Abstract:

Based on numerous texts regarding studies of religious prevalence and family structures, the notion surfaced that within families, members who share the same religion are more compatible and that both fertility as well as marriage rates have been dropping exponentially. There was a lack of research between those two subjects, specifically how the religion that one follows structures their views on marriage, conception, and parenting. The sample consisted of the inhabitants of the United States between the ages of 12 and 20, which was the targeted age range for people who have not yet married or had children. An online survey that I fabricated was used in order to collect their responses, and google sheets was utilized in order to code their data. The overall findings are as follows: those who believe in higher-powers (religions involved, Catholicism, Christianity, Islam) have an increased relationship with getting married and having children, while those who do not believe in higher-powers (religions involved, Agnostic, Atheism, Religiously Unaffiliated) have a lower relationship with such quantities. Parenting, when observed, seemed to have no concise findings for each religion, as the responses overlapped too heavily. Consequently, with more extensive research, religion can be observed sequentially, and in tandem, marital, conceptual, and parental trends, alongside it in order to view the overarching influence of religion, as well as the effect of each one individually.