Can We Explain the Generation Gap in Churchgoing?

Abstract

In western societies, secularization in the sense of declining individual religiosity is mainly caused by cohort replacement. Every cohort is somewhat less religious than its predecessor, indicating that religious transmission is incomplete. The puzzle is just what causes this incomplete transmission and whether there is one or a restricted number of factors that mainly explain the process. Our aim in this article is to establish, describe, and explain this lack of religious transmission in West Germany, comparing parents’ and children's level of church attendance and their determinants over time. We use a data set of more than 8,000 parent-child pairs across four cohorts from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and test whether indicators measuring parent attributes, family relations, or parental context influence the attendance gap. As expected, we find a substantial parent-child attendance gap. However, we do not find factors that mainly explain the process. Only family disruption and the percentage of nones in the state slightly increase the attendance gap, but effect sizes are small. Our surprising result is that secularization happens largely independently of attributes of the parents and their immediate surroundings. We discuss how this finding may give credibility to new theories of secular transition and present an agenda for future research on religious transmission.