Explaining Protestant Fertility: Belief, Commitment, and Homogamy

Abstract

Alternative explanations for higher conservative than liberal fertility among white Protestants in the United States emphasize concurrent compositional differences in either (1) social characteristics or (2) doctrine. Previous tests support the doctrine hypothesis but use denominational proxies for beliefs. Using a personal measure of liberaiism-conservatism, I test these hypotheses with data from the 1963 Glock-Stark Northern California Church Member Study. I find little support for either the characteristics or doctrine explanations, even when the analysis is restricted to subsets of couples highly committed to their faith and denominationally homogamous. Further investigation suggests that the regional nature of the Northern California data, and not the measurement of liberalism-conservatism, accounts for the difference in results between this and prior research.

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