A couple of days ago I posted a chart showing that Democrats were more likely to be childless than Republicans. I thought this was mainly due to religiosity, but I wasn't sure.
However, a friend emailed me a link to Ryan Burge's substack, called "Graphs About Religion." This is an admirably clear name, and it delivers what he promises. What he found is that religion has a lot to do with childlessness, but not everything. Here's one chart:
Even if you compare regular churchgoers, Democrats are still less likely to have children. But there's some interesting detail in a second chart:
Among atheists and high-income mainline Protestants, Republicans are more likely to have children even after you control for some standard demographics. However, among evangelicals and Catholics, there's no difference.
So in the end, it's true that Democrats are less likely to have children than Republicans. But this is entirely due to differences among atheists and mainline Protestants. What's more, with a few basic controls in place the gaps become fairly modest. Overall, the difference is probably on the order of 5% or so.
You don't have to have children to be concerned with the well being of children. You have to be capable of a certain level of empathy. Just ask any random Republican or conservative who has kids and who is prolife what their stand is for benefits for a child born into poverty. Things like welfare, universal pre-k and Healthcare.
Exactly. If most childless people are Democratic, it kinda shows we're even more likely to support those things.
Ditto
You don't even really need to be empathetic, though it's good for human beings to possess this attribute (and generally bad when they do not).
All that's necessary is to recognize that, for a whole host of reasons, a country is better off its children are healthy, happy, safe, well-nourished, well-educated, and well looked after.
Show me a country that doesn't do the right thing by its kids, and I'll show you one where there's more crime, more violence, more addiction, more economic problems, more mental illness, more poverty and more political chaos. Such dysfunctionality affects even the childless.
You don't have to have children to be concerned with the well being of children.
in spite of having more kids, i've never seen any data showing that the famously tax-averse republican base are more inclined than dems to raise property taxes to pay for schools
They aren’t. Lived in Florida for 2 years. Republicans constantly voted down school bonds necessitated by all the growth they welcomed. More retirees = more low wage jobs = more low wage families = more people needing public schools… but “I already paid for my kids to go through school, I’m done with that, why is my order at McDonald’s taking so long and why can’t the clerk count change?”
One thing to consider is that a lot of people join a church when they have children. They might not be practicing their faith, but they want their children exposed to it and appropriately educated.
Well, that's a good point. I know people as well that suddenly started going to church with young children out of some weird sense they it was something they "ought" to do.
Churches can help with daycare. And sometimes when a child is in the "buy why?" mode, saying, "well, God made it that way" can make life a little easier for a short bit.
I don’t doubt this is true but, damn, that’s a lot of emotional baggage to take on simply to get out of using your phone/computer to google an answer to all the “but why?” questions that you personally cannot explain.
Emotional baggage? Being active in Church is the opposite of emotional baggage.
Ex-Christian here: involvement in a church absolutely is emotional baggage.
Depends on the church. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, all happy churches are alike; each unhappy church is unhappy in its own way.
+1
Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handy.
Define appropriately educated? Taught that there's a magic fantasy man who lives in the clouds and peeks into bedrooms?
Belief is one thing, please don't confuse it with educated.
The vast, vast majority of our country disagrees with you. It’s obviously fine to have your own opinion. But please recognize that you are the outcast.
Better to be an outcast than someone who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality.
You will know reality one day. Hopefully it won’t be too late.
The evangelist blows his cover.
I'm with you Atticus. The purpose of religion is to reveal reality in lieu of illusion. A person who identifies as religious but perceives illusion in lieu of reality misunderstood the lesson. On the other hand, you gotta admit there's a lot of people who identify as religious and misunderstand the lesson.
+1
Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handy.
Thank you for your concern. I think adherence to the ideas expressed by Jesus will more than suffice for a quality life without relying on a supernatural being concocted by 40 authors over 1,500 years, many of whom claim to have visions and dreams leading to their entry.
Friend, you just called Raphael Warnock and Barack Obama deluded and non compos mentis.
Where? The part where you imagined your own argument?
No, the vast majority of people don't behave as if they believe that set of, er, peculiar propositions, let us call them. You, for example, are an obvious non-believer.
Good one.
So why don't you believe in the Christian God? Please tell me, I'm genuinely curious.
I love it when atheists (who are a very small minority of Americans) lecture Christians on not adhering to the tenets of their religion.
One, I'm not an atheist. Two, you haven't answered my question: Why don't you believe in a Christian God?
Kaleberg has an excellent point, but one that's not limited to believers.
My personal experience, among a cluster of partly-spiritual atheists, agnostics, and general free-thinkers, almost exclusively Democratic voters, in Houston:
* Many of us joined First UU Houston, whose minister at the time was a gay Buddhist, because we had kids.
— My then-wife and I joined when our young daughter started asking questions such as "remind me, who's Jesus" at Christmastime, on the way to visit the fundamentalist in-laws.
— I think of bringing up kids in Unitarian Universalist church, besides providing community of like-minded people who are thoughtful and interested in social justice, as like a multi-valent inoculation with the least virulent strains of religions etc.
— Really. I taught "religious education" several years, at pre-K and middle-school levels. Those kids learned about the various theistic, deistic, or philosophical teachings and stories, although leaving out the less-happy history of theocracy, intolerance, & wars. (Until high school?)
— Also, very open-minded sexuality education, especially at the middle- and high-school levels. ("Our Whole Lives")
* For our circle of friends, education about values, community with other families, and sometimes babysitting were huge. To this day, around half of our non-work related friends are from that church. In comparison:
— Non-churchy groups for the non-theistic (Houston Atheists, Humanists of Houston, etc.): almost zero activities for children, no parental support. Family activities were also what several people asked for in the much smaller "Secular Sunday" group I joined and helped run when I moved to California — which ended up dying, without critical mass.
— A churchy group founded by mostly atheists: Houston Oasis, with some child care during meetings, had pretty good attendance by families with kids, and is apparently still going after departure of its founding minister-I-mean-organizer (which is a major fatality point for communities).
* Churches tend to have institutionalized inherited wealth: buildings and organizational continuity, without which attracting and supporting families with children is expensive and near impossible.
For research like this to show a causal effect, there need to be controls at the very least for people joining churches after having or planning to have kids, vs. before.
My mom used Sunday school as cheap daycare. She grew up in a Mormon household but grew out of it soon after having children.
"But this is entirely due to difference among atheists and mainline Protestants."
This is true only if you assume that the religious composition of Democrats and Republicans is identical. It could also be true that people from more child-likely religions are more likely to be Republican. One obvious point from the graphs: atheists are much less likely to have children among both Democrats and Republicans. If 20% of Republicans are atheists, and 60% of Democrats are, then Democrats will have more childless people.
Of course, this assume that the causation comes from religion - that people's likelihood to have children is influenced by their religious denomination. This could be true, but it could also be true that people inclined to go without children also have lower social attachments in general, and thus are more likely to have no religion.
It could also be that religious affiliation and decisions to have children are both influenced by some other factor: perhaps people with optimistic attitudes about their personal prospects, their country and the world in general are likely to join religions, marry, and have children, while people with pessimistic attitudes in these areas are likely to avoid religion and children.
At the end of the day, this isn't much more than numerology.
Since only 4% of Americans are Atheist, that's hardly going to move the needle.
+1
Some would be concerned by the birth rate in the “west” because… well. We all know why. 60 years ago the world population was about 3 billion. Now it’s over 8 billion. It’s still going up. Maybe it peaks around 10 or 11 billion by 2080. So really, what's the problem? Republicans and pronatalists should move to Africa to make the world great again.
Good morning and fuck this troll.
Whatever happened to comparing R-squared? You gave up?
And even all that aside, one still has to ask "so what?"
But you'll find the racist "white replacement" thing on the Right, that's gone back decades now. Sort of like how so many conspiracy theories always seem to lead back to antisemitism.
My bet would be if you accounted for acceptance of birth control and religion, you balance out. People with more children are less likely to use birth control, which is largely tied to religion.
Only Catholicism is against birth control, as far as I know. And although the vast majority of our country is Christian, Catholics make up only about 25%.
Notably irrelevant to the point that religious people are less likely to use birth control, Atticus.
Evangelicals have the highest unplanned and out of wedlock pregnancy rates.
How is it irrelevant? Art Eclectic said, "People with more children are less likely to use birth control, which is largely tied to religion." In response to that, I pointed out that it's only Catholicism (as far as I know) that is officially against birth control. And Catholics are only around 25% of Christians in our country.
Whether the pregnancies are unplanned or not is irrelevant to this conversation.
Chuckle. You don't know many Catholics, do you?
I am Catholic. Most people I knew growing up were a Catholic.
Riiiight. You have two, count them, _two_ daughters, or so you say. Do try to be consistent.
LOL.
LMFAO.
ROFL
WTF
IIRC
YOLO
FOMO
We know your online backstory and what kind of person you are. In sometimes nauseating detail.
I'm sure a lot of people start attending church once they have kids. But it's also a lot easier to have kids when you're a member of a church. A lot of public life these days is not particularly kid-friendly - there are even restaurants that totally ban kids. But churches are full of people who are genuinely happy to see kids (at least at church), and where the needs of families are taken seriously. The kid focus is so big at some mega-churches that a lot of empty-nesters start to drift away once their kids grow up.
One other thing to note - Mainline Protestants have a really big urban/rural divide when it comes to politics. Mainline Protestant churches in rural areas are much more conservative than those in urban areas. The childless differences between Democrats and Republicans among Mainliners may be just measuring differences between urban and rural childlessness.
Is there any data on people who have only one child? It seems like a very different thing than wanting "to start a family" or "become a mother". My spouses motivation started when he realized that we could not take the cats into hotels while traveling but could take a human pet. I certainly did not want to "become a mother". but I accepted it was a necessary part of acquiring said pet.
I have had the impression that other one-child parents are similar. They do not want a different role although they realize that they have started a very time consuming hobby.