Evangelicals and the GOP

Given that the 2006 election gave the Democrats control of Congress, predictions of the demise of the Religious Right—based on claims that evangelical Protestants are defecting from the Grand Old Party—are back in vogue. Yet a study by two scholars at Penn State University suggests that the alignment of conservative Protestants with the Republican Party not only extends beyond the social issues, but also shows no signs of abating.

Using data from the General Social Survey that has tracked U.S. households between 1972 and 2004, Jacob Felson and Heather Kindell looked at the relationship between religious identification and respondents’ answers to 15 questions about the role and scope of the federal government in society. Among college educated Protestants who agree that “the Bible is the actual Word of God, to be taken literally word for word,” the Penn State team found a strong correlation with “economic conservatism,” especially in matters related to federal spending.

Controlling for income, gender, southern region, and age, these educated “Bible literalists” consistently expressed more conservative answers than other Protestants to each of the 15 questions, ten of which reach statistical significance. “They tend to favor decreases in government spending on reducing income inequality, environmental protections, health care, urban issues, education, improving the conditions of blacks, foreign aid, welfare, and mass transportation.” They did, however, favor increased spending on the military.

These conservative patterns were even more pronounced among Bible literalists with a graduate degree. In addition, the researchers found similar, but less pronounced, results using a denominational classification that separated evangelical from mainline Protestants in the place of Bible literalism.

Based upon regressions that found that better-educated evangelicals have become more economically conservative over time, and given that the better-educated are disproportionally more likely to vote relative to the less educated, Felson and Kindell claim that the GOP coalition between economic and social conservatives is here to stay. Support among conservative Protestants for the Republican Party, they say, “cannot simply be reduced to single issues like abortion and gay marriage” as these voters tend to be politically conservative across the board.

(Source: Jacob Felson and Heather Kindell, “The Elusive Link Between Conservative Protestantism and Conservative Economics,” forthcoming in Social Science Research.)

The Narrowing Black-White Divorce Gap  

For decades, the divorce rate among black Americans has run distinctively higher than the divorce rate among white Americans.  Though that gap remains substantial, it has narrowed in recent years.  The black-white gap in divorce rates and the reasons that it has narrowed receive intense scrutiny in a study recently published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies by Andrew Clarkwest of the Population Studies Center in Michigan. 

Clarkwest takes his initial orientation for his new study from evidence that “the marital disruption gap between blacks and non-blacks has narrowed somewhat since the mid-1900s, but the gap remains large.”  By examining nationally representative data collected  in two waves (1987-88 and 1992-94), Clarkwest establishes that the black-white gap in divorce rates remains sizable:  “About 25% of African American’s post-Wave 1 [1987-88] marriages disrupted before the second wave [1992-94],” Clarkwest writes.  “This is nearly twice the rate experienced by other sample members (13%).” 

Why does this very considerable black-white gap in marital failure persist?  Clarkwest notes that black Americans differ from the general population in certain “socioeconomic characteristics and family formation experiences” that would “predict higher disruption risk.”  “Lower educational attainment, earnings, and parental educational attainment” all would predict distinctively high marital disruption rates among black Americans.  So, too, would the fact that “African Americans are more likely [than other Americans] to have experienced the disruption of their parents’ relationship and to have had children prior to marrying.”  Though statistical analysis confirms that such socioeconomic and family characteristics do explain a “non-trivial” part of the black-white divorce gap, Clarkwest admits that “much of the gap [remains] unexplained.” 

Nonetheless, Clarkwest advances at least a partial explanation for “the narrowing of the marital disruption gap after mid-century.”  That explanation highlights the way that as the overall black marriage rate has dropped, the blacks “who [still] do marry tend to have higher earnings, been childless [at the time of marriage], attended church, and disapproved of divorce and premarital sex and cohabitation before marrying.”   Clarkwest reports that the “between-wave [1987-88 / 1992-94] marriage rate of African Americans was about twenty percent compared to nearly forty-five percent for non-African Americans.”   But he also stresses that those African Americans in the study who did marry during this period differed from their non-marrying African-American peers in a number of striking ways, particularly in their social attitudes.  They differed from their non-marrying African-American peers, in fact, decidedly more than marrying non-African Americans differed from their non-marrying peers.  Clarkwest consequently concludes that “selection [into marriage] is of a notably greater magnitude among blacks than among non-blacks with respect to income, parental divorce, parenthood status, weekly church attendance, and attitudes towards divorce and premarital sexuality.” 

The narrowing of the black-white gap in marital disruption, Clarkwest plausibly suggests, is in large measure the consequence of this relatively new and distinctively large gap between African Americans who marry and African Americans who do not.   What is more, he reasons, “racial differences in marital disruption rates would be substantially larger [roughly one-third larger] than what we observe if not for the fact that African Americans who would be at highest risk of divorce disproportionately choose not to marry.”    

Though still disturbingly large, the black-white gap in divorce apparently is shrinking as those blacks who still do marry become ever more distinctively prepared for and committed to wedlock.

(Source: Andrew Clarkwest, “Premarital Characteristics, Selection into Marriage, and African American Marital Disruption,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 37 [2006]: 361-380.)

Working Moms Weaken Civil Society  

When Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000, he claimed that greater television viewing, as well as generational differences between those who fought World War Two and their boomer children, were responsible for declining levels of social capital and civic engagement since the mid-1970s. Now a study by three Canadian sociologists finds not only that the documented retreat from civic involvement among Americans pertains only to women, but also suggests that the greater number of mothers working outside the home is responsible for this social disengagement.

Looking at data from the Multinational Time Use Study, the researchers tracked the daily time spent on civic association activities—from 1965 to 1998—by adults in Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While finding an increase in television viewing in all countries, their bivariate analysis found that only adults in the United States experienced a “clear reduction” in time spent in civic and voluntary activities in recent decades.

Multivariate tests further showed a significant decline in such involvements among American women, but not among American men, even after controlling for family income and excluding data for 1992, the year at which civic engagement reached its lowest point. As the researchers explain: “Women devoted considerably more time to civic associations than did men from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, but since then have fallen to activity levels that are virtually identical to that of men.”

Their analysis finds that, within the course of one generation (between 1965 and 1998), American mothers increased their time devoted to paid work by 120 minutes a day, comparably more than Dutch mothers (32 minutes) and Canadian mothers (75 minutes); in the UK, mothers actually cut back their time devoted to paid work by 18 minutes per day. The sociologists also found that between 1992 and 1998, American mothers increased their daily time spent in caring for their children by 36 minutes.

This last finding lead the Canadians to conclude that not just the larger commitments to paid work, but also the demands of motherhood make it difficult for American women to volunteer in community organizations. So they end up lamenting the “lower levels of state support for childcare and early childhood education in the United States” and the “less statist nature of American society,” both of which means “less government encouragement” of civic involvement among women. Yet why not simply encourage mothers to spend less time in the office and more time at home and in the neighborhood? That would allow civil society to function as it is supposed to, without involving Big Brother.

(Source: Robert Andersen, James Curtis, and Edward Grabb, “Trends in Civic Association Activity in Four Democracies: The Special Case of Women in the United States,” American Sociological Review 71 [June 2006]: 376-400).

Church Going Pays Social Dividends  

Bullish on the relationship between religion and self-government, Alexis de Tocqueville claimed that an “unceasing object of the legislators of democracies” should be “to raise the souls of their fellow-citizens, and keep them lifted up towards heaven.” While the Frenchman was most likely thinking how Christianity builds personal character, an international study by Dutch sociologists quantifies how high levels of church attendance helps to turn citizens into good neighbors by promoting their engagement in a wide range of voluntary activities.

The two professors at Radbound University in Nijmegen examined the voluntary activities of more than 117,000 citizens in 53 countries who participated in three waves (1981-84, 1990-93, and 1991-2001) of the European Values Survey/World Values Survey. They found that citizens claiming one of three religious identities (Protestant, Catholic, or non-Christian religion) volunteer more than citizens claiming no religious affiliation, and that Protestants and adherents to non-Christian religions volunteer more than Catholics.

Yet the Dutchmen found in tests that controlled for church attendance that the frequency of participating in public worship is the better predictor of volunteering, even among those claiming no religious affiliation and even as differences between Protestants and Catholics remained. People who attend church at least twice a week are more than fives times more likely to volunteer than those who never attended church; they also volunteer more for secular organizations than do their non-church-going peers.

More important, the study documented an additional boost to volunteering in countries that reported higher averages of church attendance among citizens, relative to those with lower averages. The more devout a society (measured by average church attendance), the more that citizens that do not attend church end up following the volunteering patterns of their neighbors that do go to church, as the correlation between individual church attendance and volunteering were strongest in countries with lower aggregate levels of church attendance. Consequently, the researchers believe their findings “suggest that diminished civic involvement goes hand in hand with ongoing secularization.”

Why church attendance—and some faith traditions more than others—correlates with higher levels of volunteering might be explained by a study by two Taiwanese economists. Looking at data on 1,278 respondents to the 1999 Taiwan Social Change Survey, the economists found adherents to Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) reported significantly higher levels of charitable contributions and voluntary activities than did adherents of Buddhism and Taiwanese folk religions. Furthermore, the researchers linked these greater social dividends in the here and now to the greater “afterlife rewards” promised by Christianity relative to Eastern religions.

No wonder Tocqueville claimed that “Christianity must be maintained at any cost in the bosom of modern democracies.”

(Sources: Stijn Ruiter and Nan Dirk De Graaf, “National Context, Religiosity, and Volunteering: Results from 53 Countries,” American Sociological Review 71 [April 2006]: 191-210, and Hung-Lin Tao and Powen Yeh, “Religion as Investment: Comparing the Contributions and Volunteer Frequency among Christians, Buddhists, and Folk Religionists,” Southern Economic Journal 73 [January 2007]: 770-790.)

The Dangers of Danish Day Care  

American feminists practically swoon when they start to talk about day care in Denmark, a country with a remarkably extensive and well-subsidized system of government crèches.  But despite the much-lauded quality of Danish day care, a new study indicates that Danish mothers who put their young children in day care today are disturbingly likely to be putting those children in the hospital tomorrow—especially if those mothers are single parents.

Recently published in Pediatrics by a team of researchers from Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, this new study draws on data for all of the Danish children born between 1989 and 2004 in any municipality with a child-care registry.  Analysis of these data clearly indicates that placing young children in nonparental childcare puts them distinctly at risk for hospitalization for acute respiratory infection (ARI).  Looking specifically at hospitalization data for children under the age of two, the Danish scholars establish that “attendance in childcare facilities was associated with an increased risk of ARI [hospitalization].” 

Further analysis reveals that “children of mothers who were single when giving birth were more frequently hospitalized for ARIs than children from shared parenthoods.”  The researchers confess that they have “no apparent explanation for this finding.”   But why should it surprise anyone that living without Father exacerbates the risk a child faces when daily placed in care away from Mother?

 (Source: Mads Kamper-Jørgensen et al., “Population-Based Study of the Impact of Childcare Attendance on Hospitalizations for Acute Respiratory Infections,” Pediatrics 118 [2006]: 1439-1446.)

Single Mothers in Bad Neighborhoods  

Single mothers often find it very difficult to keep their teenage children out of trouble, especially if they live in a socially disadvantaged community.  Criminologists have long known about the difficulty single mothers face in controlling their adolescent offspring, but that difficulty is clarified by a study recently completed by researchers from five different universities, including Florida State and Washington State universities.

Published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, this new study investigates the ways in which community disadvantage affects family influences on crime.  Analyzing data collected from a national sample of adolescents, the authors of the new study establish that — just as most social theorists would predict — “a weak family environment was associated with greater [adolescent] crime” and that “the effects of family problems became greater at high values of community poverty and perceived community weakness.” 

Taking mother’s marital status as one measure of family weakness, the researchers limn statistical links between “unmarried mother” and all five measures of adolescent crime (p < 0.05 for two measures; p < 0.01 for the other three measures).  This finding, like other family-related findings in this study, “match[es] what has been found in prior research.”  Like other family problems, unmarried motherhood predicts particularly high levels of adolescent criminality in disadvantaged communities.  But the researchers stress that their statistical analysis “revealed that community disadvantage affected the magnitude of family effects, not whether they were present to begin with.”  Elaborating this point, the researchers point out that “the effect of overall family problems” would be “strong” even in “a typical community” not characterized by “community disadvantage.”

Though it is particularly likely to foster criminality in adolescent offspring in impoverished slums, unmarried motherhood pushes teen children toward lawlessness even in affluent suburbs.

(Source: Carter Hay et al., “The Impact of Community Disadvantage on the Relationship between the Family and Juvenile Crime,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 43 [2006]: 326-356.) 

Parenthood or Prozac?  

The demand for psychotropic drugs has skyrocketed in recent decades, prompting  some observers to express fears about an epidemic of mental illness.   Contributory causes of that epidemic recently came to light in a study published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.  Focusing on the relationship between parenthood and mental health, this new study may indicate that the alarming increase in psychological distress reflects—at least in part—our national retreat from child-bearing, especially within marriage.

Conducted by scholars from the Technische Universität Dresden and the Robert Koch Institute of Berlin, the new study analyzes psychological data collected from a nationally representative sample of over 2,800 German adults ages 18 to 49. Parsing of the data establishes “an overall positive effect of parenthood on mental health.”  “Parenthood,” the researchers report, “was associated with lower rates of psychiatric morbidity in general, and depressive and substance use disorders in particular.”  Though “the association between parental status and mental health was more distinct in men than in women,” it is mostly women the researchers have in view when they identify “single parents [as] a high-risk group for mental disorders.”   In other words, although married parenthood appears to particularly benefit men, unmarried parenthood especially hurts women.  

Though the authors of the new study are German, they interpret their findings in the light of earlier research completed in the United States.  American researchers, in turn, have good reason to see in this new European study an all-too-plausible explanation of the reason that our hospitals have been opening new psychiatric wards as they count ever fewer married women as patients in their down-sized maternity wards.

(Source: Sylvia Helbig et al., “Is Parenthood Associated with Mental Health? Findings from an Epidemiological Community Survey,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 41 [2006]: 889-896.)