HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 3
3 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part One: The Empirical Links among Marriage, Childbearing, and Religiosity
- 1. . Faith and family: Which really comes first?
- Why are married people with children more likely to go to church and to be religious than are single people?
- Bradford Wilcox. He has suggested three reasons for why churchgoing is so tightly bound to being married with children: because they find other couples like them
- because children “drive parents to church” in the sense of encouraging them to transmit a moral/religious compass;
- and because men are much more likely than women to fall away from church on their own
- something about the way people live in families makes people in those families more inclined to church... Perhaps something about living in families makes people more receptive to religiosity and the Christian creed.
- . Faith and fertility: What really drives what?
- “The religious tend to have more children, irrespective of age, education or wealth….
- fertility in Europe as a whole is lower than it is in the United States
- if the prohibition against birth control is supposed to be the exclusive reason or even the main reason why religious people have larger families, then we can make no sense of this fact: evangelical Christians, most of whom do not similarly have theological injunctions against birth control as such, have a higher fertility rate than do secular people.... Orthodox Jews in America, as well as in Israel, have far more children than secular Jews—even though orthodox Judaism also allows contraception within marriage for certain, quite broad purpose
- Segnale di nesso al contrario. if secularization theory and the conventional way of understanding faith’s relationship to family were correct, then we would not expect to see religious people continuing to have larger numbers of children than do nonreligious people, even when their religion allows them the option of contraception.
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