For many parents, religion is a key source for the moral formation of their kids. It enables them to give their kids a sense of moral direction in this world, and that applies across the board. More conservative religious parents, be they Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, or whatnot, tend to be more invested in parenting, in part because they want to convey their faith to their children, but also in part because they are worried about a culture that they see as debased and debasing. They want to protect their kids from that culture. Those are two key points that I see in my work on religion and parenting. Parents across the religious and ideological spectrum see religion as a key source of moral direction for their kids. It’s also why we see that the highest level of [church] attendance for adults is for folks, particularly men, who are married with kids. Once their kids are at a certain age, between six and 12, they want to get involved with a local church or synagogue and get their kids integrated into the life of that congregation.

What we find in general is that parents who are more religious and are also affectionate and firm with their kids — it is both their religiosity as parents … [and] their parenting style — that these two things when they work in concert are likely to ensure that they will transmit the faith that they have to their children. If they are very religious themselves, and if they are affectionate with their kids, and also if they are firm — if they have not an overly strict but a firm approach to discipline — they are more likely to convey their faith to their children.

We know, for instance, that children from evangelical homes are more likely to remain in that tradition, about 80 percent of kids from those homes. And in mainline Protestant traditions it’s closer to 60 percent. A big part of that difference is the difference in the faith. Evangelical parents tend to have a stronger faith, which then makes their kids more likely to abide in that faith. Likewise, about 75 percent of Catholic kids would persist in the faith of their parents. I don’t have numbers for Jewish and Muslim children.

Parents who are too strict with their kids, who are authoritarian parents, are more likely to see their children rebel, both with respect to their moral beliefs as well as their religious beliefs. There is a kind of continuum. Parents who are too permissive are going to see their kids go off, and parents who are too strict are also going to see their kids leave the faith. There is this dynamic, particularly when it comes to issues of control and discipline. Parents who give their kids some latitude but not too much are more likely to see their kids stick with the faith.

There is a new survey that was conducted out of the University of North Carolina which shows that kids who are more religious are less likely to use drugs, to abuse alcohol. They are less likely to be delinquent. They are less likely to be depressed. So there is an association between weekly religious practice and also having a strong religious self-identity and being less likely to fall into social trouble and also less likely to experience psychological distress.

The RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY poll indicates — and this goes to the issue of more traditional religious parents being more concerned about the broader culture — that about half of evangelical Protestant and traditional Catholic parents are concerned about sex and violence in popular culture, and this compares to about a third of parents of other traditions and secular parents. There clearly is this gap between the more traditional and less traditional religious parents when it comes to their concern about our popular culture. That’s a very interesting finding for the R & E poll.

Another interesting finding from the poll is that parents in traditional families, that is, married parents with kids, are much less worried about their kids than parents in single-parent or nontraditional families. So there is something about that family structure that makes the more traditional parents less worried about the schools their kids are in, the values their kids are being exposed to. They are also slightly less worried about transmitting their faith to their kids — though that’s a smaller effect there.

The poll suggests that parents who are in more traditional families are less worried about their kids, probably in part because they are more integrated into their religious communities. Parents whose kids are more religious are likely to see their kids do slightly better in school, and also to see their kids much less likely to be involved with alcohol and drugs, to be delinquent or to experience psychological distress — things like depression, for instance. It lasts at least into young adulthood. With anything like this there is always a question of persistence. Kids who persist in a religious faith will see these effects continue into their lives. But kids who drift away from religious practice over five or 10 or 15 years are going to be less likely to experience the benefits of religious practice.

Particularly among more moderate and liberal religious parents, one of their key concerns, their key motivations in bringing their kids to church, synagogue, or even mosque is to give their kids some religious and moral formation that they hope will protect their children. Whereas for the more traditional or devout religious parents, a key motivation for them is also, of course, to really give their kids a strong faith.

I think it’s always been the case that religion has always been a key part of a parent’s tool kit. But I think there is a new concern, particularly among the more traditional parents, about the nature of popular culture in our society, and that concern motivates them to be even more dedicated parents and to do more to get their kids engaged with their faith. More traditional parents also recognize that other institutions, schools, and the popular culture are less likely to be supportive of their faith, and so there’s more of a sense on their part that they have to step up and take more responsibility for the transmission of their faith, because other institutions are going to be less likely to do the job for them. The RELIGION & ETHICS survey, for example, finds that 6 percent of American parents are home schooling. That’s actually the highest number that I’ve seen in these kinds of surveys. It suggests to me that one of the reasons, among others, that these parents are home schooling is to provide a sense of their faith and their moral beliefs to their kids.

The poll also indicates that about a third of interfaith families think their kids will have the faith that they do, and that compares to about half of parents who share the same faith. One clear take-away here is that parents, I think accurately, recognize that they are more likely to transmit their faith if they share that faith with one another, and they are less likely, of course, to transmit a faith to their kids if they don’t share the same faith.

What tends to happen in interfaith families is that the parent who is more religious tends to be in the driver’s seat with respect to things like holidays and is the one who tends to influence the children more when it comes to their own faith. We also know that interfaith families do experience more tension around faith for obvious reasons, and they are more likely to experience marital distress and divorce. We know that kids from interfaith families are more likely to become secular as they enter young adulthood. As with anything, whether it is politics or religion, when there are clear differences between parents, that can be a source for tension and also a source for more questioning on the part of kids.

The big issue is whether or not the kids [in interfaith families] get integrated into a religious congregation, be it Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, whatever. If they do, they are less likely, just like other kids, to experience things like delinquency and depression. The key challenge to interfaith families is to figure out whether or not they can integrate their child into a particular congregation.

It certainly is the case that children from interfaith families are kind of walking between two worlds. In a Jewish-Christian family, they are walking between Passover and Easter, or between Hanukkah and Christmas, and they are trying to negotiate these two different traditions, these two different sets of holidays and rituals, and it certainly can lead to confusion and a lot of questioning of their own religious identity. Insofar as it makes them less likely to be religious both as teenagers and as young adults, there are some risks like delinquency and depression. On the positive end of the ledger, I would say that these kids tend to think for themselves more than other children and they tend to have a better sense of how different traditions relate to one another or don’t. They are more cosmopolitan. They would be more tolerant, typically.

According to the poll, almost two thirds of parents indicate that they think their kids should be free to choose their own religious faith. A large percentage of parents really want their kids to make the choice for themselves. Of course, they also hope that their kids will pick the faith that they have as parents. There is an interesting dynamic here — on the one hand, a high respect for the child’s autonomy to do as they please when it comes to their religious faith as young adults. At the same time, there is a hope on the part of many parents that they will pick the faith that they were raised in.

Parents who are regular churchgoers, regular mosquegoers — those parents are more engaged with their kids in one-on-one activities. That’s common across traditions. But there are important distinctions. For instance, when it comes to rules, evangelical and fundamentalist parents are much more likely to have a lot of rules for their kids, whereas Jewish parents are much less likely to have a lot of rules for their kids. We also find for Orthodox Jewish parents, and I think this would probably be true for Muslim parents, that [they] tend to know almost all the friends of their children, almost all of their kids’ friends’ parents. There’s a high level of what we call intergenerational closure. The Orthodox Jewish parents are much more likely to basically know who their kids are hanging out with, and this is true to a certain extent of all parents who attend services on a weekly basis. But it’s particularly true for Jewish parents and, I suspect, true also for the Muslim parents.

In part it’s the religious beliefs themselves that lead to good results — people want to follow the Ten Commandments. I think there’s also a sense that kids get that there is kind of a moral golden rule out there and that rule is reinforced by their own tradition, and they want to follow that rule. But I wouldn’t want to underestimate the importance of social networks, that is, who the kids are hanging out with. If they are involved in a church, a synagogue, or a mosque, they are hanging out with a group of kids who are getting certain messages about the moral life from their parents, from their parents’ friends, and from a youth minister, and as a consequence they are going to be more likely to go with that crowd as a opposed to a crowd that might be involved in less savory activities.

I think there is some association between religious rituals during the day and behavior during the day. Any kind of activity that is done throughout the day will keep children and adults, for that matter, more mindful of their religious beliefs, and so therefore it probably is true that if you pray more often — obviously if it’s sincere — that you are going to be more attentive to how your behavior does or does not correspond to your religious beliefs.

One of the things about the poll is that it makes it very clear that single parents are more likely to be worried about a variety of things for their children. A Catholic single mother would probably be worrying about making ends meet, would be worried about, perhaps, the popular culture that her children are exposed to, and a variety of other things. Obviously in the Catholic faith there is a strong emphasis on the sacrament of marriage and the idea that marriages should be for life and the best place for kids to be reared is in a married home. So for a single mother who is Catholic, there’s going to be tension between her lived reality and the faith that she holds, the faith that she wants to convey to her kids, and the kids are going to know that, too. For the kids, there is obviously a tension between what they know happened in their family and what they know their faith teaches. Whenever there is a tension between the faith and the lived reality, that can lead to doubt and confusion for kids, and we also know that kids in divorced homes, including Catholic homes, are more likely to leave the faith that they are raised in.

Dads play an important role in passing on — or not — the faith to their kids. If dads are not there, and they are not on the same page with the mother, the kids are much less likely to keep the faith. This is true particularly for divorced kids who can, once again, be walking between two different worlds, their mom’s world and their dad’s world. Oftentimes when a divorce happens, it’s the father who will drop away from the religious faith. That makes the kids more likely to leave the faith themselves.

I think we are seeing more secular parents, more secular kids, but we are also seeing more religiously orthodox or traditional parents and more orthodox or traditional religious kids. What is becoming less common is the mainline Protestant, liberal Catholic, and Reformed Jewish family where religion is a source for moral foundation but not more, because today you have to make a choice. You have to choose to embrace a faith or to drift away or leave a faith. That’s why we are seeing more secular kids and families and more intensely religious kids and families. My sense is that the middle is dropping out.

Our larger society and culture is not as supportive of a kind of generic religious faith as it was 40 years ago. Obviously there is a lot of religion in the news, but in terms of having schools and popular culture all reinforcing a kind of general religious ethos — that’s not our society anymore. I think it’s more likely that you have two choices: go with the flow or stand against that flow and try to teach your kids the faith that you take seriously.

Many parents are concerned about things like sex and violence on television, on the games their kids are playing, and this is more particularly true for the more traditional religious parents, for the evangelical Protestants, the traditional Catholics. Parents are also concerned about the values their kids learn at school, that the teachers convey at school. One of the big concerns parents articulate in the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY poll, particularly single parents, is making ends meet — a very real financial concern that relates to the whole parenting enterprise. There are a variety of concerns the poll indicates parents are struggling with. Some of these are cultural concerns; some are economic concerns. For single parents, the biggest concern is making ends meet. For the intact families, it is more a concern about the values their kids are exposed to in popular culture, as well as the kinds of things their kids encounter among their peers, at their schools, and the like.

Around the junior or senior year of high school, about age 16 to 17, kids start to move on, and they start to separate themselves from their family and their faith, to a certain extent, particularly in the mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Reform Jewish traditions. On average, separation from their religion is more likely to happen for [kids with] parents who are not intensely religious. It is part of becoming an adult, becoming independent, and so often they will move away from their religious faith, their tradition and then come back to it when they marry and have kids themselves. At early ages, there is a sense of wonder and trust in parents, in religious institutions, and as they enter into their teenage years, there are a lot more questions that follow, and they start to become more independent-minded; they are more likely to question their religious leaders, their parents. Once they become parents themselves, they are more likely to want to convey a sense of faith to their kids, even if they don’t necessarily always feel that faith, but they want to give their kids something to hold onto. We know in general that questioning is a part of ‘most anyone’s religious life, from those who are not particularly religious to those who are strongly religious. Questioning in and of itself is not necessarily going to lead someone to exit a faith.

It is definitely the case, particularly when kids are teenagers, if they are embedded in communities that reinforce and affirm their parents’ faith, they are more likely to keep that faith. If they are in a vibrant church or synagogue or mosque that gives them access to other kids and other adults who take the faith seriously, it’s much easier for the teenagers to maintain the faith that their parents have and to make it their own, because they can see their peers or other adults that they respect living out that faith.

Since the 1960s, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in interfaith marriages in the U.S. So in the last 40 years, there has been a marked increase of interfaith marriages. Kids from interfaith marriages are less likely to be religious themselves as adults. And they are more likely to enter into a new religious tradition that may or may not correspond, of course, to one of their parents’ faiths. Because they are somewhat less religious, they are a little bit more likely to get into trouble or to experience psychological distress. They are also more likely to be independent-minded and to be tolerant.

The poll indicates that most parents want sex education for their kids that incorporates some basic facts about reproduction and about birth control. But it also indicates that most parents value abstinence. They want their kids to value abstinence before marriage, but they also want their kids to know the basic facts of life and how to use birth control. More generally, I think the poll indicates that the more traditional religious parents, be they Muslim or Catholic or Protestant, are concerned about sex and violence in the popular culture; they are concerned about sexuality more generally. As a consequence, they are more likely to teach their kids strategies for remaining chaste throughout their young adult lives. It’s certainly the case that kids from more religious homes are less likely to have sex, and they are less likely to be engaged in sexual activity more generally. But it’s not a silver bullet. Obviously, you see kids having sex as teenagers and before marriage across religious traditions.

One thing I think it’s important to realize when it comes to understanding the role that men play in their families — and I can say this speaking both personally and professionally — is that religion tends to domesticate men. It makes men more likely to focus on the needs of their wives and their children. We know that more religious fathers are more involved and more affectionate with their kids and, in fact, religion seems to matter more for fathers than it does for mothers, because most moms are very involved with their kids. There is more heterogeneity when it comes to dads. Some dads are really involved and some dads are not so involved, and because there is more difference in the levels of paternal involvement, any factor that makes them family-focused will have an impact.

What I find in my work is that religion is more predictive of greater involvement for dads than it is for moms. Religion is one of the few institutions that men encounter in their daily lives that really encourage them to think about their families. At work, in the bar, at Yankee Stadium, men for the most part are not encouraged to think about their families. Whereas if they go to a synagogue on Saturday or to a church on Sunday, they will often hear a message about the importance of loving their kids, the importance of setting aside time for their children. These are reasons why religion is important, particularly for dads, in making them more engaged as parents.

Religion inculcates kids with moral purpose in two ways. One is by providing them with peers and adults who value particular moral norms, but also by giving them a religious rationale for doing something — a sense that there is a God out there who is watching them and who wants them to do the right thing. It’s the faith itself as well as the kinds of peers and adults they encounter in their religious congregation. One interesting thing that we are seeing now in polls is that young adults, teenagers think of God in pretty darn benevolent terms. They think God is a pretty good guy who loves them and cares for them, and they are not that concerned about hell. They are not concerned about eternal damnation. What they do view God as is a kind of a loving figure who is looking out for them, and they want to please him, but there is not this real concern. I think there’s a sense that God is a loving father or a loving parent who is just there to help them and comfort them when they are facing either personal challenges or challenges that they see on the news or in their local communities. There is a strong sense that God offers comfort for teenagers. Many of them view God in therapeutic terms, as someone offering succor or help to them.

TYPES OF FAMILIES AND BELIEFS ABOUT FAMILIES

There are many types of families in the United States, and the survey shows the following types:

Only 18.5% of families met the traditional nuclear family ideal: married, never divorced, with children at home.

Another 25.6% were married, never divorced, but with no children at home. Also another 7.5% are widowed persons with no children at home–mostly elderly.

If these three groups are combined 51.6% of Americans live in some type of “traditional” family (see bolded rows in the table above).

Put another way, about 48% of Americans live in households that depart dramatically from the ideal of the traditional family.

Nonetheless, 79.6% of all Americans agree that it is best for children if their parents are married, and 70.5% agree that traditional marriage is “God’s plan.” A majority of every type of family holds these views, although non-traditional families hold them to a lesser extent.

But Americans do recognize the decline of the traditional family in practice. For instance, 52% of families believe that divorce is often a good thing, and slightly less than one-half agree that married people are happier than non-married people, or that is it acceptable for couples to live together.

MORAL VALUES

When asked to name their most important concerns, 18% of the sample listed “moral values.” But when asked about the meaning of the term, just 10% of those who listed moral values named “social issues,” such as abortion or marriage, and another 35% mentioned “family values,” such as protecting children from sexual abuse. These two responses are often closely related in many people’s minds. However, the single largest response was “personal values,” such as honesty and responsibility, which accounted for 36% of the respondents.

It is worth noting that 26% of members of “traditional families” (married and never divorced with children at home) listed “moral values” as their most important concern. And interestingly, single never-married respondents without children were the second most likely group to list “moral values,” at 20%. When asked to define “moral values,” 37% of both groups picked either “social issues” or “family values.” But in both cases, the largest single category was still “personal values,” such as honesty and responsibility.

In addition, there are differences by family type on social issues. Half or more of the members of traditional families held pro-life views on abortion (ban abortions or restrict them substantially). In contrast, a majority of non-traditional families were pro-choice.

An even starker division appears on the legal status of marriage: more than 60% of traditional families favored marriage as a union between one man and one woman and not civil unions or same-sex marriage. Nontraditional families were more open to these alternatives, although same-sex marriage is not a plurality in any type of family.

TRADITIONAL FAMILIES AND THE WORSHIP ATTENDANCE GAP

Traditional families were more commonly found in some religious traditions and among weekly worship attenders within these traditions:

VIEWS OF MARRIAGE AND RELIGION

There was also considerable variation in the views of marriage by religious tradition and weekly worship attendance. The following table presents the percent that agree with these views of marriage:

FAMILY TYPE, PARTISANSHIP, AND IDEOLOGY

The survey revealed some interesting variations in partisanship by family type:

Traditional families tend to be more Republican than the sample as a whole (see underlined entries in the above table). In contrast, the nontraditional families tend to be more Democratic (see italicized entries). In part, this pattern reflects the effects of religion (traditional families are more likely to be evangelicals and weekly attenders). However, it may also be because the GOP has catered to traditional families, and the Democrats have catered to other kinds of households.

However, there is not as much difference by ideology.

Non-traditional families tended to be more liberal than the sample as a whole, while traditional families tended to be conservative, albeit to a lesser extent (see bold entries).

ANNA GREENBERG: Changes in the American family are probably the most significant changes we’ve seen in the last, I’d say, 30 years, and it’s happened in some ways almost unnoticed, though certainly not by some folks, especially some political actors in our society. But it’s gone somewhat unnoticed. In the 1950s, 80 percent of all Americans lived in a household where the head of household was married. Now 50 percent of Americans live in a household where the head of household is unmarried. Almost half of all people in America are not married.

There are lots of other statistics we could talk about: the increase in the number of kids living in single-parent homes; obviously, the level of divorce. There are lots and lots of ways we could slice the changes in the American family, but nevertheless it is quite significant, and we can have an entire conversation about why we’ve seen these changes, ranging from the women’s movement to the birth control pill to no-fault divorce to changes in the economy which require two-income families. This is a huge conversation.

But we are going to talk about the relationship between these changes in the family and religion in America, and we’re going to do it in three ways: first, looking at what we call “traditional” versus “nontraditional” families and how they interact with religious life — and I will give you a definition of that in a moment; second, how religious institutions are confronting these changes; and third, what are the implications for the future of religious life in America?

The survey itself was a random-digit dial telephone survey of about 1,100 adults over the age of 18 conducted this past summer, and we had oversamples of traditional families and nontraditional families, so that we could really dig into the differences between these two groups. Overall, the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus three, but obviously, whenever we look at subgroups, the margin of error is higher. We did not report, when we looked at the differences between traditional and nontraditional families, on any differences that weren’t beyond the margin of error.

Both John Green and Brad Wilcox played a key role in helping construct this survey, making sure that it’s rooted in the literature, in what we know about family life and know about religion, and [they] were invaluable to making this study as good as it is.

In this survey we are defining “traditional” families as any married couple with children under the age of 18, and that’s 24 percent of the American population. We’re defining “nontraditional” as unmarried parents with children under the age of 18, and that is 16 percent of Americans. That can include single parents; it can include cohabitating couples who have children but are not married; it can include same-sex relationships with children. We have a broad definition of “nontraditional” and, as you can see, there are still more “traditional” families, but obviously that has changed dramatically over the years.

I’m going to focus on three of the most interesting and major findings. The first is the gap between beliefs and reality. The second is looking at what is a family and how do people see family and the importance of family. And the third is to look at the differences between traditional and nontraditional families in their relationship to religious life. Then John Green and Brad Wilcox are going to have a lot more to add to what I say.

There’s a significant gap between what we call beliefs and reality. Nearly everybody in this country supports an idealized vision of family. Seventy-one percent of Americans agree that it’s God’s plan that marriage should be between one man and one woman, and four in five agree that it’s better for kids if parents are married. There [are] very strong beliefs and — this is across traditional and nontraditional families — you might even say a romanticized kind of vision of what family should look like. And yet there is a very basic acknowledgment of the reality that family life does not look like that, both in attitudes and actual behavior.

Attitudinally, 52 percent of Americans say divorce is usually the best solution if parents can’t work out their problems. So more than half — not much more than half, but more than half — say in fact divorce is a good solution if parents can’t work things out. Only 22 percent of Americans think that divorce is a sin. There is just a dramatic, dramatic change in attitudes about divorce. And about half, 49 percent, accept the notion that cohabitation is just fine. Now there’s a difference between cohabitation and trial marriage. In fact, a majority do not think a trial marriage is a good idea. The notion that you would live together for a few years before you get married to see how it works out — only 40 percent agree that it’s a good idea to try out marriage. But half say it is okay for couples to live together if they don’t intend to get married.

There is, I think, a fairly dramatic disjunction: 71 percent think marriage should be one man-one woman for life, and then at least half of this country accepts divorce and cohabitation. Behaviorally, lots of people are getting divorced. [Yet] lots of people who are divorced or lots of people who never get married and have children will hold these idealized views.

It’s not surprising, however, that there are big differences between traditional and nontraditional families. Traditional families are less likely to support cohabitation and trial marriage, less likely to think divorce is okay. What’s interesting is that 69 percent of people in nontraditional marriages believe that is God’s plan for marriage, [to be] one man-one woman for life. And I should say that the majority of people who are in nontraditional families are divorced. About 60 percent of them are divorced, and the rest are people who have had children without getting married. You have this interesting contradiction or tension.

The other not surprising finding is there are very big differences by religious tradition. One of the frameworks we used to analyze the data was looking at evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, traditional Catholics versus liberal Catholics, and people who had no religious preference. Obviously there’s a group of others, but that sample size wasn’t big enough to do real analysis of them. We don’t think they’re unimportant; we just couldn’t get enough of them in the survey to talk about them.

What’s quite notable is, not surprisingly, very big differences between religious conservatives and religious moderates and liberals and people who have no religious preference. Evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics are much less supportive of the notion of divorce, less supportive of cohabitation, and less supportive of trial marriage. Only about a third of evangelical Christians say that divorce is a sin, and 30 percent of traditional Catholics say divorce is a sin. This notion of divorce as a sin is not supported among religious conservatives. There are a lot of ways we can speculate about that, but evangelical communities have been very welcoming of people who are divorced, and so [disapproval of divorce] is not an attitude that is expressed.

Divorce is quite common among evangelical Christians and among traditional Catholics. There’s one difference that’s important to note: if you are very religious — in other words, if you attend church or another institution more than once a week — you are less likely to get divorced than if you were less religious. But if you are more religiously conservative in terms of your faith tradition, you are not less likely to get divorced and in some cases more likely to get divorced. The issue is not so much tradition as the intensity of your religious commitment that’s related to divorce, and there are lots of things we can talk about in terms of evangelical Christians — class and income and how that all relates to divorce. We know, for instance, that people without a college education are much more likely to get divorced than people with a college education.

What is family? This is a huge issue. Anybody paying attention to politics over the last couple of years knows that gay marriage is a huge debate in our politics. But we also have other issues. We have marriage initiatives coming out of the current administration encouraging people to get married, especially people in poverty. We certainly have a lot of activism among conservative religious groups around family breakup and the state of the family. Anyone who goes on the Metro in Washington sees the signs about “Marriage Works.” This question of what is a family is obviously very important and really is in flux.

We found that people’s notion of family is quite flexible. There’s no doubt that it’s about kinship for most people, in other words, being related by blood. In an open-ended context, we just said, “Tell me what family is” before we even asked any of the other questions in the survey, so that we wouldn’t bias their answers, and there’s no question that most people — three quarters — think it’s someone you’re related to genetically or by blood. But that does not necessarily mean a nuclear family. In fact, only a third said a mother, a father, and children, or married parents and children. There is a sense that you should be related to each other to be family, but it can be an extended network. It can be grandparents, it can be people who are divorced in blended families with stepchildren and half-brothers and sisters. And of course this, I think, is in part a reaction to the reality of the decline of the nuclear family — that we are seeing fewer and fewer traditional families where a man and woman get married and have kids and stay married for life.

In fact, over half — 55 percent — agree that “Love is what makes a family, and it doesn’t matter if parents are gay, straight, married, or single.” We have had a change over time in what marriage is supposed to be about. It’s very much in our postmodern times about partnership and love, and much less about economic relationship. This notion that being in a family is just about love, I think, is a quite modern notion.

A little over half of Americans agree with that. There are, as you can imagine, differences between traditional and nontraditional families about what family is. People in nontraditional families quite strongly believe in a flexible definition of family because they aren’t in what we think of as a traditional family. And there are big differences by religious faith tradition. Traditional Catholics and evangelical Christians [are] significantly less likely [to agree] that love means a family whether or not [it is] gay or straight than either liberal Catholics, mainline Protestants, or people without a preference. There is still evidence of polarization, even as we have the majority of Americans agreeing about a flexible notion of family. When we get to the issue of gay marriage, obviously this issue gets much more divisive.

A majority of Americans in our poll — 59 percent — believe that marriage is about one man and one woman. This is quite consistent with other national polls that have opposition to gay marriage, if it’s a binary yes or no [question], around 55, 59 percent. When it comes to the issue of gay marriage and gay rights in general, this is one of the areas where we’ve seen some of the biggest shifts in public opinion over the last 15 years. This is not a static number. This is a dynamic number, and there are a lot of reasons to believe that it may change even more. Certainly if you take marriage issues out, on most issues around gay people you have a majority of Americans against discrimination and a whole range of other issues, a majority favoring civil unions. But the gay marriage issue remains the one, and I don’t think it is unrelated to a larger issue of what’s happening to family in America, where we’ve seen a little less change. And again, not surprisingly, [there are] big differences by denomination, though not by whether you’re in a traditional or nontraditional family.

Nontraditional families are religious, and a lot of them are religiously conservative. We have a big chunk of African American women especially in the nontraditional family category. This is a group that while very progressive, say, on economic issues and other [issues], are not necessarily progressive on issues of, say, gay rights or gay marriage. In fact, there aren’t very big differences between traditional and nontraditional families when it comes to the question of gay marriage, but there are huge denominational differences.

The only group for whom a majority favors gay marriage is people without any religious preference at all. This is a group that is growing, by the way. About 15 percent of the population has no religious preference. For people under 30, it’s about 25 percent with no religious preference. A plurality of liberal Catholics support gay marriage, but among evangelicals and traditional Catholics there is opposition. They’re split on gay adoption, and again, this goes to the question of flexibility about what family is. While a majority — 59 percent — oppose gay marriage, 49 percent favor gay adoption. Forty-seven percent are against gay adoption.

I think what you’re going to see over time [are] changes in family around same-sex relationships, where they become more and more like every other family with kids, and that probably will precede changes in what their legal status is. [It is] important for some of those changes to happen so that kids have the legal protections of marriage and all those sorts of issues.

The final section I’m going to talk about is religious observance in general. I’m going to neutrally give you data, but Brad has some pretty provocative, I think, conclusions about the future of religious life, given some of the differences between traditional and nontraditional families around religious observance. There is no question that, when it comes to traditional worship and participation in institutions, nontraditional families are less religious than traditional families. As an example, 36 percent of people in nontraditional families attend church or religious services at least once a week, compared to 50 percent of people in traditional families. That’s a pretty significant difference.

Because there are more African Americans in nontraditional families, there are fewer denominational differences than you might expect around evangelical/nonevangelical, because most African Americans are evangelical. But 17 percent of nontraditional families say they have no religious preference. They’re not religious at all, compared to 9 percent of people in traditional families. There’s no doubt that there are religious conservatives in the nontraditional family group, but there are also more people who are not religious, who have no preference.

What is interesting, however, is that if you look at informal measures of religious observance, the difference is actually close. The gap closes between traditional and nontraditional families. Fifty-five percent of nontraditional families say religion is very important, [as do] 59 percent of traditional families, even when we control for race. In other words, because we know that African Americans are more religious, we looked among whites and still see that traditional and nontraditional [families] are closer to each other when it comes to this perceived importance of religion, and if you look at other informal measures — reading the Bible at home — 50 percent of both traditional and nontraditional [families] say they read the Bible. We know that’s over-reported, but what I’m really interested in is just what the differences are between the groups. Daily devotions at home: again, about half of traditional and nontraditional families say that they have daily devotions. Similarly, they’re equally likely to say that they talk to their friends about religion.

I think this has a couple implications. The first is that there are huge stresses in the lives of nontraditional families. People in nontraditional families are lower income; there are more minorities. They are more economically marginal than people in traditional families. We know that one of the things marriage does is increase economic stability. But if you look at the range of questions about what people in families worry about, nontraditional families are 10 and 20 points more worried on every single measure about their kids, whether that’s economic issues or values issues. I infer from some of these data that the kind of stresses around nontraditional families may make it harder for them to participate in traditional religious institutions. They’ve got incredible time challenges. Mostly they are raising their kids alone. A majority of nontraditional families are single parents. They’re not people with partners, so it may just be hard for them to get that into their life. I think a lot of people would argue that if they did, there would be a lot of benefits to their family by being integrated into a religious community. Maybe some of them find religious institutions unwelcoming because they are in nontraditional families. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence of that. Brad can speak to this more, but a lot of evangelical churches, for instance, are quite welcoming of people who are divorced. They have ministries to people who are single parents and divorced. Certainly in the more liberal traditions there’s no reason to believe that they’re unwelcome. I think that the issue is probably not religious institutions themselves, but the kind of stresses around time and other aspects of nontraditional families’ lives, where traditional participation is just much harder for them.

JOHN GREEN: Let me say that it was a real privilege to work on this survey with the sponsors and also with Anna Greenberg and Brad Wilcox. I think it’s a very rich set of findings that will reward a great deal of attention, but let me just pick up on one of the things that Anna talked about at the very beginning of her remarks, which was the tension between the ideal of marriage and family life and the reality that people experience. If you look at this from that point of view, then churches and other religious institutions have been fairly successful in maintaining a certain kind of ideal that’s accepted even among people who can’t live it out. On the other hand, when we look at the kinds of households and families that people live in and their attitudes towards the stresses of everyday family life, we see a different reality — that relatively few Americans actually live in those types of idealized situations. And that’s something to think about.

On the one hand, it may be that the ideal has persisted precisely because the reality has changed, and there are an awful lot of people that would very much like to have the kind of family life that’s idealized in religious traditions, but also in the sort of popular images of the family.

On the other hand, Americans have become much, much more tolerant of deviations from that ideal, I suspect because they experience those deviations — that they themselves may have been in divorce or may have been involved in other kinds of nontraditional families, and they certainly know an awful lot of people, may even be related to a lot of people, who have those different kinds of family structures. And this shows up in the politics of family values, if you will, in an interesting way.

As Anna pointed out, Americans do not tend to see divorce as a sin any longer, even among very conservative religious people. That figure has become much lower than it used to be. There is strong support for traditional marriage in the law and not very much support for same-sex marriage and, depending on how you ask the question, certainly not overwhelming support for civil unions, although there is somewhat more support than for same-sex marriage.

In some sense, I think the support for maintaining the traditional legal status of marriage reflects that ideal — that sense that this is the way it really ought to be, even though not everyone can live up to it. On the other hand, there is a sense that perhaps the government, the state should not be too involved in family life. One of the statistics that Anna didn’t bring up, but I’ll bring it up right now, is we also asked people about the various programs sponsored by the government to encourage marriage. And 82 percent of the people in our survey were against having government involvement in encouraging marriage.

I think that’s another part of this ambivalence, this disjunction between idealized families and the reality. Many people would certainly like to see the ideal enshrined in the law about marriage, but they’re not necessarily sure that they want the government telling people how to live their lives and what kinds of families they should be in. This disjunction, I think, is really very important, and it helps explain the politics that surrounds family values.

BRAD WILCOX: I just want to add a few points here, and I’ll speak both on the survey itself and on the General Social Survey (GSS), which is a large national survey that’s been conducted since 1972. I did some new analyses of that survey for this press conference and for the series.

One of the interesting things, as we’ve talked about just now, is this gap between belief and behavior, and a lot of this centers around the issue of marriage, obviously. I want to just once again highlight the issues that don’t always come to the fore in this discussion. There have been a number of media accounts around questions of evangelicals and born-again Americans being more likely to divorce, and that is, indeed, true. But I think we have to remember that there are also important issues of race and class here, and part of this phenomenon is the phenomenon of race and class and not really religion per se, because African Americans and working-class Americans are more likely to face stresses in their lives that make them more vulnerable to divorce. That’s an important, I think, qualifying point.

Another thing that relates to that, as Anna mentioned, is that there is a strong association between religious practice and marital stability, so folks who attend services on a weekly basis are between 30 and 40 percent less likely to divorce. We have to be careful, I think, here in talking about evangelicals or born-again Christians in the abstract and then also talking about folks who actually attend services on a regular basis, and that could be evangelical Protestants, it could be Catholics, it could be Jews. But folks who go to church or to synagogue on a regular basis are much less likely to divorce.

Another interesting point that comes out in the survey is this gap in attendance between traditional and nontraditional families. About a third of adults having nontraditional families attend services weekly, compared to about half of adults in married households. This gap is actually even larger in the population as a whole. In the U.S. population, 32 percent of men and 39 percent of women who are married with kids attend weekly, and this compares to just 15 percent of men and 23 percent of women who are single without kids. There’s a big gap in the U.S. population between folks who are married with kids and folks who are either not married or don’t have kids, and this gap is particularly big among men.

Men are much less likely to attend church if they’re not married with kids. We have to just think about how certain types of families are associated with religious practice.

I also did some analysis of changes over time in religious attendance. In 1972, 41 percent of Americans reported attending [church] on a weekly basis, and that falls to 31 percent in 2002 over a 30-year period. When I looked at the link between these declines in attendance over the last 30 years and family structure or family trends, what I found is that about a third of the decline in attendance is associated with these changes we’ve been talking about in the American family. If we had the same number of adults who are married with kids as we did in 1972, we’d see a lot more folks in the pews on Sunday.

This is important in part because it has important consequences for the congregational life of many churches and synagogues in the U.S. And so while it may be true that folks are still doing things on their own, whether it’s reading the Bible or praying or whatever, if they’re not integrated into a community, it has consequences for those communities, of course, but also for themselves. We know that being integrated into a religious congregation puts you in touch with social networks and norms that can then impact your family life in a variety of ways.

There seems to be a strong association between religion and marriage for men, a stronger one than for women. So, for instance, just looking at issues of martial happiness, we find that folks who attend on a weekly basis are happier in their marriages. We also find in the survey that they’re happier with their family life and happier with life in general. But these effects seem to be particularly strong for men. Seventy-two percent of married men who attend weekly report that they are very happy in their marriages, compared to 60 percent of married men who don’t attend weekly, whereas for women it’s 64 percent of married women who attend weekly are very happy, compared to 58 percent of married women who don’t attend weekly. In a sense, the religious boost for marital quality is stronger for men than it is for women. And, once again, the link between marriage and attendance is also stronger for men than it is for women. There is something about this religion-gender link, which I think is interesting to highlight.

I want to just conclude by once again stressing this idea that the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY survey shows some important differences in attitudes toward things like cohabitation, divorce, and same-sex marriage between, on the one hand, traditional Catholics and evangelical Protestants, and on the other hand, mainline Protestants, liberal Protestants, and liberal Catholics. Most surveys until recently haven’t actually broken out the Catholics. This is one of the first surveys that actually break out Catholics along traditional and liberal lines, asking the respondents to say, “Are you a liberal Catholic or a traditional Catholic or just a Catholic basically?” So we are able to see for the first time that the divisions we’ve seen at the elite level on a lot of hot-button social issues, like abortion or same-sex marriage, are also being mirrored to some extent in the pews. One of the things I really think is good about the survey is that it does break out Catholics in ways that allow us to get at that phenomenon in the pews.

JOHN GREEN: We thought one of the most interesting findings in our survey was the whole question of moral values. I’m sure you all remember that caused quite a stir after the 2004 election, because one of the questions on the exit polls showed that the largest group of priorities that voters had were “moral values.” About a fifth of the public held those views, and that set off a storm of argument. We ask a very similar question on our survey, and what we found was about the same number of people chose “moral values” as opposed to jobs, the war in Iraq, other sorts of issue priorities — a little bit less than on the exit polls, but roughly about one fifth of the population. We do have a group of people who identify or respond to the term “moral values” when asked about their political priorities.

But then we did something really, I think, quite innovative. We went and asked people what they meant by “moral values,” and then we found something really quite interesting. If you look at the entire sample, only about 10 percent of people define “moral values” as issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage. Another 25 percent, roughly another quarter, mentioned family issues such as protecting children from sexual abuse or from violence and sexual content on television. But the single largest definition for “moral values” was personal values, personal honesty, personal responsibility. So we find a really interesting thing. A lot of people identify with this term that may, in fact, influence their voting behavior, but it means different things to different people. And the most common meaning isn’t those hot-button social issues that are oftentimes connected with that term “moral values.” They’re, rather, questions of personal behavior — honesty and responsibility.

If you take out the 18 percent that picked moral values as their top priority, they are somewhat more likely to name abortion and marriage as their definition of “moral values,” but it’s only a little bit higher than the group as a whole, and still these questions of personal values come in first. If you look at evangelical Protestants, regular worship attenders, people in traditional families, the numbers on these hot-button social issues as a definition for moral values [are] also a little bit higher. But even for those groups, it’s these questions of personal values that are really the most common definition for “moral values.”

This is really an interesting finding, because it tells us for the first time how people think about the meaning of that term “moral values.” A lot of people care about morality in the United States, but the hot-button social issues are by no means the most important thing that they care about when they use that language. This is not to suggest in any way, shape, or form that people who care about abortion and marriage are not an important part of the electorate, an important part of the political process. They certainly are. But the whole question of moral values is really a much more complicated issue and extends to a wide variety of values and not just to those issues.

ANNA GREENBERG: This survey is a snapshot in time. This is not a longitudinal study. It would be interesting to know, are these attitudes [about cohabitation and divorce] moving? We know if we look at census projections that the increase in, say, single-headed households is continuing. In other words, this is a dynamic process. We’re not at point A and it’s going to stay like this. We’re actually going to be a majority unmarried country in the not too distant future. What I want to see is, are these more progressive attitudes about cohabitation and same-sex relationships moving in that direction, and do they continue to move that way as family structure changes?

If you look at the two groups that are growing in the religious landscape, it is conservative Christians, whatever denomination, and it is people who are nothing. If you look at younger people, you see that even more dramatically. I don’t know that there are limits to changes in peoples’ attitudes. I don’t think there are, actually. I think we’re in the middle of a process that hasn’t ended. But I do think there are going to be more pitched battles and more polarization, because those are the groups that are growing most quickly, and it’s the groups in the middle that are in some ways — for instance, if you look at mainline Protestants that are on the decline, one study talks about the fact that one of the reasons why we see the growth in people who say they are nothing is that you have a movement of people who are more politically liberal out of religious communities because of the polarization on cultural issues in religious communities. Again, I don’t see limits. I see polarization.

BRAD WILCOX: And just the fact that we actually see these family dynamics affect church attendance are most consequential for mainline Protestant and moderate or liberal Catholic churches. One of the fascinating ironies of our day and age is that as the family itself has become less centered around the traditional model, we’ve actually seen a growth in evangelical churches. I think one of the reasons that’s happening is that people are reacting to these trends. But I think another reason that it’s happening is that folks who don’t fall into this kind of conventional family style are less likely to go to a mainline Protestant church or to a Catholic church for the religious and moral formation of their children. This is one of those interesting ironies where the center in a sense is getting smaller as the polar extremes are getting larger. And the changes in the American family are related to these developments.

ANNA GREENBERG: What is interesting about some of these churches in the center is they are less well equipped to handle families. What evangelical churches do very well is provide a whole set of ministries — small groups, for example. But, if you look at mainline churches, for instance, they are much less likely to have activities every night of the week or over the weekend to help. Similarly with African American churches — they are also more likely. It’s not just that [people] are less likely to go to these mainline churches to inculcate values in their children. Those kinds of institutions are less likely to have things for them to do with their children. It’s a real institutional issue as well.

BRAD WILCOX: Singles often don’t feel there is a place for them in their local church or synagogue; that is part of the equation. Part of the story is a lack of pastoral offerings for folks who are not married with kids, and part of it is the fact that folks who aren’t married with kids tend to be less interested in the kinds of things that churches and synagogues and mosques can offer to them.

ANNA GREENBERG: We also know that people are delaying marriage. Twenty-six, 27 is the average age for women, and it was much different in the ’50s and ’60s. You have this much longer period in people’s 20s where they’re not getting married. Some are having kids, but other aren’t, and you wonder. I mean, some people come back [to church] when they have kids. But when you spend such a long time out of religious life, what’s the likelihood of going back? I think that is not insignificant. If you look at the National Election Study or the GSS and the change over time and how many people are married in that 18-to-30 group, it just [drops dramatically]. And that has a big impact on their participation in religious life.

BRAD WILCOX: In my analysis of the General Social Survey, I looked at adults from 1992 to 2002 by the religious denomination that folks indicated they are affiliated with. Forty-two percent of evangelical Protestants — these are folks who have to have been married at some point — are divorced or separated. That compares to 39 percent of mainline Protestants, 53 percent of black Protestants, 35 percent of Catholics, 36 percent of Jews, and 53 percent of unaffiliated folks. The bottom line is that basically, evangelical black Protestants and secular adults are more likely to report having been divorced or separated.

ANNA GREENBERG: Evangelical and mainline Protestants are more likely to get married than others, but they are no more likely to stay married. Twenty percent of evangelicals have been married more than once, compared to, say, 15 percent of people with no religious preference. But I want to reiterate Brad’s point. A lot of this is related to class and race. There is a new study that just came out that showed that women who were married between 1990 and 1994 — if you were college educated, you were half as likely to get divorced than if you didn’t have a college education. A lot correlates with the demographic reality of these folks’ lives, and it isn’t a religious explanation per se for this.

BRAD WILCOX: My colleague Penny Edgell at the University of Minnesota found in her study — this was in upstate New York, but I think her study is probably suggestive of trends elsewhere — that it was actually the evangelical Protestant churches that were most likely to have ministries that combine on the one hand, this notion that we have an ideal about what marriage should be, and on the other hand, have ministries that were targeting folks who weren’t able to live up to that ideal for one reason or another. Having more singles ministries, having more ministries for stepfamilies, having more ministries for folks who had been divorced — I mean, the irony, of course, here is that the tradition that in some ways is most opposed to these developments symbolically is also the tradition that practically has more ministries on the ground. I’ve done a study on this with the National Survey of Congregations that finds some similar patterns. It’s one of these ironies in American religious life, you know, that we find mainline Protestant churches, as Anna said, less likely to have ministries serving nontraditional families, even though symbolically they’re more likely to affirm their commitment to family diversity.

JOHN GREEN: As Anna indicated, when we asked people about the stresses and worries in their lives, we found that people in nontraditional families expressed more concern about [values and their kids]. Many of the concerns that people have about raising their children and so forth are exactly the sorts of things where congregations have historically provided a great deal of help. And yet those people who need that help are not as involved in congregations. Although, as Anna also indicated, by other measures of religiosity, the subjective importance of religion, prayer, and so forth, [nontraditional families] are just as religious in that sense. One implication of this finding is that there is a real opportunity for congregations to find ways to help nontraditional families cope with the stresses in their lives.

ANNA GREENBERG: There is important research by Christian Smith and others that talks about how kids do when they grow up in families that are more religious. I’m not making any kind of normative statement here, but kids and teens who are from religious families — and I saw this in a study I had done on youth and religion as well — tend to have higher self-esteem, do better in school, are less likely to use drugs, less likely to drink. There are a whole lot of things that parents are worried about, which you see dramatically in the survey, especially among nontraditional families. When you look at kids that grew up in religious families, and by “religious” I mean [regular church] attending, they actually do better on a lot of those measures.

JOHN GREEN: Married couples that have never been divorced and that don’t have children at home make up about 25 percent of the population but wouldn’t be counted in our definition of “traditional” family because they don’t have kids at home. But they’re an important part of the public, and in terms of attitudes they look a lot like married couples who have kids at home. In other words, they tend to have very traditional values. While only about a quarter of the population fits that definition [of "traditional"], there are other people who have participated in that definition at some other point in their life and who probably think of themselves as being in traditional families. Another group is widows with no children at home, who are people unmarried probably for involuntary reasons. And their attitudes look a lot like [those of] traditional families of one kind or another. Because they tend to be older, though, they’re a little bit more traditional on some of these things.

The moral values question, whether it’s in the exit polls or in our survey, is a priorities question. We’re asking people, what are their priorities? We don’t actually ask them what their attitudes are. We have other questions where we ask people what their attitudes are, and what we find is just that a lot of people who have conservative attitudes on marriage or on abortion simply don’t rate those issues as their top priority. Perhaps it is because jobs are more important, or foreign policy concerns are more important, or whatever. So there is a potential disconnect, if you will, between people’s attitudes and their priorities. But one of the things you have to understand about a priority is that only so many things can have top priority. By nature you rank them, and a lot of people who have traditional values in one sense or another don’t make them their top priority. And then, on the other hand, people when they think about moral values as a priority have a broader set of definitions. Other questions fall in there besides just abortion and marriage.

ANNA GREENBERG: I would add that if you look at our evangelical study from last year, we asked about a whole range of concerns, and you see that evangelicals, who are going to be more likely to say “moral values” is an important issue, have a whole set of economic concerns about health care costs that are similar to everybody else. In a lot of ways evangelicals look like every other American, and so it’s not surprising that when you ask these moral values questions that even for people who are conservative, gay marriage and abortion are lower on their list than other things like, “How am I going to pay for my health care?”

BRAD WILCOX: What’s also interesting is the survey suggests that about 10 percent of traditional Catholic and evangelical Protestants think that all the kinds of priorities articulated in the survey are important to them — personal values, family values, social issues, and social justice also. I think for a lot of these folks there’s a sense in which they are to some extent in our current political context homeless, because neither party really in their view does a good job on both economic issues and social issues.

I have conducted new analyses of the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative survey sponsored by National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Basically, I find very strong associations between religion and marriage in the U.S., ties that are particularly strong for men and weaker for African Americans. For the most part, I rely on GSS data from 1992 to 2002:

1. Family Structure and Religious Change. Weekly religious attendance in the U.S. fell from 41 percent in 1972 to 31 percent in 2002. My statistical analyses of the data indicate that 28 percent of the decline in religious attendance over the last 30 years can be attributed to family change, especially the fact that fewer adults are now married with children (see below). In a word, changes in family structure have played an important role in the nation’s secularization.

2. Family Structure and Current Religious Attendance. Table 1 indicates that being married and having children are both associated with higher levels of religious attendance. Specifically, adults who are married with children are significantly more likely to attend religious services weekly, compared to adults who are single and/or childless. This is true for the entire U.S. population, and it is also true for whites, blacks, and Latinos. For instance, 32% of men and 39% of women who are married with children attend weekly, compared to 15% of men and 23% of women who are single without children. Figure 1, which reports data from new parents in a sample of 20 cities in the U.S., indicates similar trends apply to blacks, Latinos, and white parents in urban America.

3. Religion, Family, and Men. Marriage matters more for men than it does for women in predicting religious attendance. Men are a lot less likely to attend church if they are not married with children, compared to women. Table 1 indicates that men are 57% less likely to attend church weekly if they are single with no children, compared to men who are married with children. Women are only 41% less likely to attend church weekly if they are single and childless. Similar trends are found among blacks and whites, but less so among Latinos.

4. Race, Gender, and Churchgoing. The gender gap between married white and black parents is the same–only 7 percentage points. But the gender gap between unmarried white and black parents is quite different–only 8 percentage points for whites and 23 percentage points for blacks. Given family trends among African Americans (i.e., the high percentage of unmarried parents among blacks), this means that Black churches have many more mothers than fathers sitting in the pews on any given Sunday. The mother-father gap is less salient in predominantly white churches.

5. Divorce and Religion. Divorce is most common among Black Protestants, unaffiliated Americans, and evangelical Protestants. But once we look at attendance, we see that most religious Americans who attend weekly are significantly less likely to have been divorced (except Black Protestants). Active Catholics are least likely to report a divorce or separation–only 27% report a marital dissolution. Overall, 32% percent of weekly attendees have been divorced/separated, compared to 47% of adults who attend less frequently or not at all.

6. Religion, Gender, and Marital Happiness. When it comes to marital happiness, evangelical men and women, mainline Protestant men, and Jewish women are the most likely to report that they are very happy in their marriages. Table 3 indicates that this is especially true for evangelical and mainline Protestants who attend weekly. Black Protestant married men and especially women are much less likely to benefit from weekly attendance when it comes to marital happiness. More generally, 72% of married men who attend weekly report that they are very happy in their marriages, compared to 60% of married men who don’t attend weekly. Likewise, 64% of married women who attend weekly report that they are very happy in their marriages, compared to 58% of married women who don’t attend weekly. This means that church attendance seems to matter more for men than women in predicting marital happiness.

7. Religion, Marriage, and Overall Happiness. Table 4 indicates that weekly religious attendance and marriage are both associated with higher reports of happiness among U.S. adults. In fact, more than 48 percent of adults who are married and weekly churchgoers report that they are very happy, compared to just 20 percent of adults who are unmarried and do not attend church weekly. Adults who are married but not regular churchgoers and adults who are regular churchgoers but are not married fall in between these two groups in their reported levels of happiness. Gender differences in overall happiness are not very large.

This survey indicates that average evangelicals are deeply concerned about the moral health of the nation. Numerous observers have connected this concern to increased evangelical Protestant participation in politics. But this survey also suggests that evangelicals are as concerned about what happens in their own homes as they are about what happens in the U.S. House of Representatives. Evangelicals are seeking to change the moral climate both in the public and the private spheres.

Faced with a culture they see as debased and debasing, evangelical parents are devoting more attention to their families. One way they are doing this is by monitoring the media their children encounter. This survey, for instance, indicates that evangelical parents are more likely than other parents to prevent their children from watching objectionable shows (76% versus 54%) and playing violent video games (61% versus 47%).

Evangelicals are also investing more time and attention to parenting than many American parents. In my research, I find similarly high patterns of parental oversight and involvement among evangelicals when it comes to curfews, youth activities such as the Boy Scouts, and one-on-one activities such as reading to one’s children.

As this survey indicates, a clear majority of evangelical parents believe that too many children in the U.S. are not learning the right values. By focusing on their families, they are trying to ensure that their children acquire the values they worry other children don’t have.

W. Bradford Wilcox is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of SOFT PATRIARCHS, NEW MEN: HOW CHRISTIANITY SHAPES FATHERS AND HUSBANDS (University of Chicago Press, 2004).