"Whenever someone shows you a chart about Catholics, with no filtering, you’re usually better off cutting out the middleman and just looking up a chart about Hispanics and Scots-Irish instead."
You're not actually better off if you do this, because the Scots-Irish, when they have a religious affiliation, are generally Protestants. It's a long story, but they're descended from people who England sent over to Ulster in the early 1600s to try and basically colonize Ireland.
Huh. I was under the impression that Irish people counted in Scots-Irish, but the venerable authorities at Wikipedia tell me I was *totally* wrong about that.
I suspect you're still better off going straight to a chart of Hispanics and Scots-Irish, since charts of "Catholics" are dominated by racial effects over the religious effects the chart is nominally looking for, and Scotch Irish are *racially* pretty close to the Irish (culturally? maybe? dunno). But you're right that I meant something else here, and you'd be *best* off looking at a chart of what Irish-Americans think, rather than Scots-Irish Americans.
The Irish and the Scots-Irish may be pretty close genetically, but they're both pretty close to the English, generally, yet their cultures are all very distinct from each other. If you haven't already, read David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed", which discuss the four main cultural strains from Britain which made the early United States.
Fisher's Borderers aren't identical to the Scots-Irish but there is a good deal of overlap culturally and genetically. (Fisher does not discuss the genetics at all - he was writing in 1989; he focuses on the economic and political conditions which developed the cultures in Britain and how they adapted to America.)
Correction, James: In Minnesota, there are actually a lot more German-American Catholics than there are Irish-American Catholics, especially around St. Cloud and New Ulm and in rural central and Southern Minnesota (there are a decent number in the Twin Cities too).
Quite possibly true locally, but I don't think true nationally, where there are just a metric ton of Irish Catholics.
Now, if the data existed to answer it (and, alas, I don't think it does), it would be VERY interesting to answer this: what percentage of self-identified Irish Catholics are devout vs. indifferent, and are they more or less indifferent than self-identified German Catholics? I could believe German Catholics did a better job passing on the Faith. But I think the Irish still have them outnumbered, at least nominally.
Hence why I specified Minnesota. The Upper Midwestern states and Ohio are where a huge number of German Catholics settled after fleeing persecution from Otto von Bismarck’s anti-Catholic Kulturkampf. We’re in the German-American Catholic hotspot part of the country.
Now, a lot of the northern East Coast states are heavily Irish Catholics.
Chicago is a mix of Polish and Irish Catholics.
Fun fact: In Minnesota, German-American and Irish-American Catholics initially did not get along well at all and tended to have separate Catholic parishes on opposite sides of town in cities where both groups of Catholics settled. In my hometown of Hastings, MN, there was an Irish-American Catholic parish (Guardian Angels), and a German-American Catholic parish (St. Boniface) and they remained separate parishes for I think around 100 years until Archbishop Roach ordered them to merge in 1987.
For example, I have a suspicion (as-yet unconfirmed) that some of the gap between what Catholics in the pews are reporting (crowded Masses! huge new waves of converts!) and what demographers are reporting (a swiftly dying Catholic Church propped up by Boomers for a few more years at best) is explained by the fact that demographers are looking at Catholic self-identification, pewsitters are looking at Catholics going to Mass... and these are really quite different groups, of quite different sizes!
I'm just guessing, though. Something to investigate now that I've got some of these tools written!
Catholic identity has some similarities to Jewish identity in that identification lasts for a few generations as a cultural label even without any actual religious practice. This is unlike Protestants, who typically stop identifying as such pretty quickly if they stop practicing (it might last a generation, but probably not beyond that). This does have a time limit, though, and just as I don't expect secular Jewish identity to survive the 21st century (at least outside of Israel), nor do I expect cultural/heritage Catholic identity to.
Doesn’t the pie chart in footnote 5 contradict this though? ‘Indifferent mainline’ is the category or people who list themselves as Protestant to a survey but who don’t attend service regularly. If it was true that people who don’t participate regularly stop using the label then I’d expect this grouping of indifferent mainliners to be much smaller. Instead, it’s a larger wedge than devout Catholics!
I would be interested to see what changes if you separate out the 2-3 times a month churchgoers from the less-than-monthly. I'd suspect many of the 2-3s are in the situation Jason M describes. Also, my in-laws are fairly devout and had 4 children, but in winter (in Iowa) they might not make it to Mass on a given Sunday because the priest who serves multiple parishes can't safely travel to their parish. There's a big part of the country where that could be an issue.
This is almost certainly what's happening. The indifferent Catholics are dying off and their kids don't care to pretend anymore, so they leave. But those pews were always empty.
Now those pews are filling up with people who converted and are taking it seriously.
Anecdotally, I suspect that regular church attendance is a poor proxy for your line on indifferent Catholics.
My parents took my sister and I to church every Sunday and holy day of obligation without fail, even when we were traveling. I'll leave you to infer their stance on birth control with the additional story that one time when I brought my girlfriend home for the holidays they asked if we could share a bed due to space constraints.
Conversely, two of the Catholic families I know who are on the other side of the fence, with regards to birth control, attend irregularly because they struggle to get their 5 young kids to all go in the same direction at once to go anywhere, church or otherwise.
As the article concedes, no matter what line you draw, you're going to find some people on the objectively wrong side of it. And you're going to have some people who might *subjectively* be on the wrong side of it (which is then up for debate). And, on top of all that, sometimes the question itself dictates a differently drawn line!
I love stats and polls, but there's no denying they're fuzzier than you'd think from their cold, neat reporting of numbers.
Your family would foil almost any rule I tried to use on them, though! "Even when travelling" is so strongly correlated (in my experience) with orthodox Catholicism that I would have assumed, with considerable confidence, quite a different reaction from your parents when you brought the girlfriend home. Just goes to show that people are many and varied!
Are you able to compare the venn diagram of "Attends weekly or more" and "Doesn't use birth control?"
I know I once answered on a survey I attended Mass "Once or more a Month" because I had two kids under three and we were always sick with something and it was close enough to 2020 that people still frowned at any sign of illness nearby.
I don't talk about this much anymore, because I was young, it was very pugilistic (I wrote it to refute some Planned Parenthood talking points in the Romney-Obama race), and I'm not actually sure I did the weights correctly, but it is useful for answering that extremely specific question!
The answer is that Mass attendance is certainly *correlated* with being open to life, but probably not as much as you'd expect if you're assuming active involvement with the Church = doctrinal agreement with the Church. I found that two-thirds of sexually-active Catholic women 15-44 who attended Mass *more than once a week* were using some form of artificial birth control... which was *still* a lot less than the 80% among Catholic women 15-44 who were attending less than once a week.
(And, yes, we've all had seasons in life where, very often for very legitimate reasons like yours, we couldn't be at Mass every week. My attempt to draw the line in this post was necessarily a generalization. Of course, I don't think I realized that when I was 22 and wrote that other post, so my apologies if Young Me is rude!)
Out of curiosity, how many of those women in the more-than-once-a-week group are using birth control *as birth control*, and not for other medical reasons? I don't know if that information is available or if it would make a difference in outcomes, but hormonal medications are used quite consistently as treatment for, say, endometriosis, and only have a contraceptive effect as a side note.
Impressively, the NSFG actually DOES separate out contraceptive and non-contraceptive use, God bless it, so I was able to separate these.
Among more-than-once-a-week Catholics, 7.1% were using the Pill contraceptively and 1.2% medically. I counted the medical users as "Open To Life" rather than as "Artificial Birth Control Users."
I'm not certain I did my weights correctly (this was 2013, after all), so the exact numbers might be a little off, but, broadly speaking, like 1-in-8 of more-than-once-a-week Catholics are using the Pill as a medical treatment.
This seems low to me. Like, there's a LOT of endometriosis around, or so it seems to me.
This accords better with what I see on the ground, and I've always been curious what the numbers would look like without the lax. With that being said:
Bucketing is never going to be a perfect exercise, and I don't think you're out of line for putting monthly attendees as indifferent, but I do think this group is substantially different than the rarely/never attendees. If they're telling the truth, then they most likely have a tangible connection to their church community (kids are in religious educated, maybe a member of certain charitable groups, etc.) that rarely/nevers don't. If they're lying (and I expect a good amount are), it at least means that these people have some personal connection to religion that will might influence behavior in some way.
I'll be interested in what the Catholic numbers look like a decade and a half from now. I anticipate that younger millennial/Gen Z Catholic women have a higher TFR than Gen X Catholic women, but that's definitely more anecdotal. Decreasing Catholic immigrant fertility may also wipe out any gains.
I think you have a point. As I continue playing with this, I will keep on doing things like what I did in Footnote 7 in this article: fiddling with the definition of "indifferent", focusing on more or less devout groups than what I've done here, and seeing whether that changes the results.
In this case, it didn't! But I suspect I will gradually start to see places where there's a clear break in behavior between one group of self-identified members of a religion and another. Whether that break turns out to be right where I drew the line, I'm not sure.
(Maybe I need to come up with names for the different groups! The never/seldoms are perhaps not just "indifferent", but "alienated"? Just spitballing here.)
Your hypothesis about younger Catholic fertility is both interesting and, in principle, testable! It *should* be possible to calculate TFR for young Millennial/GenZ Catholics in, say, CES 2024, then calculate the TFR for young GenX/Millennial Catholics in CES 2006 (so you can compare apples to apples: TFR vs TFR instead of TFR vs completed fertility), and compare. Not saying I'm gonna do it, but am saying I'm tempted.
How available are statistics which break down immigrants, 1st-generation children of immigrants, and everyone else? I would expect the 1st native generation to have somewhat distinguishable behaviors from immigrants and from the longer-settled.
I think that the difference between devout and indifferent that we intuit to be the case must be dependent on something other than attendance. I think that specific doctrines, regardless of which religion a person claims to follow, would show a wider gap here. For example, I would imagine that questions like:
What are your views on Abortion?
What are your views on Contraception?
What are your views on Marriage?
The closer to never abort, never contracept, and lifelong commitment between 1 man and at least one woman, the more fertile.
Speaking of marriage, what happens if you split on married/widowed/divorced vs single/never married?
How many of the religiously devout other than Catholics have a ban on IVF? As far as I know, Catholics are one of the only groups that steadfastly prohibits it. IVF doesn't account for enough births to make a huge difference but I wonder if it is in play here at all
Several others prohibit embryo-destructive IVF, but you're right! That is probably a factor.
But probably a small factor. Bing tells me that 2-3% of all babies born right now are IVF babies. On the one hand, that's utterly extraordinary, unimaginable a few decades ago. Yet, on the other hand, it's still not very much. If we assume that every Catholic follows the Church's teaching on IVF perfectly -- which, I mean, most weekly church-goers contracept, so no, ha ha, no -- then Catholicism's prohibition on IVF means Catholic fertility is ~3% lower than it would be otherwise. Plug that back into our chart, and, instead of 1.76 children per Catholic woman, we'd see... 1.81. Not nothing, but not enough to change the rank order.
Good question, had to think about it, and read an article on pro-life Evangelicals grappling with IVF. (Apparently they don't warn you about creating all the "excess" babies. They just do it, and some Evangelicals were unpleasantly surprised that they now had a lot more babies to deal with than they'd expected.)
1. Footnotes on iOS (or at least the safari browser app) have been broken for a few months now, which is a real bummer when reading your work with all your great footnotes!
2. Footnote 7 makes all the sense in the world to have done. You’d already pulled all the data and created a robust method for drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, why NOT play around with where that line is to see if you find something striking? That said…… would it have changed your mind on devout vs indifferent if you had seen something significant when testing out the line on both sides? What if the line ended up being relevant at us CEO (Christmas, Easter, One other time) Catholics? Do you think you would have started including us in your mental grouping of devout?
I’m annoyed footnotes are broken! I think Substack should stop trying to make the fancy-dan pop-ups work and just go back to the original behavior: click a footnote, it takes you to the footnote, the end.
Part of my reason for focusing on attenders will make more sense after I do the follow-up. For the thing I’m trying to do, it really is more relevant to look at the community that shows up, regardless of their adherence to doctrine.
But, yeah, if I’d found a different line that would have had a clear impact, I definitely would have updated my beliefs!
And, yes, it appears that wealthier people are having more babies. Is that a direct correlation (babies more expensive so only richer people have them)? Or is it an indirect effect (e.g. babies more likely in marriage but only rich people are getting married because of cultural shifts)? Either way, it does seem like a big deal.
I know IFR has also done work on desired vs. achieved, although, off the top of my head, I don’t know where exactly.
I know it has nothing to do with babies, but I find it very interesting that the indifferent and the none are roughly equal in their share of the pie chart (and they comprise 75% of the country together). That is both alarming and vindicating, since it basically proves we live in an anti-religious era.
Very interesting, the only thing I'd want to do more work on is theory 1 about having things in common with coreligionists. I strongly suspect that it isn't just class, ethnicity etc. but culture.
I would put down money that if you took 100 atheists and slapped them in Salt Lake City, they'd have more kids than atheists in a hypothetical city that is identical in every way but everyone is an atheist.
If you grow up around families of five+ children, I strongly suspect you are more likely to have larger families regardless of your religious convictions or lack thereof. Having larger families just feels normal. People treat it as normal. Spaces are designed for it.
If you put a super devout Mormon with eight kids in Korea it is just going to be much weirder and harder for them.
I am a Catholic raised in a small-family country. To me, eight kids is almost unimaginable (although I believe and practice the Church's teachings in this area). I have never met someone below 80 who has had that many children.
"Whenever someone shows you a chart about Catholics, with no filtering, you’re usually better off cutting out the middleman and just looking up a chart about Hispanics and Scots-Irish instead."
Ooo Scots-Irish, called "Ulster Scots" in the UK, are Northern Irish Protestants of Scottish background who were sent to Ireland to make it more Protestant, and then many of them got tired of fighting the native Catholics and settled in Appalachia. They are by definition the furthest thing from Catholic! In fact, on St. Patty's Day, Ulster Scots (aka Scots-Irish) dress in all Orange as an anti-Catholic symbol of the Calvinist Orange armies that slaughtered a lot of the native Irish to take over the island.
Sorry, just had to say that. Otherwise, as a moderate Catholic with three kids, this was a great, well-researched article!
Calling people who spend half their Sundays in church indifferents seems off base to me. Even people who consistently make it at least once a month are not just cultural Catholics/Prots/etc.
Practicing vs non-practicing would seem to be a cleaner way to think about it. But if you do want to isolate the devouts then I think you should still differentiate among the rest between practicing and indifferents.
Also, use of birth control is famously the one big area where a huge chunk of Catholics don’t follow church doctrine. There’s even a section about it in MacCulloch’s history of Christianity.
"Whenever someone shows you a chart about Catholics, with no filtering, you’re usually better off cutting out the middleman and just looking up a chart about Hispanics and Scots-Irish instead."
You're not actually better off if you do this, because the Scots-Irish, when they have a religious affiliation, are generally Protestants. It's a long story, but they're descended from people who England sent over to Ulster in the early 1600s to try and basically colonize Ireland.
Huh. I was under the impression that Irish people counted in Scots-Irish, but the venerable authorities at Wikipedia tell me I was *totally* wrong about that.
I suspect you're still better off going straight to a chart of Hispanics and Scots-Irish, since charts of "Catholics" are dominated by racial effects over the religious effects the chart is nominally looking for, and Scotch Irish are *racially* pretty close to the Irish (culturally? maybe? dunno). But you're right that I meant something else here, and you'd be *best* off looking at a chart of what Irish-Americans think, rather than Scots-Irish Americans.
The Irish and the Scots-Irish may be pretty close genetically, but they're both pretty close to the English, generally, yet their cultures are all very distinct from each other. If you haven't already, read David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed", which discuss the four main cultural strains from Britain which made the early United States.
Fisher's Borderers aren't identical to the Scots-Irish but there is a good deal of overlap culturally and genetically. (Fisher does not discuss the genetics at all - he was writing in 1989; he focuses on the economic and political conditions which developed the cultures in Britain and how they adapted to America.)
Yeah, I should read Albion’s Seed. Heaven knows I spend enough time in rat/post-rat spaces to justify the time investment!
Correction, James: In Minnesota, there are actually a lot more German-American Catholics than there are Irish-American Catholics, especially around St. Cloud and New Ulm and in rural central and Southern Minnesota (there are a decent number in the Twin Cities too).
Quite possibly true locally, but I don't think true nationally, where there are just a metric ton of Irish Catholics.
Now, if the data existed to answer it (and, alas, I don't think it does), it would be VERY interesting to answer this: what percentage of self-identified Irish Catholics are devout vs. indifferent, and are they more or less indifferent than self-identified German Catholics? I could believe German Catholics did a better job passing on the Faith. But I think the Irish still have them outnumbered, at least nominally.
Hence why I specified Minnesota. The Upper Midwestern states and Ohio are where a huge number of German Catholics settled after fleeing persecution from Otto von Bismarck’s anti-Catholic Kulturkampf. We’re in the German-American Catholic hotspot part of the country.
Now, a lot of the northern East Coast states are heavily Irish Catholics.
Chicago is a mix of Polish and Irish Catholics.
Fun fact: In Minnesota, German-American and Irish-American Catholics initially did not get along well at all and tended to have separate Catholic parishes on opposite sides of town in cities where both groups of Catholics settled. In my hometown of Hastings, MN, there was an Irish-American Catholic parish (Guardian Angels), and a German-American Catholic parish (St. Boniface) and they remained separate parishes for I think around 100 years until Archbishop Roach ordered them to merge in 1987.
Well this was a rather blackpilling post.
Sorry! But it kind of explains a lot, doesn't it?
For example, I have a suspicion (as-yet unconfirmed) that some of the gap between what Catholics in the pews are reporting (crowded Masses! huge new waves of converts!) and what demographers are reporting (a swiftly dying Catholic Church propped up by Boomers for a few more years at best) is explained by the fact that demographers are looking at Catholic self-identification, pewsitters are looking at Catholics going to Mass... and these are really quite different groups, of quite different sizes!
I'm just guessing, though. Something to investigate now that I've got some of these tools written!
I look forward to more data with these analysis tools!
Catholic identity has some similarities to Jewish identity in that identification lasts for a few generations as a cultural label even without any actual religious practice. This is unlike Protestants, who typically stop identifying as such pretty quickly if they stop practicing (it might last a generation, but probably not beyond that). This does have a time limit, though, and just as I don't expect secular Jewish identity to survive the 21st century (at least outside of Israel), nor do I expect cultural/heritage Catholic identity to.
Doesn’t the pie chart in footnote 5 contradict this though? ‘Indifferent mainline’ is the category or people who list themselves as Protestant to a survey but who don’t attend service regularly. If it was true that people who don’t participate regularly stop using the label then I’d expect this grouping of indifferent mainliners to be much smaller. Instead, it’s a larger wedge than devout Catholics!
I would be interested to see what changes if you separate out the 2-3 times a month churchgoers from the less-than-monthly. I'd suspect many of the 2-3s are in the situation Jason M describes. Also, my in-laws are fairly devout and had 4 children, but in winter (in Iowa) they might not make it to Mass on a given Sunday because the priest who serves multiple parishes can't safely travel to their parish. There's a big part of the country where that could be an issue.
Take a gander at Footnote 7! It’s a fair theory, so it was even more surprising when it made no difference, either.
This is almost certainly what's happening. The indifferent Catholics are dying off and their kids don't care to pretend anymore, so they leave. But those pews were always empty.
Now those pews are filling up with people who converted and are taking it seriously.
‘Blackpilling’? New term for me
Anecdotally, I suspect that regular church attendance is a poor proxy for your line on indifferent Catholics.
My parents took my sister and I to church every Sunday and holy day of obligation without fail, even when we were traveling. I'll leave you to infer their stance on birth control with the additional story that one time when I brought my girlfriend home for the holidays they asked if we could share a bed due to space constraints.
Conversely, two of the Catholic families I know who are on the other side of the fence, with regards to birth control, attend irregularly because they struggle to get their 5 young kids to all go in the same direction at once to go anywhere, church or otherwise.
As the article concedes, no matter what line you draw, you're going to find some people on the objectively wrong side of it. And you're going to have some people who might *subjectively* be on the wrong side of it (which is then up for debate). And, on top of all that, sometimes the question itself dictates a differently drawn line!
I love stats and polls, but there's no denying they're fuzzier than you'd think from their cold, neat reporting of numbers.
Your family would foil almost any rule I tried to use on them, though! "Even when travelling" is so strongly correlated (in my experience) with orthodox Catholicism that I would have assumed, with considerable confidence, quite a different reaction from your parents when you brought the girlfriend home. Just goes to show that people are many and varied!
Are you able to compare the venn diagram of "Attends weekly or more" and "Doesn't use birth control?"
I know I once answered on a survey I attended Mass "Once or more a Month" because I had two kids under three and we were always sick with something and it was close enough to 2020 that people still frowned at any sign of illness nearby.
Interestingly enough, I did a lot of work on this question back in 2012: https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2012/02/24/the-james-j-heaney-institute-presents-a-new-study-of-religion-and-contraceptive-use/
I don't talk about this much anymore, because I was young, it was very pugilistic (I wrote it to refute some Planned Parenthood talking points in the Romney-Obama race), and I'm not actually sure I did the weights correctly, but it is useful for answering that extremely specific question!
The answer is that Mass attendance is certainly *correlated* with being open to life, but probably not as much as you'd expect if you're assuming active involvement with the Church = doctrinal agreement with the Church. I found that two-thirds of sexually-active Catholic women 15-44 who attended Mass *more than once a week* were using some form of artificial birth control... which was *still* a lot less than the 80% among Catholic women 15-44 who were attending less than once a week.
(And, yes, we've all had seasons in life where, very often for very legitimate reasons like yours, we couldn't be at Mass every week. My attempt to draw the line in this post was necessarily a generalization. Of course, I don't think I realized that when I was 22 and wrote that other post, so my apologies if Young Me is rude!)
Out of curiosity, how many of those women in the more-than-once-a-week group are using birth control *as birth control*, and not for other medical reasons? I don't know if that information is available or if it would make a difference in outcomes, but hormonal medications are used quite consistently as treatment for, say, endometriosis, and only have a contraceptive effect as a side note.
Impressively, the NSFG actually DOES separate out contraceptive and non-contraceptive use, God bless it, so I was able to separate these.
Among more-than-once-a-week Catholics, 7.1% were using the Pill contraceptively and 1.2% medically. I counted the medical users as "Open To Life" rather than as "Artificial Birth Control Users."
I'm not certain I did my weights correctly (this was 2013, after all), so the exact numbers might be a little off, but, broadly speaking, like 1-in-8 of more-than-once-a-week Catholics are using the Pill as a medical treatment.
This seems low to me. Like, there's a LOT of endometriosis around, or so it seems to me.
Lol you may be biased by all the endometriosis surrounding you. "Spiders Georg" and all that
Here is the relevant chart: https://www.starshipexcelsior.com/decivitate/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/JJHI-CCCW-Table-3-4.png
For both weighting and small sample size reasons, I wouldn't swear by this, but it's still fascinating.
This accords better with what I see on the ground, and I've always been curious what the numbers would look like without the lax. With that being said:
Bucketing is never going to be a perfect exercise, and I don't think you're out of line for putting monthly attendees as indifferent, but I do think this group is substantially different than the rarely/never attendees. If they're telling the truth, then they most likely have a tangible connection to their church community (kids are in religious educated, maybe a member of certain charitable groups, etc.) that rarely/nevers don't. If they're lying (and I expect a good amount are), it at least means that these people have some personal connection to religion that will might influence behavior in some way.
I'll be interested in what the Catholic numbers look like a decade and a half from now. I anticipate that younger millennial/Gen Z Catholic women have a higher TFR than Gen X Catholic women, but that's definitely more anecdotal. Decreasing Catholic immigrant fertility may also wipe out any gains.
I think you have a point. As I continue playing with this, I will keep on doing things like what I did in Footnote 7 in this article: fiddling with the definition of "indifferent", focusing on more or less devout groups than what I've done here, and seeing whether that changes the results.
In this case, it didn't! But I suspect I will gradually start to see places where there's a clear break in behavior between one group of self-identified members of a religion and another. Whether that break turns out to be right where I drew the line, I'm not sure.
(Maybe I need to come up with names for the different groups! The never/seldoms are perhaps not just "indifferent", but "alienated"? Just spitballing here.)
Your hypothesis about younger Catholic fertility is both interesting and, in principle, testable! It *should* be possible to calculate TFR for young Millennial/GenZ Catholics in, say, CES 2024, then calculate the TFR for young GenX/Millennial Catholics in CES 2006 (so you can compare apples to apples: TFR vs TFR instead of TFR vs completed fertility), and compare. Not saying I'm gonna do it, but am saying I'm tempted.
How available are statistics which break down immigrants, 1st-generation children of immigrants, and everyone else? I would expect the 1st native generation to have somewhat distinguishable behaviors from immigrants and from the longer-settled.
I think that the difference between devout and indifferent that we intuit to be the case must be dependent on something other than attendance. I think that specific doctrines, regardless of which religion a person claims to follow, would show a wider gap here. For example, I would imagine that questions like:
What are your views on Abortion?
What are your views on Contraception?
What are your views on Marriage?
The closer to never abort, never contracept, and lifelong commitment between 1 man and at least one woman, the more fertile.
Speaking of marriage, what happens if you split on married/widowed/divorced vs single/never married?
How many of the religiously devout other than Catholics have a ban on IVF? As far as I know, Catholics are one of the only groups that steadfastly prohibits it. IVF doesn't account for enough births to make a huge difference but I wonder if it is in play here at all
Several others prohibit embryo-destructive IVF, but you're right! That is probably a factor.
But probably a small factor. Bing tells me that 2-3% of all babies born right now are IVF babies. On the one hand, that's utterly extraordinary, unimaginable a few decades ago. Yet, on the other hand, it's still not very much. If we assume that every Catholic follows the Church's teaching on IVF perfectly -- which, I mean, most weekly church-goers contracept, so no, ha ha, no -- then Catholicism's prohibition on IVF means Catholic fertility is ~3% lower than it would be otherwise. Plug that back into our chart, and, instead of 1.76 children per Catholic woman, we'd see... 1.81. Not nothing, but not enough to change the rank order.
Good question, had to think about it, and read an article on pro-life Evangelicals grappling with IVF. (Apparently they don't warn you about creating all the "excess" babies. They just do it, and some Evangelicals were unpleasantly surprised that they now had a lot more babies to deal with than they'd expected.)
1. Footnotes on iOS (or at least the safari browser app) have been broken for a few months now, which is a real bummer when reading your work with all your great footnotes!
2. Footnote 7 makes all the sense in the world to have done. You’d already pulled all the data and created a robust method for drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, why NOT play around with where that line is to see if you find something striking? That said…… would it have changed your mind on devout vs indifferent if you had seen something significant when testing out the line on both sides? What if the line ended up being relevant at us CEO (Christmas, Easter, One other time) Catholics? Do you think you would have started including us in your mental grouping of devout?
I’m annoyed footnotes are broken! I think Substack should stop trying to make the fancy-dan pop-ups work and just go back to the original behavior: click a footnote, it takes you to the footnote, the end.
Part of my reason for focusing on attenders will make more sense after I do the follow-up. For the thing I’m trying to do, it really is more relevant to look at the community that shows up, regardless of their adherence to doctrine.
But, yeah, if I’d found a different line that would have had a clear impact, I definitely would have updated my beliefs!
Fascinating! (and wonderful use of charts)
Would be interesting to see the numbers of children by wealth (top 1%, 10%, vs lower quintiles?).
Is cost of raising a family deterring more children? Conversely, are some focused on two wage earner careers rather than families?
Also by family size desired vs achieved would be helpful (for both religion and wealth graphs), if such data exists…
The Institute for Family Research has happily done some work in this area! https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-relationship-between-status-and-children-is-changing
And, yes, it appears that wealthier people are having more babies. Is that a direct correlation (babies more expensive so only richer people have them)? Or is it an indirect effect (e.g. babies more likely in marriage but only rich people are getting married because of cultural shifts)? Either way, it does seem like a big deal.
I know IFR has also done work on desired vs. achieved, although, off the top of my head, I don’t know where exactly.
I know it has nothing to do with babies, but I find it very interesting that the indifferent and the none are roughly equal in their share of the pie chart (and they comprise 75% of the country together). That is both alarming and vindicating, since it basically proves we live in an anti-religious era.
Very interesting, the only thing I'd want to do more work on is theory 1 about having things in common with coreligionists. I strongly suspect that it isn't just class, ethnicity etc. but culture.
I would put down money that if you took 100 atheists and slapped them in Salt Lake City, they'd have more kids than atheists in a hypothetical city that is identical in every way but everyone is an atheist.
If you grow up around families of five+ children, I strongly suspect you are more likely to have larger families regardless of your religious convictions or lack thereof. Having larger families just feels normal. People treat it as normal. Spaces are designed for it.
If you put a super devout Mormon with eight kids in Korea it is just going to be much weirder and harder for them.
I am a Catholic raised in a small-family country. To me, eight kids is almost unimaginable (although I believe and practice the Church's teachings in this area). I have never met someone below 80 who has had that many children.
"Whenever someone shows you a chart about Catholics, with no filtering, you’re usually better off cutting out the middleman and just looking up a chart about Hispanics and Scots-Irish instead."
Ooo Scots-Irish, called "Ulster Scots" in the UK, are Northern Irish Protestants of Scottish background who were sent to Ireland to make it more Protestant, and then many of them got tired of fighting the native Catholics and settled in Appalachia. They are by definition the furthest thing from Catholic! In fact, on St. Patty's Day, Ulster Scots (aka Scots-Irish) dress in all Orange as an anti-Catholic symbol of the Calvinist Orange armies that slaughtered a lot of the native Irish to take over the island.
Sorry, just had to say that. Otherwise, as a moderate Catholic with three kids, this was a great, well-researched article!
Calling people who spend half their Sundays in church indifferents seems off base to me. Even people who consistently make it at least once a month are not just cultural Catholics/Prots/etc.
Practicing vs non-practicing would seem to be a cleaner way to think about it. But if you do want to isolate the devouts then I think you should still differentiate among the rest between practicing and indifferents.
Also, use of birth control is famously the one big area where a huge chunk of Catholics don’t follow church doctrine. There’s even a section about it in MacCulloch’s history of Christianity.