Religion is a central part of our society. It shapes culture, can lead to wars, and stimulates social change. Religion also holds considerable sway over family dynamics.
A team of researchers from multiple universities including the University of Connecticut has received a three-year three million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation to examine and illuminate the effects of religion on family dynamics, specifically family size and its relationship to child success.
UConn anthropology professor Richard Sosis will serve as co-principal investigator on this project alongside his colleagues Rebecca Sear (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Mary K. Shenk (Pennsylvania State University), and John Shaver (University of Otago), a former graduate student of Sosis at the University of Connecticut.
Across the world, religious families generally have more children than secular families. Because the resources that can be invested in children are always finite or limited, it may suggest children in large religious families would struggle, but evidence shows that many of them prosper and flourish. This unsolved phenomenon has puzzled researchers for years.
Research by Sosis and others has shown that religious individuals tend to be more interdependent and cooperative than their secular counterparts. In terms of childcare, members of religious communities are more likely to assist each other, which helps alleviate the costs associated with having many children, thereby enabling larger family sizes and future success for children.
Still, there is little awareness of how religion affects the number of children people have or their children’s outcomes, and why these outcomes differ across religious groups. There is also a great deal of confusion regarding how processes of social change interact with religion’s influence on reproductive decision-making and child success.
Investigating these issues can shed light on how religion influences reproduction and how these effects are influenced by recent and broad social changes.
To examine this phenomenon, the team will conduct extensive cross-cultural interviews with over 8,500 Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim participants from Bangladesh, the Gambia, India, Malawi, and the United States. This sample represents a diverse set of modernized and developing countries where those religions are both a minority and a majority.
The knowledge garnered from this research will contribute to a deeper understanding of outcomes for children who grow up in pro-natal religious communities.
This research will usher in a new vibrant and innovative scholarly field focused on the evolutionary demography of religion, and the project will serve to train students and postdoctoral researchers who will help establish this new field of study. This work will also inform public debates on the resilience and endurance of religion today.
Understanding religion’s effects on family size and children’s success is not only of interest to the scholarly community, says Sosis. Outcomes from this research will be of equal importance to governments, non-governmental organizations, and public policy officials due to its connection to economic and social development, health, and demographic projections.
Richard Sosis is the James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology. He is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, which publishes research on the biocultural study of religion.
