DISCUSSION
Ideal Age of Marriage
Results indicated that, on average, affiliating with certain religious groups in adolescence predicted younger ideal ages of marriage. No aspect of adolescent religiosity, though, predicted a statistically significant change in the average ideal ages of marriage. Mormon adolescents consistently wanted to get married more than a year sooner than Mainline Protestant adolescents. Adolescents with Catholic mothers, however, wanted to get married almost six months later than Mainline Protestants.
The lack of statistical significance for adolescent religious salience and attendance might imply religion did not influence marital timing attitudes, if religious affiliation had not influenced marital timing attitudes at statistically significant levels. However, Evangelical Protestant and Mormon adolescents were more likely to want to marry younger than Mainline Protestant adolescents at statistically significant levels.
Furthermore, based on Table 5, Christian adolescents’ average ideal age of marriage, regardless of denomination, was almost one year below non-Christian adolescents’
average ideal age of marriage. In other words, something about being Christian, and more specifically being Evangelical Protestant or Mormon, might influence these adolescents to wish to be married younger than other non-Christian adolescents.
These results indicate successful transmission of attitudes toward marital timing between religious mothers and adolescents. In general, adolescents’ ideal age of marriage as a function of religious affiliation was similar to their ideal age of marriage as
a function of their mothers’ religious affiliation. Adolescents of Catholic mothers and that identified as Catholic themselves wanted to marry slightly later than those with Mainline Protestant mothers. Furthermore, Mormon adolescents and adolescents with Mormon mothers had similar coefficients that were over a year sooner than Mainline Protestant adolescents and mothers. Being Evangelical Protestant or Mormon in adolescence, or having an Evangelical Protestant or Mormon mother reduced the average age at which adolescents believed ideal to get married. However, being Catholic or having a Catholic mother often increased the age at which adolescents wished to marry.
These similarities implied maternal religious values were successfully transmitted to adolescents.
Evangelical Protestant and Mormon churches may have more successfully transmitted family values that support younger marriage to their adolescent members, even if their adolescent members did not feel their faith played much of a role in influencing their daily life. This transmission may have occurred because Evangelical Protestant and Mormon youth subconsciously internalized the family-oriented teachings of these faith traditions in a way that made them want to marry sooner rather than marrying in their mid-twenties or later.
Attitudes toward Cohabitation and Nonmarital Sex
This study also found that higher adolescent religiosity did decrease the odds of believing cohabitation and nonmarital sex acceptable. These findings were consistent with existing literature regarding the relationship between religion and these specific sexual attitudes (Thornton and Camburn 1989; Thornton, Axinn, and Hill 1992;
Manning, Longmore, and Giordano 2007). Adolescents with higher religious attendance and higher religious salience had, on average, lower odds than those with lower attendance and salience of accepting nonmarital sex and cohabitation at highly statistically significant levels.
When maternal religiosity was analyzed, hypothesized results continued to be found. Catholic mothers were more likely to have children who accepted nonmarital sex than Mainline Protestant mothers, while Evangelical Protestant and Mormon mothers’
children had lower odds of accepting nonmarital sex and cohabitation than Mainline Protestant mothers. The adolescent nonmarital sex outcomes coincided with the maternal nonmarital sex measure, further indicating a successful transmission of beliefs from mothers to children.
The higher maternal religious attendance and salience levels, the less likely their children were to accept nonmarital sex or cohabitation, though maternal salience was less predictive of lower odds of accepting nonmarital sex than adolescent salience was.
Regarding adolescent attitudes toward cohabitation, adolescents whose mothers attended more regularly were slightly less likely (odd ratio = .83) of accepting cohabitation than those whose mothers attended less frequently. Similar trends were found when separating out by gender in the sense that mothers’ and their sons’ or daughters’ attitudes toward nonmarital sex and cohabitation were similar based on religious affiliation and religiosity.
Regarding adolescent attitudes toward cohabitation, maternal religious attendance and salience again predicted lower odds of adolescents accepting cohabitation in
comparison to mothers who attended less frequently or felt religion was less influential in their daily lives. Having an Evangelical Protestant mother as opposed to a Mainline Protestant mother also made adolescent men and women significantly less likely to find cohabitation acceptable.
The Reciprocal Relationship
One of the reciprocal relationship examined with Wave 3 data revealed that married respondents had higher attendance levels than unmarried respondents. However, when age was controlled for, these findings shifted and religious attendance increased.
Religious salience was actually found to be lower for married respondents than unmarried respondents. These results somewhat challenge literature that found marriage to increase a person’s religiosity (Thornton, Axinn, and Camburn 1992). Cohabiting was also found to impact religiosity in different ways. Cohabiters were found to have a very slight increase in religious salience, but a slightly larger decrease in attendance. This reality implies that cohabiters and married respondents attend more frequently, but actually experience a decrease in the importance of religion in their everyday lives.
Married respondents were also more likely to believe the ideal age of marriage was almost 3 years younger than unmarried respondents, and more than 3 years younger than unmarried respondents when controlling for age. This finding makes sense as the majority of married respondents were 22 and their reported average ideal age of marriage was around 24.79 years of age. It was unlikely married people would believe the age at which they married to be significantly different from an ideal or appropriate age of marriage. Cohabiters and those in non-cohabiting relationships also believed the ideal
age of marriage to be younger than those not in any romantic relationship, but the difference was not as great as the difference between married and unmarried respondents.
These results suggest that, on average, the ideal age of marriage declines with those not in a romantic relationship reporting the oldest ideal age of marriage to married respondents reporting the youngest ideal age of marriage. In other words, the more marriage-like the living arrangement, the sooner respondents believe it ideal to be married.
Religious affiliation was also found to influence how much the prospect of never marrying bothered respondents. More respondents with no faith tradition reported feeling completely okay or completely uncomfortable with the prospect of never marrying.
Catholics and those that identified as “just Christian” reported that the prospect of never marrying was less bothersome to them than it was to Mainline Protestants at statistically significant levels. These results were found both when only measuring religious affiliation and when controlling for religiosity. An unusual finding was that an increase in religious salience minimally decreased the amount of discomfort never married respondents voiced at the prospect of never marrying. One potential explanation for this finding could be that those with higher levels of salience may believe they will marry if God wants them to. Thus if they never marry, these participants might believe they were not intended to marry.
LIMITATIONS
While this study was longitudinal and nationally representative of Christian adolescents and their mothers, several limitations exist that should be noted. One
limitation about this study is that the influence of fathers could not be determined as the number of fathers surveyed was significantly smaller than the number of mothers surveyed. Coefficients for Mormons also might have been non-significant in some analyses due to low sample sizes. Future studies should strive to have higher numbers of this faith tradition. When moving from Wave 1 to Wave 3 analyses, attrition did cause the sample size to decrease, indicating the responses utilized in analyses might carry selection factors for people more likely to complete longitudinal surveys. The decrease was minimal, though, and a sizable sample still remained for both Wave 1 and 3 analyses.
Race was not included in analyses because the NSYR’s sample is “a nearly perfectly representative sample of 13-17 year-olds living in U.S. households” (Smith and Denton 2003, p.19). Also, this data is only generalizable to Christian adolescents and mothers.
Finally, the low r-squareds indicate there might be omitted variable bias. Future studies should seek to include other variables that might also influence attitudes toward marital timing either instead of or in addition to religious variables. Despite these limitations, this study does offer a nationally representative and longitudinal understanding of how Christian religiosity and denominational affiliation influences when adolescents want to get married, regardless of when they actually do marry.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, religious traditions, on average, were successful to varying degrees at transmitting desirable family values to their adolescent members in ways that decreased the average age adolescents believed preferable to marry. Religiosity did not influence adolescents’ attitudes toward marital timing at statistically significant levels,
however. Maternal religiosity and affiliation frequently influenced adolescents’ attitude toward marital timing similarly to adolescent religiosity and affiliation. While attitudes toward marital timing might not have been heavily influenced by religiosity, religiosity did influence attitudes toward nonmarital sex and cohabitation. Religiosity negatively influences these two attitudes, which was consistent by previous literature. Furthermore, these attitudes did significantly influence when adolescents wished to get married, with those adolescents that found cohabitation and nonmarital sex acceptable wishing to marry at later ages. Thus this finding potentially supports the notion that a motivation for religious adolescents to marry is, in part, to legitimize sexual intercourse. However, there was possibly omitted variable bias, which would muddy the understanding of how influential religious affiliation and religiosity are on attitudes toward marital timing.
Furthermore, Evangelical Protestants have been found to marry younger, and Catholics have been found to marry later, and this data supports the notion that Evangelical Protestant adolescents want to marry sooner while Catholic youth want to marry later (Uecker and Stokes 2008). Thus there is a consistency within these two faith traditions regarding when these adolescents wish to marry and when they actually do marry.
This study contributed to religion and marriage and family literature by revealing how certain aspects of religion influenced adolescents, on average, to desire younger marriage. Furthermore, maternal religiosity and affiliation measures yielded consistent results as their adolescent counterparts, indicating a successful transmission of family and religious values from mothers to children in religious families. Future studies on marital timing attitudes should further investigate the relationships between heterosexual parents
and their children by including an adequate sample of fathers. Future studies should also seek to better understand what underlying factors within Evangelical Protestant and Mormon traditions make them more influential than Mainline Protestant traditions in predicting younger average ideal ages of marriage, as well as what about the Catholic faith makes adolescents desire later marriage than Mainline Protestants.
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