collection.

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3.7 Dependent Measures

The dependent variables in this analysis are four religious measures gathered in

Wave III. The first measure is an indicator of the respondent’s public religious practice:

religious service attendance within the past 12 months. There were seven response

categories ranging from “never” to “more than once a week”. The second measure of

religiosity is a measure of religious saliency: self-rated importance of faith. The

respondent was asked how important his or her religious faith was. Four response

categories ranging from “not important” to “more important than anything else” were

available as answers. As an indicator of private religious practice, frequency of prayer is

included as a dependent variable (the survey question specifically asks the respondent not

to include prayer in a church service). There were eight possible response categories

ranging from “never” to “more than once a day”. The fourth measure is a dichotomous

variable indicating whether or not the respondent had a religious affiliation at Wave III.12

3.8 Independent Measures

The primary independent variables in this analysis are measures of college

attendance and college graduation. The variable “some college” indicates that the

12 While the dependent variables are selective indicators of the key concepts of practice, salience, and identity, they enjoy a long precedent in sociological research using population surveys. It is not the intention of this research to establish the psychometric validity and reliability of these indicators, although their shortcomings in this regard are acknowledged.

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respondent has attended at least some college and either has a degree less than a

bachelor’s degree, or does not have a degree at all. The second main independent

variables is a dichotomous variable that codes those who have obtained a bachelor’s

degree or higher as “1” and all other respondents as “0”. The time elapsed between the

Waves I and III is approximately six years, enough time for both juniors and seniors in

high school to have completed the requirements for a bachelor’s degree. Approximately

twenty-five percent of the respondents in this analysis had completed a bachelor’s degree

by Wave III. Separate models will also look at the interaction of this variable with the

following: gender, college major (social sciences or humanities), Catholic identity,

conservative Protestant identity, and race (African American).

The primary controls in this analysis will be religious beliefs and practice taken

from the Wave I interview. To control for prior religious practice and belief, the

following measures are included: (1) attendance at religious services, (2) frequency of

private prayer, (3) self-rated importance of faith, (4) a dummy variable indicating

Catholic affiliation, (5) a dummy variable indicating conservative Protestant affiliation13,

and (6) a dummy variable indicating that the respondent considers the scriptures to be the

“word of God, without any mistakes”.

In addition to the primary controls, additional control variables will be included

from both Wave I and Wave III. From Wave I, academic skill is controlled for using the

percentile ranking from a shortened version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test

administered to all respondents. Controlling for the respondent’s prior achievement level

13 Conservative Protestant identity is measured as adherence to Adventist, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Pentecostal, or Holiness categories for non-Black respondents at Wave I of the survey.

75

separates the effects of attending college from personal academic skill. Also,

dichotomous variables for gender and race (African-American/Other) are included as

controls.

Familial measures are also included from the Wave I as controls. Consistent with

past research on intergenerational religious transmission, it is hypothesized that

adolescents whose parents are religious, and adolescents who feel close to their parents,

will be more likely to retain their religious beliefs into young adulthood (Bader and

Desmond 2006; Hunsberger 1983; Ozorak 1989; Sherkat and Wilson 1995). The

religious beliefs of the parent or guardian answering the survey are therefore included as

controls. The specific measures are: religious service attendance, frequency of private

prayer, and self-rated importance of faith. In addition to these, variables indicating how

close the adolescent feels to his/her parents and if the adolescent has attended religious

services with his/her parents within the past four weeks are included as controls. Lastly,

family socio-economic status is included as a control. The measure of family SES

includes parent’s income and parent’s educational attainment.

Wave III controls consist of life course events that occur between the Wave I and

Wave III interviews that could potentially confound the relationship between college

attendance and religious outcomes. A variable indicating whether or not the respondent

is currently living at home is included in the analyses. Living with parents is

hypothesized to result in higher levels of religious practice as it reduces the opportunities

to deviate from the religious identity of the family. Research on the life course has

identified both marriage and having children as events that increase levels of religiosity

(Hoge and Hoge 1984; Sandomirsky and Wilson 1990; Wilson and Sherkat 1994). Both

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will be included as dichotomous variables in the analysis. The literature also documents

cohabiting with an unmarried partner resulting in lower levels of religious participation

(Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, Waite 1995). A variable indicating whether the respondent is

currently cohabiting will also be included.

In addition, high social status has been associated with adherence to mainline

Protestant denominations (Niebuhr 1929; Park and Reimer 2002; Roof and McKinney

1987), and hence more liberal religious beliefs (although this relationship may be

weakening). Personal income at Wave III has been included in this analysis as an

indicator of social status. Lastly, a variable indicating whether the respondent has

participated in any unpaid volunteer work within the last 12 months is included.

Volunteer work is used as proxy for community involvement and should decrease the

positive relationship between higher education and church attendance based on the theory

that increased church attendance is the result of civic activism and not religious piety.

Missing data are handled via multiple imputation methods.14 A table of descriptive

statistics is available upon request.

14 The ICE software program available in STATA was used to impute missing values (Royston 2005). ICE uses a maximum likelihood procedure to fill in the most likely values for missing data. In regression analysis, the standard errors of the regression coefficients are correctly computed by statistically including a degree of uncertainty for the values that have been imputed. To avoid losing these and other respondents, most missing values have been imputed. Unfortunately, missing data can only be validly imputed if the type of missingness is missing completely at random (MCAR) or missing at random (MAR). Data that does not fit the MCAR or MAR criteria are referred to at non-ignorable (NI). Non-ignorable missingness occurs when missing data depends on some unobservable variables. Due to a programmed skip pattern in Wave I of Add Health, religiously unaffiliated respondents, and religious unaffiliated parents of respondents, were not asked any of the explicitly religious questions. We believe this data is best classified as NI, and have applied list-wise deletion for these cases. Approximately 15% of cases have been deleted. For more information on multiple imputation please consult King et al (2001).

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3.9 Results

Tables 3.1 through 3.3 present OLS regressions predicting religious service

attendance, self-rated importance of faith, and frequency of prayer when most of the

respondents were age 22 through 25 (Wave III).15 16 Table 3.4 presents odds ratios

predicting no religious affiliation at age 22 to 25. Each table follows a similar modeling

strategy. Model 1 displays the group mean differences on the religious outcome by

education level. Model 2 provides the adjusted group differences by education net of

demographic and life course controls. The lagged dependent variable at age 16-19 (Wave

I) is added to model 3.17 Model 4 adds in additional individual and familial religious

variables. Finally, model 5 provides a series of interaction effects by education level.

3.9.1 Religious Service Attendance

Consistent with past research, Table 3.1 reveals that those respondents with a

college degree also tend to attend religious services more regularly. As expected, Model

2 suggests African Americans, females, those who felt close to their parent(s) at age 16-

19, those currently in their first marriage, those who have children, and those who

volunteer are more frequent attendees. On the other hand, those who scored high on the

Peabody Picture Vocabulary test, and those who are currently cohabiting attend less

15 Ordinal regression techniques were also tested with no substantial differences evident. For ease of interpretation, OLS regression has been used in these tables.

16 Approximately 98% of the sample used was between the ages of 22 and 25 at Wave III of the survey. More than 80% were either 23 or 24 years of age.

17 Approximately 99% of the sample used was between the ages of 16 and 19 at Wave I of the survey. More than 80% were either 17 or 18 years of age.

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TABLE 3.1

OLS REGRESSION

PREDICTING FREQUENCY OF CHURCH ATTENDANCE

AGE 22-25

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Education Some College .277* .247* .200 .185 .029 Bachelor’s Degree or More .805*** .643*** .518*** .495*** .408* Wave 1 General Controls Vocabulary Score -.004* -.004* -.004* -.004* Female .372*** .322*** .284*** .390** Black .739*** .491*** .199 .123 Feels Close to Parents .125* .102 .063 .060 Parent’s Income (logged) .046 .023 .051 .056 Parent’s Educational Attainment .030 .013 .010 .009 Wave 3 General Controls Currently Living in Parent’s Home .180 .180* .187* .184* Currently in First Marriage .782*** .643*** .550*** .543*** Have Children .176* .247** .260*** .247** Currently Cohabiting -.699*** -.536*** -.438*** -.435*** Personal Income (logged) -.014 -.002 -.000 -.001 Volunteered During Past Year .634*** .520*** .479*** .492*** Lagged Dependent Rel Service Attendance Age 16-19 .666*** .261*** .260*** Individual Religion (Age 16-19) Importance of Faith .199** .209*** Frequency of Prayer .127*** .126*** Bible is the “Word of God” .071 .056 Catholic -.056 -.245 Conservative Protestant .226* .056 Family Religion Parent’s Church Attendance .215*** .213*** Parent’s Importance of Faith .139 .142 Parent’s Frequency of Prayer -.004 -.007 Attends Church With Parents .427*** .429***

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SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001

frequently. The various controls present in Model 2 slightly diminish the relationship

between education and church attendance.

Model 3 adds a measure of church attendance from Wave I of the survey. As

expected this is highly correlated with the similar Wave III measure. The addition of the

earlier measure of church attendance diminishes the effect of having a BA further, while

rendering those with some college non-significant from those with no college. However,

most of the other significant findings from Model 2 maintain their significance (with the

exception of feeling close to parents). This suggests that blacks and females do not suffer

as large of a change in church attendance between late high school and early adulthood

compared to non-blacks and males. Currently living with parents teeters from non-

significance to significance at the .05 level with the addition of the lagged dependent

variable.

TABLE 3.1 (Continued)

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Differential Effects Female * Some College -.143 Female * BA or More -.169 Soc Sci/Human Maj * Some College .142 Soc Sci/Human Maj * BA or More -.111 Catholic * Some College .358 Catholic * BA or More .171 Black * Some College -.092 Black * BA or More .451 Conserv Protestant * Some College .278 Conserv Protestant * BA or More .268 Constant 1.909 .991 -.666 -1.921 -1.851 N 4259 4259 4259 4259 4259 R2 ( significance of R2 change) .026 .150*** .274*** .325*** .329

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Model 4 adds both individual and family measures of religion. Several of these

variables are significant predictors of church attendance at age 22-25, even after

controlling for prior church attendance. The addition of these other dimensions of

religiosity reduces the effect of church attendance at age 16-19 by more than 60%. These

variables also reduce the effect from African Americans to non-significance.

Nevertheless, the relationship between those who have a BA and the frequency of

religious service attendance is nearly unaltered by these controls. Model 5 includes

several variables that interact education with gender, college major, religious

identification, and race. No significant differences are found.

3.9.2 Importance of Faith

Unlike church attendance, Table 3.2 suggests that there is no overall difference in

importance of faith by level of education. Despite this, the other variables behave

similarly in Table 3.2 and Table 3.1. Model 2 finds importance of faith higher for blacks,

females, those who felt close to their parents, those currently in their first marriage, and

those who volunteer. Individuals with higher vocabulary scores, as well as those who

cohabit, claim faith is not as important to them. The introduction of the lagged dependent

variable in Model 3 reduces the effect of the vocabulary test and feeling close to parents

to non-significance. The effect from gender and African American are also reduced, yet

still significant at the .001 level. As in Table 3.1, the additional religious variables

included in Model 4 reduce the partial correlation between importance of faith at Wave I

and III. Interestingly enough, neither individual church going in high school or parental

church going affect how important faith is early adulthood. However, attending church

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TABLE 3.2

OLS REGRESSION

PREDICTING IMPORTANCE OF FAITH

AGE 22-25

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Education Some College -.025 -.000 -.019 -.016 -.081 Bachelor’s Degree or More .046 .063 .046 .045 .070 Wave 1 General Controls Vocabulary Score -.002** -.001 -.001* -.001 Female .166*** .099*** .108*** .102* Black .347*** .195*** .096 .024 Feels Close to Parents .074** .021 .024 .026 Parent’s Income (logged) -.050 -.029 -.028 -.025 Parent’s Educational Attainment .003 .002 -.002 -.002 Wave 3 General Controls Currently Living in Parent’s Home -.009 -.011 -.007 -.009 Currently in First Marriage .268*** .197*** .163*** .156*** Have Children .009 .021 .031 .027 Currently Cohabiting -.205*** -.127*** -.101** -.101** Personal Income (logged) -.010 -.007 -.005 -.005 Volunteered During Past Year .169*** .116** .106** .109** Lagged Dependent Importance of Faith at Age 16-19 .420*** .269*** .270*** Individual Religion (Age 16-19) Religious Service Attendance .023 .025 Frequency of Prayer .054** .055** Bible is the “Word of God” .075* .066* Catholic -.035 .029 Conservative Protestant .112** .093 Family Religion Parent’s Church Attendance .013 .012 Parent’s Importance of Faith .122*** .120** Parent’s Frequency of Prayer .013 .014 Attends Church With Parents .107* .118**

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SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001

regularly with parents during high school seems to increase importance of faith, net of

other factors. In all models, education level is unrelated to self-rated importance of faith.

Model 5 uses interaction effects to test whether higher education differentially

effects key subpopulations. Unlike the similar test in the regression predicting church

attendance, this model finds some differences between groups. Catholics are less likely

to say their faith is important to them if they graduated from college. Catholics who do

not go to college are significantly different from their college counterparts, and the

similar degree of decline in saliency of faith is not evident. Conversely, Blacks who

graduate from college are significantly more likely to claim their faith is important to

them compared to those who do not go to college. Model 5 also reveals that females are

more religious than males, regardless of whether or not they go to college. Neither

conservative Protestant affiliation, nor majoring in the social sciences or humanities, have

TABLE 3.2 (continued)

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Differential Effects Female * Some College .007 Female * BA or More .021 Soc Sci/Human Maj * Some College .005 Soc Sci/Human Maj * BA or More .011 Catholic * Some College .045 Catholic * BA or More -.274** Black * Some College .082 Black * BA or More .205* Conserv Protestant * Some College .071 Conserv Protestant * BA or More .009 Constant 1.517 1.366 .145 -.297 -.303 N 4259 4259 4259 4259 4259 R2 ( significance of R2 change) .006 .105*** .255*** .291*** .299**

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significant interactions with educational variables. It is also important to note that while

group differences in the form of interaction effects are indeed significant, the contribution

to the overall variance explained is minimal.

3.9.3 Frequency of Prayer

As with Table 3.2, Table 3.3 finds no difference in frequency of prayer by

educational attainment. This lack of difference holds up across the various models.

Model 2, once again, finds differences by vocabulary score, race, gender, and closeness

toward parents in high school. The life course effects of marriage and cohabiting are also

evident in this table as in prior analyses. Living with parents and having children are

non-significant. Volunteer activity has a positive and significant effect, while personal

income measured in Wave III has a negative effect.

Most of these findings hold up (albeit with diminished effect size) when the

lagged dependent variable is added in Model 3. Cohabitation and income are no longer

significant in this model. Model 4 adds the rest of the religion variables. As in the

analysis predicting importance of faith, prior church attendance does not influence later

frequency of prayer. It is also important to note that unlike the previous two tables,

measures of parents’ religiosity have no influence on later frequency of prayer (including

how frequently parents pray). Model 5 finds no significant differences in any of the

interaction effects measured.

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TABLE 3.3

OLS REGRESSION

PREDICTING FREQUENCY OF PRAYER

AGE 22-25

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Education Some College .171 .216 .135 .166 -.150 Bachelor’s Degree or More .347 .303 .172 .249 .160 Wave 1 General Controls Vocabulary Score -.005* -.004 -.003 -.003 Female .816*** .585*** .601*** .417* Black 1.220*** .904*** .553*** .494 Feels Close to Parents .285*** .195** .153* .154* Parent’s Income (logged) -.097 -.092 -.052 -.050 Parent’s Educational Attainment .028 .019 .015 .015 Wave 3 General Controls Currently Living in Parent’s Home

-.022 .017 .005 -.010

Currently in First Marriage .729*** .572*** .453*** .428*** Have Children .108 .151 .159 .166 Currently Cohabiting -.346** -.137 -.063 -.065 Personal Income (logged) -.043** -.027 -.025 -.025 Volunteered During Past Year .684*** .481*** .464*** .479*** Lagged Dependent Frequency of Prayer at Age 16-19 .761*** .555*** .557*** Individual Religion (Age 16-19) Religious Service Attendance .038 .039 Importance of Faith .351*** .359*** Bible is the “Word of God” .145 .136 Catholic -.087 -.187 Conservative Protestant .383** .346 Family Religion Parent’s Church Attendance .002 -.003 Parent’s Importance of Faith .154 .140 Parent’s Frequency of Prayer .124 .126 Attends Church With Parents .118 .136

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SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001

3.9.4 Religious Disaffiliation

Table 3.4 presents the odds ratios of reporting no religious affiliation on Wave III

of the survey.18 Once again, there are no differences across any of the models by

educational attainment. Model 2 suggests that females, those who feel close to their

parents in high school, those still living with their parents in early adulthood, and those in

their first marriage all are less likely to disaffiliate from a religious tradition. Unlike all

of the other analyses carried out, cohabitation and volunteer activity have no effect on

disaffiliation. The effect from the vocabulary test becomes non-significant once religious

variables are added in Model 3. Similar to the analysis predicting frequency of prayer,

18 Approximately 99% of the sample used was between the ages of 16 and 19 at Wave I of the survey. More than 80% were either 17 or 18 years of age.

TABLE 3.3 (continued)

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Differential Effects Female * Some College .303 Female * BA or More .304 Soc Sci/Human Maj * Some College -.191 Soc Sci/Human Maj * BA or More -.106 Catholic * Some College .504 Catholic * BA or More -.297 Black * Some College -.049 Black * BA or More .341 Conserv Protestant * Some College .098 Conserv Protestant * BA or More .058 Constant 3.712 2.450 -.062 -1.836 -1.690 N 4259 4259 4259 4259 4259 R2 ( significance of R2 change) .003 .119*** .262*** .291*** .296

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TABLE 3.4

LOGISTIC REGRESSION

PREDICTING NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

AGE 22-25

(1) (2) (3) (4) Education Some College .882 .798 .845 .797 Bachelor’s Degree or More .798 .719 .731 .532 Wave 1 General Controls Vocabulary Score 1.007** 1.005 1.005 Female .632*** .669** .700 Black .722 1.078 1.336 Feels Close to Parents .740** .796* .783* Parent’s Income (logged) .895 .878 .870 Parent’s Educational Attainment 1.003 .982 .982 Wave 3 General Controls Currently Living in Parent’s Home .643** .652** .658** Currently in First Marriage .536** .610* .631* Have Children .957 .935 .942 Currently Cohabiting 1.115 .905 .917 Personal Income (logged) .995 .982 .980 Volunteered During Past Year .821 .914 .898 Individual Religion (Age 16-19) Religious Service Attendance 1.003 .999 Importance of Faith .654*** .647*** Frequency of Prayer .883* .878* Bible is the “Word of God” .628** .639** Catholic .608* .357** Conservative Protestant .817 .770 Family Religion Parent’s Church Attendance .839 .847 Parent’s Importance of Faith .830 .840 Parent’s Frequency of Prayer .963 .956 Attends Church With Parents 1.116 1.097

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TABLE 3.4 (continued)

(1) (2) (3) (4) Differential Effects Female * Some College 1.005 Female * BA or More .791 Social Science/Humanities Major * Some College 1.903 Social Science/Humanities Major * BA or More 1.634 Catholic * Some College 1.593 Catholic * BA or More 3.253* Black * Some College .818 Black * BA or More .308* Conservative Protestant * Some College .959 Conservative Protestant * BA or More 1.411 N 4259 4259 4259 4259 Pseudo R2 (asterisks indicate sig. of R2 change) .001 .048*** .097*** .124* *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health NOTE: Coefficients are odds ratios *p<.05 **p<.01 ***p<.001 only individual religious variables prove significant. Additionally, church attendance in

high school does not affect the likelihood of disaffiliation in early adulthood (nor did it

affect frequency of prayer or importance of faith in previous tables).

Lastly, in the interaction effects of Model 4, we see similar patterns to the analysis

predicting importance of faith. Catholics, who are less likely overall to disaffiliate, seem

to be less likely only if they do not graduate from college. Catholics who graduate from

college are significantly more likely to disaffiliate. The opposite trend is apparent for

African Americans. Graduating from college results in blacks being significantly less

likely to disaffiliate compared with blacks who do not attend college at all. No

significant interaction by gender, college major, or conservative Protestant affiliation is

evident.

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3.10 Discussion

Several important findings arise from this research. First, and perhaps most

importantly, recent college graduates do not seem to be secularizing at a faster rate than

their non-college attending counterparts. In other words, the declines on various

measures of religious faith and affiliation associated with young adulthood do not seem

to be stemming from the college environment. Gauged in terms of religious attendance,

salience of faith, frequency of prayer, and religious affiliation, college graduates never

measure lower in early adulthood than those did not attend college at all. For the

outcomes examined, Hypothesis 1 cannot be accepted. Nonetheless, it is important to

point out that these measures are certainly not exhaustive in terms of capturing the many

dimensions of religion and spirituality. Other measures may very well behave differently

than the outcomes examined.

Moreover, college does not affect the religious practice and identity of the entire

population uniformly. Hypothesis 2 posits that educational attainment may produce

gender convergence on religious outcomes. No such evidence is garnered from the

outcomes studied. While college educated individuals may adopt more progressive

political and moral stances, this does not seem to result in college educated men and

women with similar religious outcomes. Rather, women appear to be more religious than

men regardless of whether or not they attend college. What the tables do suggest,

however, is that being female is still a significant predictor of religiosity at age 22-25,

even after controlling for prior religiosity. This indicates that women do not evidence the

same degree of religious falling out that men do during early adulthood. Moreover,

college attendance does not seem to shake this female advantage in religious retention.

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Hypothesis 3 should also be rejected. Majoring in the social sciences or

humanities has no significant effect on religious outcomes at age 22-25. Faculty in these

fields have been documented as the least religious in the university. Nevertheless, once

initial religious status in high school is controlled for, these students look no different

from the rest of the college population in their religious practice and identity. In many

ways, this may be the most surprising finding. It could be hypothesized that college no

longer has a secularizing effect because of the growth of business departments and other

religiously innocuous developments at the university. Nevertheless, in this formulation it

still seems reasonable to expect certain arenas of the university to undermine religious

authority. Perhaps faculty are careful not to convey their religious ideas, or equally

likely, students are less influenced by these ideas than many have suspected. More

detailed study is certainly warranted to understand why secular faculty have little

influence over their students.

Partial support is found for Hypothesis 4. Respondents who identified themselves

as Catholic in Wave I traveled a different religious trajectory compared to both their non-

Catholic college-educated counterparts as well as their Catholic peers who did not attend

college. For college-educated Catholics, faith becomes less important and their identity

as Catholics is not as firm. I have suggested that this may be due to the anti-institutional

and anti-authoritarian attitudes accumulated during the college experience. These

particular attitudes may be more problematic for young Catholics compared to other

religious groups who have more options for switching and greater flexibility in their ideas

about organized religion. Nevertheless, it important to point out that declines in mass

attendance are actually less severe for Catholics who graduate from college. However,

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this is not unique to Catholics; all groups who graduate college attend religious services

at higher rates than those who did not attend college at all.

Hypothesis 5 expected that conservative Protestants would secularize more than

other religious groups as a result of college. Contrary to this expectation, no significant

interaction effects between educational attainment and conservative Protestant identity

were found. While this study was not able to measure aspects of the college experience,

it is possible that the institutional support for conservative Protestantism in the form of

explicitly religious schools (such as those belonging to the Coalition of Christian

Colleges and Universities) or strong parachurch organizations (such as InterVarsity

Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ) provide the resources needed to

maintain conservative Protestant belief and identity during college. Once again, more

research in this area would be better able to establish the processes involved in

conservative Protestant identity maintenance during college.

In addition, some significant interactions for educational attainment and African

Americans are evidenced in the analyses. However, these interactions were in the

opposite direction than what is posited in Hypothesis 6. College educated blacks are

more likely to claim their faith was important and less likely to disaffiliate from a

religious denomination compared to other college graduates and blacks who did not go to

college at all. This finding calls attention to the manner in which black identity and

religious identity may reinforce one another during college. Future research is necessary

to understand the processes that trigger educational attainment to open up religious

trajectories in early adulthood for African Americans.

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Specific limitations of this study provide important departing points for future

research. While the virtues of panel data over cross-sectional data are considerable,

caution should still be practiced in concluding that the college environment directly

causes any differences demonstrated in these analyses. Future research should attempt to

unpack all of the meanings young adults attach to educational attainment and how these

meanings interact with religious identity. Separating indicators of status associated with

educational attainment from the actual content and values learned from the college

experience is an important first step in this process.

Lastly, the lack of data on the institution of higher education is a shortcoming that

has theoretical implication that could be addressed in future work. Hammond and Hunter

(1984) found religious students fared differently at religious and non-religious schools.

Unfortunately, the Add Health data currently contains no information on the type of

school attended by the respondent. Examining the type of school, as well as

characteristics of the school environment would also serve to shed some light on the

relationship between higher education and religious identity and practice.

3.11 Conclusion

This chapter systematically analyzed the role higher education plays in the

religious decline associated with the transition to adulthood. As higher education

expands and more students graduating from high school delay their entrance into the

occupational field and opt to continue their education, it is important to attempt to

quantify the secularizing effect college may have on young adults. Using panel data with

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multiple religious measures, the conclusion reached in this analysis suggests there is no

overall secularizing effect. This finding contradicts research conducted with older data

(see Funk and Willits 1987; Sherkat 1998). Among recent birth cohorts, those who

graduate from college look quite similar to those who do not on outcomes such as prayer,

self-reported importance of faith, and rates of religious disaffiliation. Rates of religious

service attendance are higher across the board for college graduates compared to the rest

of the population. Catholics, on the contrary, do seem to disaffiliate more and report that

their faith is less important to them if they are college graduates. However, African

Americans actually appear to do increase salience of faith and retain their religious

affiliation at a higher rate if they graduate from college.

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CHAPTER 4:

RELIGIOUS PARTICIPATION DURING COLLEGE:

DO RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

4.1 Overview

A growing body of research has been addressing the religious lives of college students in

the United States. Scholars have documented high levels of interest in spirituality among

undergraduates (Cherry, Deberg, and Porterfield 2001; Higher Education Research

Institute 2004; Lee, Matzkin, and Arthur 2006), growing campus ministry and parachurch

organizations (Bramadat 2000; Cawthon and Jones 2004; Hunt and Hunt 1991;

Schmalzbauer 2007), and the resurgence of the academic study of religion (Leege and

Kellstedt 1993; Sherkat and Ellison 1999; Stark and Finke 2000). In one national survey,

nearly three times as many students report becoming more religious during college as

opposed to less religious (Lee 2002). Moreover, work with nationally representative

panel data has confirmed that recent college graduates are not secularizing at faster rates

than their non-college counterparts (Hill 2007; Uecker, Regnerus and Vaaler 2007).19

19 The research documenting the religious climate on campuses should not be equated with some sort of return to traditional religious belief and practice. Scholars have documented that most students do not emphasize public religious identities (Clydesdale 2007), and that a respect for religious pluralism is the overarching norm (Higher Education Research Institute 2004). The role of religion in the academy has also shifted. Whereas religious studies have proliferated in recent years, the specifics of religious content do not often inform the substantive domains of study (Marsden 1994; Wuthnow 2007). Rather, religion is often studied through the lens of the humanities and social sciences.

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While this work has advanced our understanding of religious life during college,

institutional level effects have largely gone unexamined. Extant research has found that

fundamental institutional types (e.g. public, private liberal arts, religiously affiliated)

shape student change in spheres as diverse as cognitive growth (Bohr and Pascarella

1994; Bohr et al 1995), moral development (Good and Cartwright 1998; McNeel 1994),

and economic earnings (Monks 2000). Nevertheless, these between-college effects have

received little attention in the realm of religious outcomes. This research begins to

address this gap in the literature by using nationally-representative panel data to examine

changes in religious service attendance during the college years. More specifically, three

key questions are addressed: (1) Are students who are currently enrolled in college more

or less likely to attend religious services than those who are not attending college?; (2)

Among those currently enrolled, do religious institutions develop student religious

practice, or do religious students fare better at non-religious schools?; And, (3) do key

subpopulations (as measured by religious tradition, gender, and race/ethnicity) differ in

how their religious practice is shaped by the institutional characteristics of the college?

4.2 Church Attendance and Higher Education20

Research has consistently found that educational attainment is positively related

to religious service attendance (Cohen 1983; Cornwall 1989; Gaede 1977; Mueller and

Johnson 1975; Roof 1978). However, the causal direction between education attainment

20 Although more diverse measures of religious belief and practice would be ideal, the data limits this analysis to religious service attendance. Nevertheless, religious service attendance is a key sociological measure that taps into commitment to a religious community. For the college student, largely free from parental religious demands, measures of voluntary participation in a religious community provide a glimpse of the priority given to religious life over other spheres of influence in early adulthood.

95

and religious service attendance is not clear. Several studies demonstrate that youth

involved in religious communities positively interact with adults and peers in such a

manner as to encourage pro-social behavior such as avoiding deviance and pursuing

academic trajectories (Loury 2004; Smith 2003; Muller and Ellison 2001). Moreover,

there is evidence that students who regularly attend religious worship services do better

on a variety of academic outcomes while enrolled in college (Mooney 2005). These

findings suggest that at least some of the relationship between educational attainment and

religious involvement is due to religiously involved students being more likely to attend

and graduate from college.21

An alternative explanation has been posited that suggests educational attainment

is coupled with civic engagement expectations that result in educated individuals joining

religious organizations (Hoge and Roozen 1979; Roof 1978). Recent studies that control

for initial religious attendance prior to college confirm that there is an independent effect

from educational attainment on religious service attendance in early adulthood (Hill

2007; Uecker et al 2007). From this I develop my first hypothesis:

H1: Net of self-selection mechanisms, graduating from college will, on

average, result in increased levels of religious service attendance.

Despite the positive relationship between educational attainment and church

attendance, precipitous drops in religious attendance have been documented during the

college years. Bryant, Choi, and Yasuno (2003) report that 46.4% of entering freshman

21 Although regularly attending youth are more likely to attend and graduate from college, youth with fundamentalist and Pentecostal orientations are less likely to attain a college degree (Beyerlein 2004; Darnell and Sherkat 1997; Glass and Jacobs 2005; Sherkat and Darnell 1999).

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report attending religious services frequently. By the end of the first year, the percent

regularly attending drops to 27.1%. Likewise, the number of students not attending at all

climbs from 16.4% to 43.4% during the first year. Although somewhat dated, Astin

(1977) finds a freshman to senior decline in church attendance between 31 and 35

percent. Freshman to senior declines are also found in Clark (1972) and McAllister

(1985).

While declines in religious service attendance during the college years could be

due to disenchantment with institutional religion, several factors lead us to believe that

the sources may be rooted in the social arrangements and institutional constraints

associated with student life, and not in the abandonment of religious beliefs. For those

who leave home and reside on a college campus, the geographic move itself may mean

cutting ties with one religious community. Residing on campus also commonly means

that family influences on religious involvement are lessened (Astin 1972; Astin 1977).

Moreover, many college campuses provide social and religious opportunities that

functionally replace the role of a religious community by providing opportunities for

religious practice, friendships, social support, and potential mates (Cherry et al 2001).

The social forces that push young adults to be active in a church or other place of worship

are diminished on college campuses. It is likely that students who attend worship

services during college are primarily comprised of individuals who entered college with

strong normative beliefs about the importance of regular corporate worship in their

religious tradition. Thus, my second hypothesis:

H2: Young adults who attend college will temporarily exhibit lower levels of

church attendance compared to young adults not in college.

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4.3 The Relationship Between Institutional Identity and Student Religious Practice

More than 35% of all four year colleges and universities in the United States

claim some sort of religious affiliation. Moreover, most of these religiously affiliated

institutions make some sort of explicit reference to moral or spiritual development in

their mission statements. I expect that strongly religious schools would do a better job

than non-religious schools nurturing the religious and spiritual life of students as religious

socialization is central to the identity of many religiously affiliated colleges. The

religious background of the student and the religious mission of the school positively

interact to create networks of religious support and encouragement. From this

perspective, I expect that students attending such schools display less precipitous drops in

overall religious service attendance despite being away from family and home church.

Consistent with this perspective, Railsback (2006) finds that seniors attending schools

associated with the evangelical Council for Christian Colleges and Universities were

nearly twice as likely as the average student to report that their religious beliefs and

convictions were stronger since enrolling (44% versus 82%). From this I develop a third

hypothesis:

H3: Students attending strongly religious institutions will be more likely to

maintain pre-college levels of religious practice compared to students

attending less-explicitly religious or non-religious schools.

However, a homogenous religious environment may have unintended

consequences. If the institution provides opportunities for religious activities outside of

regular worship, students may choose to substitute these activities for church attendance.

98

While such an outcome does not necessarily indicate some underlying level of religious

decline, it still represents a move away from the normative expectation of corporate

worship that most religious traditions espouse.

The insular religious environments on some campuses may also breed spiritual

apathy. From such a perspective, WE might suspect that religious heterogeneity on

campus actually encourages students to examine their own religious identities and either

strengthen, revise, or abandon them. Lack of such heterogeneity leaves religious

identities unexamined. Smith (1998) makes the case that evangelical Christians actually

thrive in a religiously pluralistic environment. Consistent with Smith, Hammond and

Hunter (1984) find that evangelicals on secular campuses actually strengthen their faith

over time (the authors find a “slow erosion” of faith on insulated evangelical campuses).

In a case study of an evangelical group at a large Canadian university, Bramadat (2000)

finds that students use the group both as way to protect themselves from secular

influences as well as a tool to connect themselves with the non-evangelical intellectual

and social life on campus. This perspective proposes the counterintuitive notion that

religiously committed young adults may actually develop their religious selves more

attending an explicitly non-religious campus as they must use their religious identities to

engage and cope with secular college life. From this, we develop an alternative

hypothesis:

H3alt: Students who choose to attend non-religious schools will experience, on

average, less decline in religious practice than students attending religiously

affiliated institutions.

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4.4 Differential Effects by Religious Tradition, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity

Just as the college experience varies across institutional boundaries, it also is not a

uniform experience for students that bring minority identities to campus. Several strands

of developmental theory have emphasized the essential discontinuity between the patterns

of identity development in college for African-Americans and women when compared to

white males (Helms 1995; Josselson 1996). Students that carry self-conscious identities

to college must filter their student experience through these identities. For highly

religious students as well as minority students that claim a religious identity, religious

ideas and practices become part of the tools to negotiate social and intellectual demands

during college. Because of this, religion often becomes more integrated into public

selves for these students (Clydesdale 2007). Nevertheless, very little is known about the

effect from institutional context on the religious practice of these key subpopulations

during college. Below I present some hypotheses outlining how institutional

characteristics may facilitate and constrain religious practice during college for these

students.

4.4.1 Religious Tradition

Although research suggests that religious change is quite common, especially

during adolescence and young adulthood (Smith 2006), it is best understood in the

context of religious trajectories shaped during childhood and early adolescence (Regnerus

and Uecker 2006; Wuthnow 1999). The tools to further religious socialization during

college will be comparably greater when the institution’s religious identity corresponds

most closely with the stock of religious knowledge, rituals and beliefs that students

develop in early life. In the case of conservative Protestants and Catholics, I expect that

100

attending a college or university associated with their religious tradition will provide

them with more opportunities to practice their faith, provide relatively religiously

homogenous friendship networks, and offer more opportunities for formal religious

education. Stated more formally:

H4: Conservative Protestants and Catholic students will display the highest

levels of religious practice while enrolled in institutions that identity with

their own religious tradition.

4.4.2 Gender

Past research indicates that men and women do not differ in the net effect from

educational attainment on religiosity (Funk and Willits 1987; Hill 2007). Nevertheless,

the effects from the religious identity of the college may be masked in these studies, as

only one in ten students are enrolled in a religiously affiliated college (Mahoney,

Schmalzbauer and Younis 2001). For institutions that have strong programs of religious

socialization, males and females may respond differently. Research on religion and

gender consistently finds that men are less amenable to religious socialization than

women (Stark 2002; Walter and David 1998). Men tend to take more risks and engage

more in deviant behavior (Miller and Stark 2002), while women tend to develop

characteristics of nurturance and submissiveness (Mol 1985; Thompson 1991).

Moreover, conservative Protestants belief systems commonly reinforce these traditional

gender characteristics (Peek, Lowe and Williams 1991). While most institutions of

higher education no longer have strong religious socialization programs, the few that do

may find that men are less receptive than women. This leads us to the following

hypothesis:

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H5: Men attending evangelically affiliated colleges will have lower levels of

religious practice than women attending these institutions.

4.4.3 Race/Ethnicity

There is very little research concerning the effects of college on religiosity for

African Americans and Latinos. Hill (2007) reported that African Americans who

attended and graduated from a four year college place higher value on their faith and are

less likely to disaffiliate from their religious tradition than those with lower educational

attainment. Although not statistically significant, the same study also found that Blacks

with a college degree attended religious services more frequently. Despite these findings,

little is known about why education has a positive effect on African American religiosity.

One possible source of this increase in religiosity could be due to the effect of

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). There is a tight link between

African American congregations and HBCUs with an estimated 86% of black

congregations provide financial support to HBCUs (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). Despite

lower levels of enrollment in HBCUs among recent black college attendees, HBCUs still

grant 21.5% of all Bachelor degrees earned by Blacks in recent counts (Provasnik and

Shafer 2004). This tight coupling between the Black Church and HBCUs may allow

maintaining traditional faith and practice easier for Blacks who attend HBCUs compared

to attending other institutions. Therefore:

H6: African Americans who attend black Protestant HBCUs will be exhibit

higher levels of religious practice compared to African Americans attending

other institutions.

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No published research could be found concerning the effect of higher education

on religiosity for Latinos. Nevertheless, we can draw on some existing knowledge to

hypothesize the effect of different college types on Latino religious practice. Most

Latinos identify as Catholic (68%), with a sizable minority identifying as Protestant

(15%). Although Latinos are, on average, more religious than non-Hispanic Whites,

religious practice is often oriented around ethnic particularities with influences from the

charismatic and Pentecostal traditions. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center

(2007) finds that approximately two-thirds of Latino worshipers attend place of worship

that have Latino religious leaders, offer services in Spanish, and are comprised of a

Latino majority.

For Hispanic students who identify with ethnic religious beliefs and practices,

finding support during college may be easier in some institutional settings than others.

Among non-Hispanic white Catholics enrolled in four year institutions, nearly 14% are in

Catholic schools. The equivalent number for Hispanic Catholics is 5%.22 Among

evangelical schools associated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities

(CCCU), the total Hispanic enrollment is less than 5% of their full time undergraduates.

Seen in terms of the number of Hispanics on campus, the mean number at public four

year colleges and universities is 618 full-time undergraduates. For Catholic schools this

is only 177 students. At CCCU institutions, the average is only 68 Latinos.23 Although

economic restraints may partially explain the low levels of enrollment (Darnell and

Sherkat 1997), the reality remains that college-bound Latinos are not attending religious

22 These estimates are derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997.

23 The Latino enrollment at CCCU institutions and the median number of Latinos at public, Catholic, and CCCU institutions are derived from the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System.

103

schools. Because of this, it is unlikely that the religious programs at many Catholic and

evangelical colleges provide institutional support to the ethnic religious practices of

Latino students. I expect the following:

H7: Hispanic students attending Catholic and evangelical colleges will exhibit

greater declines in religious practice, on average, than non-Hispanics

attending the same schools.

4.5 Data and Measures

Data are derived from two national datasets: The National Longitudinal Survey of

Youth 1997 (NLSY97), and the Integrated Post Secondary Data Service (IPEDS). The

NLSY97 is a nationally representative panel survey of youth sponsored and directed by

the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the National Opinion Research

Center at the University of Chicago, with assistance from the Center for Human Resource

Research at The Ohio State University (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of

Labor 2006). The survey was first administered to 12 to 16 year old youth in 1997 and

has followed up annually with the most recent available wave in 2004. An additional

supplemental sample of Black and Hispanic youths was also conducted. The full number

of respondents from the representative sample and the over sample is 8,984.

Approximately 84% of the original respondents have been retained in the 2004 survey.

In the present research, data are primarily used from the base 1997 survey as well as

surveys conducted between 2000 and 2004. The geocode supplementary data is used to

identify the respondents’ postsecondary institution.

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The IPEDS data is a census of postsecondary educational institutions in the

United States. Data on institutional characteristics are collected annually for the IPEDS

and housed at the National Center for Educational Statistics. Data on religious affiliation,

sector, institutional size, racial and gender distribution are used in the present analysis.

4.5.1 Analytic Strategy

While my primary aim is to analyze how students at the differing religious and

secular institutions fare in terms of religious service attendance for students while

enrolled, I begin by establishing the general level of religious service attendance during

college versus the level when not enrolled in college. Once established, I then

graphically examine overall trends over time for students who reported being enrolled at

both religious and non-religious schools. I then use multivariate statistical techniques to

test the robustness of these trends, accounting for both college level characteristics and

individual aging and life course events. Finally, I examine the full multivariate model by

the following subpopulations: (1) White Evangelicals, (2) Catholics, (3) Women, (4)

Men, (5) African Americans, and (6) Latinos.

4.5.2 Measures

The dependent measure used in this analysis consists of an eight category measure

of religious service attendance ranging from “Never” to “Everyday”. The survey

question was first administered in 2000 and has been included in all subsequent surveys.

In the present analysis, each respondent contain religious service attendance data for five

years from 2000 to 2004. Because the eight category measure does not approximate a

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linear measure of annual church attendance, the church attendance data have been

converted to annual attendance to better suit analyses with linear regression methods.24

The main independent variables mark the religious affiliation or sector of the

college the respondent is enrolled in. Binary variables indicate whether the college is

identified with a non-CCCU evangelical, CCCU, mainline Protestant, Catholic, or black

Protestant denominational group if the college is religiously affiliated.25 If the college is

not religiously affiliated, a set of variables indicating whether they are public, private (not

for profit), or private (for profit). A small number of colleges labeled “Other” have been

removed from analysis (approximately 2% of students enrolled in college). For each

wave of data between 2000 and 2004, these variables are coded to indicate the total

cumulative number of years the respondent has reported attending a college or university

in each group. The affiliations and sectors are derived from the religious affiliation

available in the IPEDS data. The specific denominational affiliations have been grouped

according to the guidelines set forth in Steensland et al (2000).

Additional control variables include institutional characteristics such as a

dichotomous variable indicating required chapel attendance, student body size, status as a

four-year institution, a dichotomous variable indicating whether the university is

classified as academically elite, two measures of racial composition, and a measure of

gender composition. Chapel attendance policies were collected through email and phone

calls to campus ministry or student affairs offices for all 300 religiously affiliated

24 The following conversion was used: “Never” = 0; “Once or Twice” = 1.5; “Less than Once a Month/ 3-12 Times” = 7.5; “About Once a Month / 12 Times” = 12; “About Twice a Month / 24 Times” = 24; “About Once a Week” = 52; “Several Times a Week” = 104; “Everyday” = 365.

25 No respondents attended Jewish institutions. Institutions affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints (Mormon) were included in the non-CCCU evangelical category. Institutions were classified as black Protestant if they were religiously affiliated and identified as an HBCU.

106

institutions in the NLSY97 sample. If the institution had a policy between 2000 and 2004

requiring students to attend a fixed number of chapel services other than convocation, a

value of “1” is assigned to the institution. Otherwise the institution is assigned a “0”.

Student body size is derived from the available IPEDS data from 2005. The top 51

national universities according to 2007 US News & World Report college rankings have

been classified as elite institutions. Using a similar measure of elite status, Gross and

Simmons (2007) found faculty at these institutions to be considerably more secular in

orientation when compared to other colleges and universities. Racial composition is

measured by the complement of a Herfindahl index which measures the degree of racial

pluralism on campus as well as a measure of the percent Caucasian on campus.26 The

gender composition is measured by the percent of male undergraduates on campus. The

racial and gender compositional measures are derived from the IPEDS data for 2005.

Individual-level variables include religious tradition, graduating with a bachelors

degree, graduating with an associates degree, residing with parents (or parental figures),

living in a dorm or dorm-like setting, marital status, cohabiting status, and whether the

respondent has biological or adopted children. Religious tradition is derived from the

NLSY 1997 wave of data. Two dichotomous variables indicating belonging to a Catholic

or evangelical Protestant denomination were created.27 Two dummy variables were

created indicating whether the respondent had graduated with a bachelor’s degree or

graduated with an associate’s degree. A dichotomous variable was created indicating

whether the respondent was living with at least one parent or parental figure at the time of 26 Using the proportion of Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians/Pacific Islanders on campus, the racial diversity index takes the following form: 1 - ∑pi

2.

27 The denominational categories were approximated using Steensland et al (2000). Only white respondents were included in the evangelical Protestant category.

107

the survey. Another variable was constructed indicating whether the respondent was

living in a dorm or other group quarters. Past research has also shown that marrying and

having children commonly increase frequency of church attendance (Roozen, McKinney,

and Thompson 1990; Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy and Waite 1995). Likewise, cohabiting

with an unmarried partner has been associated with declines in church attendance

(Thornton, Axinn and Hill 1992). Dichotomous variables indicating each of these states

are included in the models.

Missing data is minimal and handled via list-wise deletion. Slightly over 3% of

the sample is missing in the final models. Table 4.1 provides descriptive statistics.

4.6 Methods

4.6.1 Random Effects Modeling

Standard regression techniques are not valid in panel data with repeated measures.

In OLS regression, the stochastic error term is assumed to random. However, when a

variable is repeatedly measured, the error terms will be correlated within individuals

across time. This violates a fundamental assumption of OLS regression. The random

effects model is one way to deal with this problem. In a random effects model, the

individual level intercepts are allowed to randomly vary between individuals. The model

takes the following form:

yit = β0 + βxit + u0i + εij

where i = 1,…,N individuals; t = 1,…,N waves of data; β0 is the population-level

intercept; βxit is a vector of predictors; u0i is a random intercept; and εij is a random

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TABLE 4.1

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Mean Std. Dev. Range Service Attendance (Annually) 20.2162 33.6019 0 to 365 Service Attendance (Truncated) 16.3094 20.4549 0 to 52 Years at Evangelical College (Non-CCCU) .0448 .3478 0 to 5 Years at CCCU College .0342 .3038 0 to 5 Years at Mainline Protestant College (Non-CCCU) .0585 .3879 0 to 5 Years at Black Protestant College .0281 .2728 0 to 5 Years at Catholic College .0795 .4509 0 to 5 Years at Public College 1.7966 1.3648 0 to 5 Years at Private Non-Religious College .1737 .6701 0 to 5 Years at Private for Profit College .0637 .3561 0 to 5 Age 18 (or less) .1064 0 to 1 Age 19 .2105 0 to 1 Age 20 .2587 0 to 1 Age 21 .1936 0 to 1 Age 22 .1351 0 to 1 Age 23 .0684 0 to 1 Age 24 (or more) .0272 0 to 1 Chapel Required .0296 0 to 1 Four Year College or University .664 0 to 1 Elite University .0512 0 to 1 Racial Pluralism Index (Standardized) 0 1 -1.8862 to 2.0412 Percent White on Campus 67.7322 25.9983 0 to 100 Percent Male on Campus 42.7294 9.1394 0 to 100 Educational Attainment: Bachelors Degree or More .051 0 to 1 Educational Attainment: Associates Degree .0325 0 to 1 Living With Parents or Parental Figures .7031 0 to 1 Currently Married .0455 0 to 1 Living with own Kids .039 0 to 1 Currently Cohabiting .063 0 to 1 Evangelical Protestant (reported in 1997) .2958 0 to 1 Catholic (reported in 1997) .3061 0 to 1 Female .5612 0 to 1 Black .2157 0 to 1 Latino .1669 0 to 1 N 13400

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997

109

disturbance term. This effectively corrects for the autocorrelation in error at the

individual level.

4.6.2 Fixed Effects Modeling

The majority of models are estimated using individual-level fixed effects. Fixed-

effects, like random effects models, are an effective way to deal with the problem of

autocorrelation. Fixed effects models take the following form in panel data:

yit = βxit + αi + εij

where i = 1,…,N individuals; t = 1,…,N waves of data; βxit is a vector of time-varying

predictors; αi is a vector of time-invariant predictors; and εij is a random disturbance term.

In a fixed-effects model, the αi is treated as fixed for every individual as opposed to

random. Practically speaking, this is equivalent to entering a dummy variable for every

respondent in the survey. Treating these values as fixed eliminates all between-subject

variance and only leaves within-subject variance to be predicted by the time-variant

predictors. There are two disadvantages to the fixed effects method over the random

effects method: (1) Because the model only uses part of the overall population variance

of the dependent variable, standard errors become larger and statistical power is reduced.

(2) Fixed effect models are also at a disadvantage if time invariant characteristics of the

individual are substantively important to what is being tested.

The most obvious advantage to a fixed-effects method over a random effects

method lies in the ability to control for stable, unobservable characteristics of individuals

that commonly result in model misspecification (Allison 2005; Halaby 2004). In my

particular application, this resolves much of the difficulties arising from selection effects.

110

Because respondents have not been randomly assigned colleges, their decision to attend

college at all, or to attend a religious or non-religious school, likely results from

particular individual and familial religious commitments. While some of these religious

commitments and preferences can be measured with survey data, other important

constructs present difficulty. For example, the religiously committed may have a strong

set of intrinsic religious motivations that both affect their likelihood of attending a

religious school as well as a instilling an intention to remain religiously active in the

transition to adulthood. In the absence of reliable and valid indicators of such constructs,

the fixed-effects approach allows us to achieve unbiased estimates.

4.7 Results

4.7.1 Effects from College on Service Attendance

Table 4.2 uses the full dataset to estimate the level of annual religious service

attendance for students currently enrolled and individuals with college degrees

(respondents not enrolled and without a post-secondary degree provide the base for

comparison). Model 1 presents an uncontrolled random effects model. Respondents who

are currently enrolled along with respondents with those who attain an associate’s degree

attend less than those without a degree and not presently enrolled. Those with a BA are

not statistically distinguishable from the reference group.

Model 2 adjusts for aging effects. Net of the population level declines in church

attendance associated with age, students currently enrolled in college have the lowest

levels of annual attendance while those with a BA or more have the highest. The

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TABLE 4.2

RANDOM AND FIXED EFFECTS

PREDICTING ANNUAL RELIGIOUS SERVICE ATTENDANCE

(1) Rand Effects

(2) Rand Effects + Age

(3) Fixed Effects + Age

Enrolled in College -2.712** -1.058** -3.292** Associates Degree -2.886* 0.866 0.627 Bachelor’s Degree -1.102 3.278** 2.210* # of Observations 38767 38767 38767 # of Individuals 8623 8623 8623 SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed) reference group and those with an associate’s degree are in the middle and

indistinguishable from one another. Lastly, Model 3 uses a fixed effects approach to

estimate the group differences in service attendance. Unlike the previous two models,

Model 3 uses only within person variance. The difference between Models 2 and 3

suggests that some of the differences between groups are due to high attending

individuals being more likely to enroll in college and graduate, which is consistent with

past research (Loury 2004; Muller and Ellison 2001). The adjusted effects reveal that

enrolling in college results in something closer to a drop in 3 services annually (rather

than 1) and that graduating with a bachelor’s degree results in an average increase of 2

services (compared to when the individual was not enrolled).

4.7.2 Institutional Differences in Service Attendance

Figure 4.1 displays the estimated number of religious services attended annually

for each year enrolled in both religiously affiliated and non-religiously affiliated

112

institutions of higher education. It is important to note that the strong first year declines

in service attendance reported by Bryant, Choi, and Yasuno (2003) have probably already

occurred for students represented in Figure 4.1. The results are obtained from a random

effects model with dichotomous variables entered in for each year enrolled in each type

of school. A random effects model takes into account the autocorrelation within subjects

between subsequent waves of measurement in panel data and provides more accurate

estimates of church attendance when compared to the alternative of group means. The

random effects regression results are available upon request.

Figure 4.1 Annual Church Attendance By College Type (Random Effects)

Two distinct groups emerge in Figure 4.1: (1) The high attending CCCU,

Evangelical, and black Protestant colleges and (2) the moderate to low attending

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Mainline, Catholic, Public, and Private colleges. Among the first group, the CCCU

attendees begin their college careers attending worship considerably more often than their

fellow evangelical and black Protestant college attendees. The average worship

attendance for this group of college students is more than once a week. Between years 2

and 3 a sharp drop places them much closer to the other respondents in the high attending

group. By year 4, the mean level of all three groups in the high attending categories

merge at approximately 40 religious services in the past year.

The low attending groups, by contrast, look remarkably similar in religious

service attendance trends. Those who attended Catholic, Mainline, or religiously

unaffiliated public or private higher education began their schooling at an average of

approximately 20 religious worship services a year and display a modest, steady drop in

attendance to 15 services a year by the fourth year of schooling.

Model 1 in Table 4.3 displays the fixed effects regression coefficients for each

cumulative year of education by college type. Consistent with the results displayed in

Figure 4.1, most college students display downward trends in religious service attendance

over subsequent years of schooling. The exceptions to this are students enrolled in black

Protestant colleges and student enrolled at private for profit schools. Neither slope is

significantly different from zero. Also, the sharp drop displayed by students attending

CCCU schools is consistent with the trend lines displayed in Figure 4.1. Even though the

level of decline is substantial for these students, this group still has a high mean level of

attendance in their later years of schooling.

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TABLE 4.3

FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSION

PREDICTING ANNUAL RELIGIOUS SERVICE ATTENDANCE

(1) (2) College Type (Years Enrolled) Evangelical -3.004* -2.467+ CCCU -8.290** -7.719** Mainline Protestant -2.248* -1.828 Black Protestant 0.436 0.877 Catholic -2.555** -2.009+ Public -1.382** -0.915 Private (non-profit) -2.368** -1.926* Private (profit) -1.032 -0.623 Age 18 (or under) 3.171* 19 1.243 20 0 21 -0.657 22 0.145 23 0.218 24 (or over) 2.078 # of Observations 13400 13400 # of Individuals 4547 4547 R-squared (within) 0.01 0.02

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed test)

The literature has already established that traditional college-aged individuals

experience overall declining levels of religious practice regardless of whether they enroll

in higher education (Willits and Crider 1989). To statistically control for this generalized

decline, I include dummy variables for the age of the respondent, centered around the age

of 20. The decline in attendance is most evident from age 18 to 20. There also appears

to be a slight rebound in church attendance at the age of 24, although this is not

115

statistically different from attendance at age 20. The declines by college type become

slightly more modest in their effect. The declines for those attending mainline and public

colleges or universities become insignificantly different from no decline. The slope

associated with CCCU students is still considerably steeper than any other group, even

after accounting for the age of the respondent.

Before we reach any conclusions about the secularizing influence from this

explicitly religious group of colleges, we need to carefully consider who is declining in

attendance at CCCU schools. Mean level declines in worship attendance could occur

primarily from high attending individuals, moderate to low attending individuals, or both.

As is clear from Figure 4.1, many of the CCCU students must attend worship services

more than once a week. If the decline is primarily due to students attending less often,

but still at least once a week, then these students would still be regularly involved in a

religious community during the college years. It seems plausible to posit that

maintaining an extremely high frequency of religious service attendance may be

logistically difficult when in residence on nearly any college campus. Moreover, those

campuses that house disproportionately high numbers of greater than weekly service

attendees will thus suffer the greatest overall decline. However, if the mean level decline

in service attendance is due to students who attend worship weekly or less than weekly

declining in attendance, than we could rightly assign a secularizing effect evidenced by

these students attending a purposefully religious college.

In order to test this hypothesis, I recode the attendance variable and truncate all

attendance greater than once a week to equal once a week. This forces all variance in the

attendance variable to occur in the weekly or less categories. In addition to testing the

116

hypothesis concerning the level of decline in CCCU schools, I believe that this truncated

variable better captures the essence of the question I have proposed – namely, is decline

or disaffection from church more or less likely at religiously affiliated schools. In this

regard, decline from more than once a week to once a week should be considered a

categorically different sort of decline, as weekly attendance is still the desired norm in

most congregations. If we want to capture declining religious practice that best

approximates what scholars generally mean when referring to individual-level

secularization, then this truncated variable better approximates this type of decline.

Table 4.4 replicates Table 4.3 but uses the truncated attendance variable as its

outcome. Model 1 reveals a substantially smaller effect size (still significant at the .10

level) for students attending campuses affiliated with non-CCCU evangelical

denominations. Students at CCCU schools display no statistically significant overall

drop in attendance, suggesting that the substantial negative effect in Table 4.1 is due

almost entirely to declining levels of attendance in the weekly or greater categories. The

remaining religious schools display similar effect sizes using the truncated attendance

outcome and the outcome that varies across all of the attendance categories. Students

attending mainline Protestant and Catholic schools show statistically significant levels of

decline while students as black Protestant colleges and universities are not significantly

different from a null change in attendance. Students at the non-religious schools all have

significant levels of decline, although they are smaller in effect than the declines of

students at Mainline and Catholic schools. The addition of age categories in Model 2

does little to change the effect size of the primary variables, however non-CCCU

evangelical and private for profit schools both drop from slightly significant to non-

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significant. The age variables themselves reveal the same “U” shaped movement of

attendance with the lowest point of attendance occurring at age 20.

Model 3 in Table 4.2 includes additional college characteristics. Overall, these

college characteristics do little to explain the differences in average student attendance

associated with the main college categories. Despite this, these variables still provide

illumination into some interesting contextual effects of the college campus on religious

service attendance. As expected, attending a campus requiring chapel attendance

increases the reported frequency of attendance. Of course, it is impossible to know from

this whether students on these campuses are substituting required chapel for off-campus

worship, or whether attending chapel acclimates students to religious community and

practice, encouraging further participation off campus (or neither of these). Students

attending four year schools are more likely to decline in attendance when compared to

students at less traditional two-year or specialty schools. The effect size is even larger

when we narrow down these four year schools to only elite institutions. However, due to

the smaller number of students attending elite schools, we cannot be statistically

confident in this result. Neither the level of racial diversity nor the percent Caucasian on

campus alter the attendance rates of students. Lastly, students attending schools which

enroll a high ratio of men to women are more likely to show some level of decline in

attendance. This finding suggests that net of one’s own gender, the gender composition

of one’s environment has an independent role on religious practice.

Model 4 includes additional variables that measure the effect from life course

events on the frequency of religious service attendance. Similar to the effects associated

with specific college characteristics in Model 3, these have little effect on size and

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TABLE 4.4

FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSION

PREDICTING TRUNCATED ANNUAL RELIGIOUS SERVICE ATTENDANCE

(1) (2) (3) (4) College Type (Years Enrolled) Evangelical -1.222+ -1.105 -1.143 -1.329+ CCCU -0.394 -0.218 -0.410 -0.722 Mainline Protestant -2.120** -2.117** -2.048** -2.356** Black Protestant -0.850 -0.809 -0.740 -0.891 Catholic -2.585** -2.457** -2.390** -2.570** Public -1.133** -1.085** -1.048** -1.116** Private (non-profit) -1.808** -1.772** -1.746** -1.930** Private (profit) -1.215+ -1.242 -1.077 -1.071 Age 18 (or under) 2.163* 2.216* 1.939* 19 0.913+ 0.946+ 0.851+ 20 0 0 0 21 0.028 0.050 0.065 22 0.907 0.936 0.720 23 1.226 1.251 0.783 24 (or over) 3.599* 3.683* 3.140+ College Characteristics Chapel Required 4.020* 4.219* Total Enrollment (In Thousands) 0.016 0.016 Four Year -1.416* -1.238* Elite University -2.509 -2.465 Racial Diversity -0.148 -0.180 Percent White 0.018 0.017 Percent Male -0.063+ -0.058+ Life Course Events Bachelors Degree 1.976** Associates Degree -0.256 Living with parents 1.204** Living in Dorm 0.456 Married 1.790* Children 1.902 Cohabiting -0.196

119

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed test) significance of the institutional variables. Consistent with past research, obtaining a

bachelors degree results in an increase in the frequency of church attendance. However,

obtaining an associates degree has no significant affect on the frequency of worship

attendance. As expected, living with parents or parental figures results in slightly higher

levels of service attendance. However, living in a dorm does not affect the level of

attendance. Getting married also seems to result in a slight increase in church attendance.

Unexpectedly, neither having children nor cohabiting significantly alters the frequency of

worship attendance. It is likely that the children born to respondents are still too young to

attend a congregational religious education program. Past research has demonstrated an

increase in service attendance when young children reach school age, but not before

(Argue, Johnson and White 1999; Stolzenberg et al 1995). The unexpected result

regarding the non-effect from cohabiting may be partly due to cohort differences in

sexual mores. Among younger cohorts, living with an unmarried partner may no longer

represent a moral barrier to entrance into congregational life as it once did.

TABLE 4.4 (continued)

(1) (2) (3) (4) # of Observations 13400 13400 13400 13400 # of Individuals 4547 4547 4547 4547 R-squared (within) 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.03

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4.7.3 Conditional Effects

We know that there are cleavages in religious life by religious tradition, gender,

and race. In order to investigate the potential for conditional effects by these categories,

Table 4.5 runs the final model from Table 4.4 for six key subpopulations. Models 1 and

2 examine differential effects for white evangelicals and Catholics (16% and 30% of the

college attending sample respectively). Models 3 and 4 examine differences by gender

(55% women and 45% men). And, Models 5 and 6 examine differences by race/ethnicity

using the categories of African American (22%) and Latino (18%).

Model 1 reveals that individuals affiliated with an evangelical denomination

display significant negative effects from each additional year of schooling in mainline

Protestant schools. No other differences by college type are significant, although the

effect size and direction of each college type mirror that of the full sample. Individuals

raised in the Catholic tradition show the steepest declines in attendance if they attend

mainline or Catholic schools. Catholics at non-religious public or private schools show

no significant decline in attendance. This suggests that, unlike the evangelicals, attending

a college or university aligned with the Catholic tradition does not prevent decline in the

frequency of religious attendance for Catholic.

Examining differences by college characteristics, evangelicals are more likely to

report frequent service attendance if they attend a school requiring chapel (in addition to

being more likely to attend a school requiring chapel). White evangelicals drop in

attendance at traditional four year colleges or universities while Catholics display

declines attending elite universities. The degree of racial diversity, percent Caucasian,

and percent male do not affect the attendance of either group.

121

TABLE 4.5

FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSION

PREDICTING TRUNCATED ATTENDANCE

BY RELIGIOUS TRADITION, GENDER, AND RACE/ETHNICITY

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Evangelical Catholic Female Male Black Latino College Type Evangelical -0.415 1.010 -1.243 -1.203 -2.865 2.677 CCCU -1.193 ----- 0.018 -2.199+ 1.447 -4.736 Mainline -3.665+ -2.612+ -1.554 -3.271** 0.060 -0.686 Black Protestant ----- ----- -1.283 0.341 -1.387 ----- Catholic -1.668 -2.555** -2.384** -2.786** -5.773 -0.542 Public -1.283 -1.081 -0.587 -1.833** -0.638 -0.117 Private (non-prof) -2.327 -1.030 -1.467* -2.483** -1.725 -0.310 Private (profit) -1.697 -0.612 -1.132 -1.202 -1.577 0.699 Age 18 (or under) 1.543 2.065 2.505* 1.181 3.053 2.033 19 -0.484 1.282 1.133+ 0.480 1.354 1.476 20 0 0 0 0 0 0 21 0.060 -0.653 -0.577 0.907 -0.720 -0.635 22 0.540 -0.375 -0.148 1.962 0.030 -1.274 23 0.527 -2.070 -0.460 2.526 0.275 -3.083 24 (or over) 1.372 1.847 1.368 5.602* 2.383 -0.421 College Characteristics

Chapel Required 6.857* 4.724 8.472** -0.533 0.237 14.992* Total Enrollment -0.002 0.065 0.077* -0.066+ 0.112 0.030 Four Year -3.373* 0.454 -1.766* -0.479 -2.597 0.210 Elite University -3.010 -10.531** -3.555 -0.352 1.796 -4.940 Racial Diversity -1.500 0.414 0.069 -0.693 -1.005 -1.374 Percent White -0.082 0.039 0.021 0.001 0.005 0.103* Percent Male 0.176+ -0.065 -0.112* -0.044 -0.168 -0.035 Life Course Events

Bachelors Degree 0.378 3.472** 2.602** 0.785 4.928** 1.497 Associates Degree -0.430 -0.183 -0.442 0.084 -1.859 -4.102* Living w/ parents 3.058** 0.703 1.531** 0.845 1.247 2.723* Living in Dorm 0.103 0.194 0.832 0.000 -0.401 -0.148 Married 3.900* -1.252 1.692 2.292 0.920 0.971 Children 0.555 8.669** 2.184 0.881 -2.100 7.652** Cohabiting -1.854 -0.246 0.101 -1.000 1.093 0.235

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TABLE 4.5 (continued)

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Evangelical Catholic Female Male Black Latino # of Observations 2035 4102 7520 5880 2891 2237 # of Individuals 710 1373 2489 2058 1020 821 R2 (within) 0.04 0.05 0.03 0.04 0.03 0.04

SOURCE: National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed test) Life course events also differ by religious tradition. Catholics are more likely to attend

after obtaining a bachelors degree, but degree attainment does not significantly increase

evangelical attendance. Evangelicals attend more while living at home, but Catholics

attend the same whether living at home or living elsewhere. This may be partially due to

the fact that evangelicals come from disproportionately high attending homes. If the

family of origin attends frequently, the norm of attending would be expected to be greater

in these households. White evangelical students attend more frequently when they marry,

although Catholics do not. However, there is a significant increase in attendance after

having children for Catholics but not for evangelicals. This is likely due the emphasis on

the sacrament of infant baptism in Catholicism. Catholics who want to raise their

children in the faith begin much earlier than most evangelicals who do not require infant

baptism. Lastly, just as in the general population, cohabiting does not negatively affect

the level of attendance for evangelicals or Catholics. Both of these traditions still

maintain prohibitions against living with an unmarried partner, although this does not

seem to affect the frequency of attendance for evangelical and Catholic college students.

Models 3 and 4 examine difference by gender. Overall, decline by college type

are more substantial for men than for women. Women have significant declining

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attendance at Catholic and non-religious private (non-profit) schools. Men, in contrast,

decline in attendance at CCCU schools, Mainline, Catholic, public, and private (non-

profit) schools. Neither sex declines significantly in attendance at non-CCCU

evangelical, black Protestant, or private (for profit) schools.

Several contextual campus characteristics have a greater impact on women than

men. Perhaps the most notable finding in this regard is the difference in reports of

attendance for women who attend a college that requires chapel versus men who attend

such colleges. It seems that men do not increase their reporting of service attendance at

such schools while women do. There are also slight differences in the effect from

attending a four year college, with women being significantly likely to decline in

attendance but not men. Neither women nor men are affected in their frequency of

service attendance by attending elite universities or the racial composition of campus.

Lastly, women seem to decline slightly in attendance when they attend colleges with a

large male to female ratio of studios. This suggests that the overall lower attendance of

males influences females on male dominant campuses.

Lastly, in examining life course measures, only women seem to increase

attendance after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. On every other measure life course

measure – obtaining an associates degree, living at home, getting married, having kids,

and cohabiting – neither men nor women are significantly affected in their frequency of

attendance. This is partially due to the decreased power associated with the smaller

samples. In the full sample (Model 4 in Table 4.4) there are significant positive effects

associated with getting married and living at home.

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Models 5 and 6 examine differential effects by African-Americans and Latinos.

No significant effects for either minority group could be found by college type. Even

though both groups are oversampled in the data, the number of minority students in the

sample attending private religious schools is small. Nevertheless, the effect size indicates

substantial drops in services for African Americans at Catholic schools and Latinos at

CCCU schools. Without larger samples of these minority groups, little should be made

of these statistically insignificant findings.

Blacks also show no significant differences in attendance level by institutional

characteristics. As with males, Blacks do not seem to increase their reporting of church

attendance when they attend an institution that requires regular chapel attendance.

Perhaps more surprisingly, neither the degree of racial diversity nor the percent of the

student body who are White affect the level of religious service attendance for Blacks.

Latinos, in contrast, are considerably more likely to report an increase in attendance

while they attend colleges that require chapel. Additionally, Latinos seem to increase in

attendance when the percent of non-Hispanic Whites on campus is high. For every 10%

increase in non-Hispanic Whites on campus, Latinos add another church service to their

annual level on average.

When we examine the effects of life course events for Blacks and Latinos, we

also discover some significant differences between the two groups. Blacks, on average,

increase their attendance after graduating with bachelor’s degree. Latinos do not (at least

not at a level of statistical significance). Conversely, Latinos actually decline in

attendance after they graduate with an associates degree. Apart from this, Blacks are not

significantly affected by the life course events measured in this model. Latinos, however,

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seem to be affected by parent-child relationships. Both living at home and having kids

seem to boost service attendance. About two-thirds of Latinos in the United States are

Catholic, so this increase in attendance after having kids may be similar to the effect that

was evident for Catholics as well. However, there is also extant research that emphasizes

the link between religiosity and marriage and fertility for many Latinos (Mosher, Johnson

and Horn 1986; Ritchey and Dietz 1990). This may also contribute to the effects evident

in Model 6.

4.8 Discussion

The relationship between the religious status of a college or university and the

religious service attendance of students is complex. Nevertheless, several key findings

emerge that deserve special attention:

(1) Most students experience some decline in religious service attendance while

enrolled in college. This remains true even after holding constant all time

invariant individual characteristics and controlling for variant characteristics

such as age, college characteristics, and life course events.

(2) Students attending institutions that belong to the Council for Christian

Colleges and Universities exhibit the greatest overall declines in annual counts

of church attendance. However, this is not a result of students dropping out of

church. Rather, students who did attend multiple times per week were simply

less likely to do so while attending a CCCU school (although these students

still attended at least weekly).

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(3) Students are the most likely to decline away from the norm of weekly

attendance while attending a Catholic or mainline affiliated college or

university. On average, these students declined at a rate between 2 and 2.5

religious services for each year enrolled, considerably more than the

approximate 1.1 service decline annually for students enrolled in public

colleges and universities.

(4) Evangelicals and Catholics students look remarkably similar to the rest of the

student population, even while attending institutions that are affiliated with

their own religious tradition.

(5) Differences by the gender and race of the student are evident. Net of other

variables, males are more likely to drop in attendance while enrolled in most

types of colleges (with the exception of non-CCCU evangelical, black

Protestant, and Private for profit institutions). African-Americans have the

sharpest decline at Catholic institutions (~5.8 services annually), while

Latinos decline the most at CCCU institutions (~4.7 services annually).

While the effects by race/ethnicity have comparably large effect sizes, they do

not reach statistical significance.

4.8.1 The Big Picture

The first two hypotheses predicted a temporary decline in religious service

attendance during college, followed by an increase after graduation. The models

presented here confirmed these hypotheses. On average, students decline in attendance

while enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States. Moreover, there is

evidence from these models that graduating with a bachelor’s degree boosts religious

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service attendance. Table 4.5 suggests that Catholics, women, and African-Americans

are the most likely groups to increase attendance after graduating. Nevertheless, on

average, this increase in service attendance does not fully counter the effect from being

enrolled in a college or university.

It is likely, however, that the effect from graduating with a BA is underestimated

in the full multivariate models presented here (see Model 4 in Table 4.4). Table 4.2

found that, net of aging effects, those with a BA in the young adult population had the

highest level of religious service attendance (compared to those enrolled in college and

not enrolled without a degree). This corroborates extant research that examines church

involvement and educational attainment using survey data (Cornwall 1989; Hoge,

Johnson, and Luidens 1994). These studies are better able to capture the long term

effects from higher education that result from new social networks, transitioning into the

workforce, and civic expectations. The data used in the full models of Table 4.4 reflect

only respondents who report being enrolled in a college or university within the past year.

The full social script that educational attainment brings to religious life has probably not

played itself out for the respondents who have just graduated. If the aforementioned

contention concerning college graduation and religious service attendance is true, then a

college education does no enduring harm to basic religious practice. Rather, educational

attainment may actually provide the structural means and cultural tools to integrate into

religious congregations during young adult life.

4.8.2 Religious service attendance at conservative Protestant schools

Hypothesis 3 had two opposing formulations. In the first formulation, strongly

religious schools were posited to have a positive religious impact; in the second

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hypothesis they were posited to have negative religious influence. Overall, there seems

to be more evidence for the first formulation for conservative Protestant schools, but with

some important caveats. While students at non-CCCU evangelical schools did not decline

as much in service attendance as students at Catholic and mainline colleges, they were

not different from public college and universities (Model 4 in Table 4.4). Moreover, a

statistically significant decline at these schools was still evident.

CCCU schools are arguably some of the most explicitly religious colleges in the

United States. When the eight category attendance variable is converted into annual

religious service attendance, students as CCCU experience the most dramatic decline

over the course of four years. In the uncontrolled random effects model (Figure 4.1),

students at CCCU schools drop nearly 25 services, primarily between their second and

third year of attendance at these institutions. While CCCU students start significantly

higher in religious service attendance, they look roughly similar to non-CCCU

evangelical and black Protestant schools by senior year. This sharp drop is confirmed in

the fixed effects models in Table 4.2. However, once I truncate the annual attendance at

52 times a year, I find that the decline associated with attendance at CCCU schools nearly

disappears (Table 4.3). This suggests that the drop in attendance is mostly due to regular

attendees (which CCCU schools have a disproportionate number of) dropping modestly,

but not to levels lower than once a week. This is probably due to the constrained

opportunities for attending more than weekly worship services while enrolled at nearly

any institution of higher education. Perhaps students attending CCCU schools substitute

their multiple weekly services with other on campus religious activities.

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Nevertheless, even using the truncated variable, men are still likely to display a

statistically significant annual decline of more than two services at CCCU schools. Part

of this is due to the fact that men decline more at nearly all types of schools when

compared to women. However, this decline is statistically robust in the face of

counteracting forces. Men, as a whole, decline less in attendance on small campuses.

CCCU schools are disproportionately small, with most enrolling less than 2,000 students.

CCCU schools also have a disproportionately high number of schools that require chapel

attendance. Nevertheless, either men substitute these required chapels for an even greater

number of off campus religious services, or they do not consider these chapel services in

their definition of “worship service” (while women do). The latter definitional gulf

between men and women seems far less plausible then the former behavioral gulf. The

picture painted here seems to suggest that women do not substitute chapel for outside

church services, while men do. Net of this difference in chapel, men still decline in their

overall attendance at CCCU schools while women do not.

4.8.3 Religious Service Attendance at Catholic and Mainline Schools

Unlike the conservative Protestant institutions, the evidence clearly points to

students at mainline and Catholic institutions declining in religious service attendance –

more so than at any other type of institution. Unlike CCCU students, this steeper rate of

decline does not appear to be from students as these schools attending at higher overall

rates (see Figure 4.1). So why is the rate of decline at these schools more than double the

rate of public colleges and universities where more than 70% of all undergraduates in the

United States enroll? Unfortunately, the data available are not able to directly address the

manner in which the religious self-identification of the institution is manifest in the

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different pedagogical philosophies, structural organization, and general campus milieu.

Nor are we able to determine from this data how student religious life interacts with these

campus characteristics. Nevertheless, some plausible explanations are available.

Students at CCCU schools (and to a certain extent non-CCCU evangelical

schools) may be relatively well served by the in locus parentis policy established on these

campuses. They are given plenty of opportunity to worship in addition to strict religious

instruction. However, this does not necessarily imply that a lack of religious direction on

other campuses necessarily results in a spiritually vacuous environment. At large public

colleges and universities, religious students must actively participate in student led

groups if they choose to be religiously active on campus. Moreover, the hands-off

approach most faculty take to religious guidance (Higher Education Research Institute

2005) may actually result in interested students finding alternative outlets for knowledge

and belief from their religious peers. Where does this place mainline and Catholic

schools? While there is substantial variation in the religious mission of these schools,

students are probably provided more opportunity for worship (with regularly available

chapel and mass on campus), and spiritual direction, but with lower religious

expectations compared to conservative Protestant institutions. Thus, the institutional

structure allows religious identities to remain private and unexamined on these campuses.

Further research should aid in developing and testing these hypotheses regarding

religious identity on campus.

4.8.4 Evangelical and Catholic Students

Hypothesis 4 predicted that evangelical and Catholic students would have the

highest levels of religious practice on campuses affiliated with their own tradition. The

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evidence does not support this hypothesis. Both Catholics and evangelicals fare about the

same as other students at these institutions (see Table 4.5: Models 1 and 2). For

evangelicals, this finding suggests that it is not simply the pairing of evangelical campus

culture with evangelicals that produce the lower rates of decline at these schools. While

we should be careful not to extrapolate too far from this finding, there is cursory evidence

here that stricter religious schools are slightly more effective in inculcating religious

practice for both evangelicals and students from non-evangelical denominations.

While attending evangelical colleges may curb certain tendencies to decline in

religious practice, evangelicals themselves are more likely than other groups to decline in

attendance when they leave their family of origin. Likewise, evangelicals are more likely

to increase their worship service attendance when they marry. These findings coincide

with the literature that emphasizes the tight ties between traditional family ideals and

religion for white evangelicals (Bendroth 2007; Edgell 2003). In this way, evangelical

higher education may play an important role in the period of time that exists between

residing with family of origin and family of procreation.

Catholics, like evangelicals, fare approximately the same as non-Catholics at

Catholic affiliated institutions. Indeed, Catholics appear to be very similar to the general

trends in the student population at large, exhibiting the highest rates of declining

attendance at Mainline and Catholic schools. This finding suggests that there is nothing

significant about the interaction with Catholics at Catholic institutions that explain the

overall higher levels of decline at these schools. Rather, Catholic institutions seem to

exert an independent effect on students regardless of their religious background.

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4.8.5 Differences by Gender

Hypothesis 4 expected that men and women would have different rates of decline

in service attendance at evangelically affiliated colleges. The evidence in the present

analyses suggests that men declined more than women at most types of institutions,

whether they were religious or not. Furthermore, women have substantially higher

increases in service attendance after graduation when compared to men. These findings

are seemingly inconsistent with past research that finds no interaction between

educational attainment and gender on religious outcomes (See Funk and Willits 1987;

Hill 2007). Nevertheless the analyses presented here only apply to students during their

college experience and not the years following college graduation. One possible

explanation for these gender differences may reside in the different reaction to an

environment largely free of family constraints. Research suggests that male religious

development is closely tied with family life (Browning 2003; Wilcox 2004). In one

study, marital dissolution resulted in a significantly larger drop in religious service

attendance for men than women (Stolzenberg et al 1995). It is quite probable that the

temporary shift away from family influence results in lower attendance for men, but is

more minimal of an influence on women. This suggests that the gender differences in

religious practice during college may be short term, and that the long-term effect from

educational attainment may be similar for men and women as other research has

indicated.

4.8.6 Differences by Race/Ethnicity

Hypothesis 6 and 7 expected differences in institutional influence for African

Americans and Latinos. While none of the coefficients of college types are significant,

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the effect sizes are larger than most in the full-population model. Part of the reason for

this lies in the smaller N of Models 5 and 6 of Table 4.5. What is more, the fixed effects

method produces larger standard errors when compared to random or mixed modeling.

African-American students attending Catholic colleges and Latino students attending

CCCU colleges have relatively large rates of annual decline (-5.8 and -4.7 services per

year enrolled respectively). While we cannot have statistical confidence in these results,

future studies may want to consider testing this finding to see if it is substantiated with

different data and methods.

African American also seem to be unaffected by the racial ecology of the campus.

This suggests that the possible Catholic school effect is not due to Catholic affiliated

schools having low levels of racial diversity and a high percentage of non-Hispanic

Whites (characteristics that, on average, the Catholic affiliated institutions in the

NLSY97 do have). Latino students, while unaffected by the overall diversity of the

campus population, are affected by the percent of Caucasians on campus. Net of other

effects, they increase their religious service attendance by one service annually for every

10% increase in Caucasian population. This would seem to suggest that being a minority

on campus, may actually result in higher levels of religious practice for the Latino

population. Future research should also address this finding in more detail to understand

this process for Latinos.

4.9 Conclusion

The findings of this research suggest that students who enroll in higher education

experience temporary declines in religious service attendance compared with other young

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adults of the same age. However, these declines are not the same at all types of

institutions. Students who attend a religious college associated with the Council for

Christian Colleges and Universities drop the most in absolute terms, but not below the

norm of weekly service attendance. When service attendance is truncated to once a week

or less, students attending Catholic and Mainline schools decline the most - more than

twice as much as students attending public colleges and universities. The religious

tradition of the student does not seem to influence these institutional differences.

However, men are more likely to decline than women at most types of institutions.

Lastly, although minorities may have unique religious experiences at some of these

institutions, the analyses carried out here were unable to distinguish statistically between

institutional influences on religious attendance for African Americans and Latinos.

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CHAPTER 5:

CONCLUSION

5.1 Emerging Themes

Although the three substantive chapters of this dissertation do not form a

sustained argument, several emerging themes arise throughout the chapters that may

serve to guide a future agenda for study in the area of religion during the transition to

adulthood. Perhaps one of the most surprising findings is the relatively early age that

religious disengagement begins. The possibility of leaving the religious community of

one’s youth was typically considered an activity that began once one left the household.

The findings in Chapter 2 suggest that substantial decline is occurring at the very latest

by age 16. Not only that, but by age 20 the downward trend has stopped and mean levels

of religious service attendance are steady.

This early disengagement may partially explain why college attendance no longer

has a clear secularizing effect on young adults as it did in the past. If the bulk of religious

decline has occurred while residing at home, then for many young people there is nothing

more to disengage from when they move to a college campus. Clydesdale (2007) argues

that the first year after high school is mostly a continuation of lifestyle for most young

people. The everyday existence of the average sixteen to twenty year old involves

preoccupation with navigating social relationships, maintaining academic standing in

school, and spending time in recreational activities. The supposed “big” questions of

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religion and meaning are likely of secondary concern for the majority during the college

years.

The story just described is appears to be different than what the baby-boomers

experienced at a similar age. For those who came of age during the 1960s, college did

have a secularizing influence on religious practice and belief. This can be seen in

Appendix A, using the panel data for young people who were high school seniors in

1965. Approximately 1.5% of the entire nationally-representative sample claimed no

religious affiliation when they were high school seniors. Yet, by 1973, 12.5% had no

religious affiliation. Moreover, if the baby-boomers graduated from college, they were

more than twice as likely to disaffiliate as those who had not attended college at all. For

this rather unique cohort, college campuses served as a mobilizing arena to oppose

traditional sources of authority, including religion.

Yet, it may be that this very purposeful religious disengagement for those that

came of age in the 1960s, has now become institutionalized in the children of the baby-

boomers. Expectations of religious engagement (or at the very least religious

identification) were high for this previous generation all the way through high school.

Yet, as the analysis in Chapter 2 revealed, as of 1997, 11.5% of twelve to fourteen year

olds had no religious affiliation. This picture is certainly congruent with the description

given by Smith and Denton (2005) of adolescent religiosity as inarticulate and

disconnected from historical religious traditions.

At the same time as this move toward early adolescent religious disengagement

has occurred, young adults are delaying marriage and having children, the events

typically associated with increasing religious practice (Wilson and Sherkat 1994).

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Wuthnow (2007) finds that a decrease in religious participation has occurred among

young adults when compared to the generation of young adults in the early 1970s.

However, the difference in religious practice between these generations can largely be

accounted for by the differential rates of marriage and childbearing.

These two movements, one toward younger disaffiliation, the other toward older

reaffiliation, open up a new period in the life course where most young adults have no

ties to religious institutions. I will outline several promising avenues of study in this

period of emerging adulthood.

One neglected population in the study of young adults and religiosity, are the

young people who do not attend college. Sociologists had assumed for some time that

higher education was detrimental to religious practice and belief. However, the research

in this dissertation (Chapters 3 and 4) suggests that college campuses may actually be a

relatively safe place for religion, and in the case of religious participation, may actually

provide the tools to integrate into religious communities upon graduation. However, we

know very little about the transition to adulthood and the accompanying religious

practices of those who enter the workforce as opposed to entering higher education. The

rough sketches provided by the General Social Survey in Appendix A suggest that the

changes in the non-college population by birth cohort have been more severe than the

changes within the population that attended college. Understanding the structural

disconnect between this population and religious institutions will be an important key to

understanding the religious lives of young adults.

Another key area of study will involve examining the role that the timing of key

life course events in emerging adulthood plays. As the normative ordering of transitional

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events such as leaving home, completing education, getting a job, getting married, and

having children have become less defined (Shanahan 2000), the ordering and timing of

these events become part of the conscious decision-making processes of young adults as

they navigate their way through emerging adulthood. This process brings with it new

questions about religiosity in young adulthood. For example, marriage and having

children bring new roles that require responsibility for others. If we suppose that one of

the primary reasons that college has little effect on the religious lives of young people is

due to the difficulty getting young persons engaged with the world outside of ego-centric

concerns, then we might expect that college would have a greater religious impact on

non-traditionally aged students, many who have already formed families.

Another important issue may be the length of time spent away from religious

institutions in young adulthood. There may be a nonlinear relationship between time

spent in apostasy and the probability of returning. If young adults spend a long enough

time outside the confines of the church developing meaningful networks of relationships

and establishing career trajectories, then they may be less likely to return even if they do

marry and have children. Understanding the full implications of this extended period of

disengagement appears to be the next step in understanding religion in early adulthood

for the current generation.

5.2 A Quantitative Agenda for the Study of Religion Over the Life Course

Studies of intra-individual religious change and its social correlates are still

relatively sparse within the sociological literature. Research that cover large periods of

the life course are quite rare, principally due to the difficulty in attaining adequate data

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(for exceptions, see Dillon and Wink 2007 and McCullough et al 2005). Collecting

retrospective data is commonly a remedy for this problem. Research that has primarily

relied upon retrospective life histories or open-ended interviews has been relatively

successful in providing broad pictures of religious change and the aging process (see

Ingersoll-Dayton, Krause, and Morgan 2002). Nevertheless, these methods are often

hampered by an individualist narrative interpretation wherein the actor is overemphasized

and many of the social forces that sociologists theorize as important - such as institutions,

networks, and cultural contexts - remain hidden. The combination of retrospective data,

and its ability to capture large swaths of time, is probably best used in tandem with

concurrent panel data that is better able to capture the hidden realities that the analyst

wishes to uncover.

The use of panel data has proliferated in sociological research over the past two

decades (Halaby 2004). And although panel data on religion is still in its infancy, several

promising developments will likely result in future research on American religion relying

more heavily on panel data. The National Study of Youth and Religion is entering its

third wave of data collection and will span a period of five years for the study participants

from adolescent into early adulthood. This promises to be a rich source of material for

analyzing multiple dimensions of religious and social change during this period of the life

course. The Panel Study on American Religion and Ethnicity, completing its first wave

of data, also promises to be a key resource on the changing beliefs, rituals, and identities

of American adults as more waves are collected. The widely used National

Congregations Study is collecting a second wave that includes a subsample of

congregations from the first wave of study, allowing for the investigation of institutional

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dynamics of religious congregations over time. The primary data used in this

dissertation, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the National

Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 are also continuing to collect further waves of data,

likely containing survey indicators of religious practice and belief. In addition, there is a

concerted effort to add high quality questions on religion to already existing panel data. I

expect that these developments will encourage sociological researchers to increasingly

study the religious dynamics of the life course as the tools to study such change become

more widely available.

Although this dissertation has focused exclusively on religion during the

transition to adulthood, studying the social correlates of religious change in mid-life and

late-life is a relatively new territory. Panel data, such as Marital Instability Over the Life

Course, and Americans’ Changing Lives, contain multiple waves of data that include

some basic religious indicators repeated over time. While there have been some studies

tracking aging and indicators such as church attendance and belief in life after death,

many basic indicators such as frequency of prayer and importance of faith have gone

unstudied. In addition, the social mechanisms associated with aging have not yet been

specified across the adult lifespan. For example, little is known concerning the influence

on religiosity from such important markers of adult life as marital quality, career

pathways, social mobility, and community attachment.

Religion in late life has been studied to a greater extent by gerontologists.

Nevertheless, a more socially orientated perspective would likely open up new questions

and debates within the field. Grown children commonly become important in this phase

of the life course. Just as the parent-child relationship is key to religious socialization in

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early life, the reversal of the care-taker role may once again increase the importance of

this relationship in late life. An examination of this relationship could be carried out

using data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations. Investigating the role of other

defining features of late life such as failing health, the death of a spouse, and entry into

professional institutions of assisted living may also be fruitful avenues for studying what

social changes predicate religious changes in late life.

Understanding the social embeddedness of religious belief is one of the

fundamental tasks of the sociologist of religion. Yet, we still only have a cursory

understanding of how religious beliefs are patterned by the many intra-individual changes

in social and institutional arrangements that give the life course its specific texture. It is

my hope that future research will move beyond theories of the family lifecycle and begin

to theorize the ways that specific religious beliefs and practices are shaped by the diverse

domains that constitute the entire life course.

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APPENDIX A:

COLLEGE AND RELIGIOSITY BY BIRTH COHORT

A.1 Overview

Chapter 3 documented the relationship between educational attainment and religious

practice and affiliation. As was noted, the hypothesized secularizing effect from college

is not evident among recent college graduates. This finding, however, applies only to a

particular birth cohort and may not be applicable to past generations. Colleges and

universities have undergone substantial shifts in the United States during the second half

of the twentieth century. Higher education rapidly expanded during this time as more

young people transitioned directly into post-secondary education following high school

graduation (Knapp, Kelly-Reid, and Whitmore 2007). Moreover, recent incoming

freshman are more likely to desire financial security from college compared to

developing a meaningful philosophy of life. This is substantially different from students

who entered college in the late 1960s (Astin 1998). In this appendix I briefly explore

how religion fares alongside these other changes, and examine how the effect of a college

education on religiosity has altered over time.

A.2 Religious Climate on Campus

A recent New York Times Op-Ed has made the claim that current students are

more traditionally religious than in the recent past (Taylor 2006). This view is not,

143

however, embraced by all social scientists who study religion on campus. There certainly

does appear to be an increase in evangelical presence on college campuses, as

documented by students adopting the “born-again” label (Bryant 2005), and the growth

of evangelical parachurch organizations on campus (Schmaulzbauer 2007). Others,

however, note that a majority of students are unreflective in their faith, with mundane

activities such as navigating classes and maintaining an active social life occupying the

majority of student life (Clydesdale 2007). While the majority of students do identify

themselves as spiritual (Higher Education Research Institute 2004), this does not

necessarily entail that they are engaged with historic strands of religious and spiritual

traditions (Bender 2007). Still, it is difficult to make claims that these students are

different than in the past without adequate measures of these dimensions of religiosity

over time.

There is some survey evidence that religious practice and belief have changed

over time for college students, although the studies are now somewhat dated. Moberg

and Hoge (1986) studied Catholic students at Marquette University in 1961, 1971, and

1982. Between 1961 and 1971, the authors report a substantial increase in individualistic

interpretations surrounding morals and religion, increased religious doubt, and decreased

mass attendance. However, between 1971 and 1982 there was a move toward more

traditional Catholic positions, along with a decreased demand for intellectual autonomy

from the Church. The authors point to the turbulence of Vatican II, Humanae Vitae, and

the Kennedy presidency between 1961 and 1971 as a possible cause for such a change.

The 1970s, on the other hand, were more stable and changes in religious beliefs among

Catholic students were similar to changes occurring among other students.

144

Hoge et al. (1987) documented these more general trends among all Dartmouth

college students with the administration of five identical surveys to undergraduates in

1952, 1968-69, 1974, 1979, and 1984. The major declines in values and orthodox

religious beliefs occurring from the 1950s and into the 1970s had reversed themselves in

many instances by the 1984 survey. For example, those with no religious preference

were highest in 1974 and subsequently drop sharply. In addition, belief in a “Divine

God, Creator of the universe” began rising in 1979 and 1984. These studies, although not

updated for recent college students, establish that considerable historical variation has

occurred in religious practice and belief over the past few generations.

There is also limited evidence that faculty dispositions toward religion may be

changing. Schmalzbauer (2003) and Lindsay (2007) have documented the increased

number of Catholic and evangelical faculty moving into the major research universities

across the United States. Along with this, several explicitly conservative, evangelical

colleges are employing faculty that are contributing more seriously to their particular

fields of study (Schultze 1993). As religious conservatives re-emerge from their enclaves

and separatist institutions of the past, it is difficult to say what effect, in any, this will

have on the religious beliefs of students attending institutions of higher education.

However, both the trends among students and faculty may signal that past studies were

picking up a historically conditioned cohort effect in addition to any enduring effect of

college upon students.

In order to examine the possibility that the relationship between religiosity and

college attendance has changed over time, two brief analyses will be carried out. The

first involves examining the bivariate relationship between attaining a college degree and

145

several key religious outcomes separated by birth cohort in the cumulative General Social

Survey. The second involves using panel data from a national sample of high school

seniors in 1965 to examine the relationship between attaining a college degree and

changes in church attendance, religious affiliation, and beliefs about the Bible between

1965 and 1973.

A.3 Data

Data come from the cumulative General Social Survey (GSS) 1972 to 2004 as

well as the Youth-Parent Panel Socialization Study. The GSS is a nationally

representative survey administered annually or biennially by the National Opinion

Research Center since 1972. A question on religious service attendance and religious

affiliation has been asked on every GSS questionnaire administered. Strength of

religious affiliation has been measured since 1974, frequency of prayer since 1983, and

beliefs about the Bible since 1984. The Youth-Parent Panel Socialization Study is a

nationally representative, four wave panel study of youth and their parents beginning

with high school seniors in 1965. Follow-up waves were conducted in 1973, 1982, and

1997. For the purposes of this analysis, only the 1965 and 1973 youth panels will be

used. Both waves contain questionnaire items on religious service attendance, affiliation,

and belief about the Bible.

A.4 Analysis I: Higher Education and Religious Outcomes in the GSS 1972-2004

Figure A.1 displays the percent of individuals age twenty-five or older who attend

church “nearly every week” or more by birth cohort for those with a bachelor’s degree or

146

more and for those with less than a bachelor’s degree. Looking within birth cohorts, this

figure displays a consistent, slight boost in weekly church attendance for those with

college degrees. While there is some fluctuation over time, there is always at least a

slight difference between college graduates and non-college graduates.28 Figure A.2

displays the percent age twenty-five or older who claim no religious affiliation across

birth cohorts. We can see that the college-educated born before 1960 were more likely to

claim no religious affiliation. However, cohorts born in the 1960s and later appear to be

roughly equal on measures of non-affiliation. Figure A.3 presents data on the percent of

respondents believing the Bible to be a “book of fables”. This measure taps into “non-

orthodox” Christian beliefs. Here we see that there is substantial difference between

college educated respondents and the rest of the population in all birth cohorts. The

difference is slightly less in recent cohorts but still hovers around ten percentage points.

Figure A.4 displays differences between the two populations in strength of affiliation. Of

those who do affiliate, the GSS asks how strongly they affiliate with their tradition. We

can see from this graph that over the majority of birth cohorts (and certainly over recent

cohorts), the college educated who identify with a religious tradition, so more strongly

than religious affiliates with less than a bachelor’s degree. Lastly, Figure A.5 examines

the differences in the percent who pray at least daily by cohort. Like the graph for non-

affiliation, we see a near convergence between the college educated and the rest of the

population among recent birth cohorts.

28 It is important to not interpret too much from the decline across birth cohorts, as this could also be due to aging effects. The important difference is within cohorts between those who graduated from college and those who did not.

147

2030

4050

Pct

Atten

ding

Wee

kly

< 1910 1910-19 1920-29 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970+

Birth Cohort

Less than BA BA or more

Figure A.1 Weekly Religious Service Attendance Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion

05

1015

20Pct

No

Rel

igio

n

< 1910 1910-19 1920-29 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970+

Birth Cohort

Less than BA BA or more

Figure A.2 No Religious Affiliation Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion

148

1020

30P

ct B

ible

Boo

k of

Fab

les

< 1910 1910-19 1920-29 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970+

Birth Cohort

Less than BA BA or more

Figure A.3 Bible “Book of Fables” Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion

3540

4550

5560

Pct

Str

ongl

y A

ffili

ated

< 1910 1910-19 1920-29 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970+

Birth Cohort

Less than BA BA or more

Figure A.4 Strong Religious Affiliation Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion

149

4050

6070

80P

ct P

ray

Dai

ly

< 1910 1910-19 1920-29 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970+

Birth Cohort

Less than BA BA or more

Figure A.5 Pray Daily Across Birth Cohort by Degree Completion

A.5 Analysis #2: Higher Education and Religious Change in the YPSPS 1965-1973

In order to assess the possibility that recent birth cohorts react differently to the

college environment, a similar analysis to the main analysis in Chapter 3 has been

conducted with panel data from an earlier cohort. The youth respondents in the Youth-

Parent Socialization Panel Study were high school seniors in 1965. They were given a

questionnaire that asked them to report their religious affiliation, religious service

attendance, and beliefs about the Bible among other items. These same questions were

then replicated in the 1973 follow-up questionnaire. The dependent variables in Table

A.1 examine three different outcomes: (1) how often they attend church on a five-point

scale ranging from “Never” to “Every Week”, (2) a dichotomous variable reporting no

religious affiliation, and (3) a dichotomous item with the responses the Bible “is a good

book” but “God had nothing to do with it”, or the Bible “was written by men who lived

150

so long ago that it is worth very little today” versus two responses that acknowledge

divine influence in the Bible.

TABLE A. 1

THE EFFECT OF DEGREE COMPLETION

ON RELIGIOUS ATTENDANCE, AFFILIATION, AND BELIEF ABOUT THE BIBLE

1965-1973

SOURCE: Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study +p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 (two-tailed test) The independent variables are similar to several used in the analysis with the Add

Health data. The main independent variable indicates whether or not the respondent has

attained a bachelor’s degree or more in the eight years between Wave I and Wave II.

Religious service attendance and Bible beliefs at Wave I are included as controls. Lastly,

basic demographic controls from Wave I have been included here as well.

Table A.1 presents the results. The first set of models examines whether religious

service attendance depends on graduating from college. Unlike the more recent cohort in

OLS Attendance

Odds Ratio “No Affiliation”

Odds Ratio “Bible Belief”

(1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) BA or More -.056 -.049 2.074** 1.985** 2.595** 2.480** W1 Attendance .502** .783* .591** W1 Bible Belief -.397 3.191** 8.260** Black .017 1.111 .535 Female .216** .600** .653* Catholic .036 1.791** 2.135** Constant 2.792 .919 .110 .256 .085 .431 N 1103 1103 1279 1279 1243 1243 (Pseudo) R2 .000 .112 .027 .085 .044 .190

151

the Add Health panel data, this earlier birth cohort saw no differences between those that

received college degrees and those that did not in the frequency of religious service

attendance. This holds true even after statistically controlling for prior service attendance

and other potentially confounding factors. The second set of regression equations in

Table A.1 present the odds ratios of disaffiliating from a religious denomination or group

between wave I and wave II. Model 2 reveals that even after statistical controls, college

graduates were nearly twice as likely to drop out of religion compared to those that did

not graduate from college. Once again, this is in rather stark contrast to the more recent

cohort represented in the Add Health data. Lastly, the set of equations on the right hand

side of Table A.5 display the odds ratios of believing the Bible is not divinely inspired

versus the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired. The coefficients from the equation

furthest to the right demonstrate that college graduates were more than 2.5 times as likely

to believe that the Bible was not divinely inspired compared to non-college graduates.

A.6 A Comparison with Recent College Graduates

Overall, the effect of educational attainment on religious outcomes appears

sufficiently different for recent college graduates compared to college graduates of the

past – particularly those that attended college in the late 1960s. Both the data analyzed

from the GSS as well as the models from the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Survey

suggest that secularization as a result of college attendance may be waning, although not

uniformly along all measures.

Religious disaffiliation, no different for college graduates and the rest of the

population in recent data, is about twice as likely to occur for college graduates who

152

came of age during the late 1960s and early 1970s according to the findings presented

here. This pattern is confirmed in the GSS, with younger birth cohorts equally likely to

disaffiliate, while college graduates from earlier birth cohorts were more likely to

disaffiliate. There are several plausible explanations for this change. Nearly all of the

high school seniors in the YPSPS in 1965 were affiliated with a religious tradition or

denomination (less than 1.5 % had no affiliation). Among recent high school seniors the

rate without a religious affiliation is nearly 13%. Yet, by the follow-up surveys, each

approximately seven years later, the rates of disaffiliation are much closer for both birth

cohorts (12.5% versus 18.9%). The earlier cohort experienced much higher rates of

disaffiliation once they left home, while the more recent birth cohort underwent far less

disaffiliation after leaving home. Moreover, the rate of religious affiliation seems to be

approximately the same from 8th grade to 12th grade in the Add Health data. While this

may mean that adolescents are disaffiliating prior to the 8th grade, the more likely

explanation is that they are reflecting the religious identity of their parents. Although

religious disaffiliation was much more common for the entire birth cohort represented in

the YPSPS, graduating from college still resulted in nearly twice the rate of disaffiliation.

In this way, college campuses likely provided the arena for attacking many of the cultural

institutions that defined their parents’ generation, including religious institutions. This

generational conflict over values does not seem to define more recent birth cohorts. In

this way, the birth cohort that came of age during the late 1960s may be the exception

rather than the norm.

The positive relationship between graduating from college and religious service

attendance evidenced in the Add Health data is non-existent in the YPSPS birth cohort.

153

College, which I have suggested provides the social and cultural tools for integrating into

religious congregations in young adulthood (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4), may only

function in this manner for recent birth cohorts. Alternatively, this function may have

been present in the past, but resulted in no mean level change due to the high level of

disaffiliation. The GSS data, however, suggest that college educated individuals have

been attending religious services slightly more frequently since the birth cohort of the

1930s (which would have most likely attended college during the 1950s). It is not

entirely clear why there is a discrepancy between these datasets, although it is quite

possible that selection effects outlined in Chapter 4 influence the cross-sectional GSS

data. The YPSPS data are a better comparison with the Add Health data because they are

both longitudinal and cover similar periods in the life course.

Bible beliefs were altered by college for this earlier generation. According to

YPSPS, college graduates were nearly two and one half times as likely to believe that

God had nothing to do with Bible compared to non-college graduates (controlling for

their prior beliefs about the Bible). However, data from the GSS in Figure A.3 suggests

that differences in Bible beliefs by educational attainment are still substantial in younger

birth cohorts. Part of this is certainly due to the lower likelihood of high educational

attainment for people who hold to literalist interpretation of the Bible (Darnell and

Sherkat 1997). Nevertheless, there may be effects from college on beliefs about

scripture among recent graduates, but information pertaining to the content of religious

belief at multiple points in time is not available in the Add Health data. It is possible that

religious practice is no longer affected by educational attainment, but that the actual

content of religious belief is still altered. As this data becomes available, researchers

154

would be wise to address the relationship between education and a wider variety of

religious indicators – particularly measures of religious belief and orthodoxy.

The GSS has measured the frequency of prayer since 1984. Consistent with the

data from the Add Health analysis in Chapter 3, college graduates seem virtually the

same as non-college graduates when measuring the percent that pray daily. However,

college graduates in the birth cohorts prior to 1950 have a relatively lower percent who

pray daily compared to those who did not graduate from college. There is, unfortunately,

no equivalent variable in the YPSPS to compare to the GSS or Add Health data.

Although we should be careful not to interpret the data over birth cohorts as decline

(much of these effects could also be accounted for by age), it is important to note that the

convergence between college graduates and non-college graduates seems to be due to the

percent praying daily more rapidly declining overall in the non-college category. Steeper

slopes for the non-college category over time are evident in several of the Tables. This

indicates the importance of future research attempting to understand how the transitions

in early adulthood affect religiosity for those that do not continue their education as well

as those that do.

For those who are affiliated with a religious tradition, Table A.4 suggests that a

higher proportion of individuals strongly identify with their religious tradition if they

have graduated from college. This seems to have consistently been the case at least since

the birth cohort born in the 1930s. This finding adds some nuance to these other

analyses. Although college graduates in the past seem more likely to disaffiliate and less

likely to believe that the Bible was divinely influenced than those that did not graduate, a

higher percentage of the affiliated strongly identified with their religious tradition. If

155

college is a time for the development of a meaningful understanding of the self, then it

seems plausible that individuals would engage their religious traditions. This may result

in disaffiliating (as it did with those that attended college in the late 1960s), or it may

result in more strongly identifying with one’s religious tradition. On the other hand, it

may simply be that those who have a stronger religious identity are more likely to attend

college (just as those that attend church more frequently are more likely to attend

college). Religious youth are likely to be more “planfully competent” (Clausen 1993),

which is correlated with educational attainment.

Regardless of the source of this difference, it is important to note that the

changing effect of college on religion is not a singular story of declining or increasing

influence on religion. The overarching trend seems to be that educational attainment may

have been related to some forms of religious decline in the past, however this is less the

case for recent college graduates. Nevertheless, it is possible that traditional and orthodox

religious beliefs are still in decline as a result of college. There are, unfortunately, no

adequate measures of this in a form which would allow us to have methodological

confidence in the results. Future research on the effect of college on religious life would

do well to reflect the complexity of forms that religious beliefs, rituals, and identity take

on during the college years. Such an analysis would shed light on how education and

religion interact and help us to generate plausible theories about how this relationship

may have changed over time.

156

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