Influence of Heterogamy by Religion on Risk of Marital Dissolution: A Cohort Study of 20,000 Couples

An integrated theoretical framework to explain interpersonal moralistic conflict

This paper offers an integrated theoretical framework to explain interpersonal, moralistic conflict that combines the logic of the "pure sociology" approach with a social psychological framework that highlights the importance of the human capacity for language, evaluation, and justification. While violations of normative expectations are the root causes of moralistic conflict, the paper argues that one can only determine the emergence of such conflict by assessing the nature of the behavior in question in relation to the social locations of the participants in combination with the justifications invoked. The central question that the theory addresses can be distilled as follows: What explains the emergence of interpersonal, moralistic conflict? The paper specifies three core assumptions, followed by a delineation of a series of propositions designed to explicate the conditions under which moralistic conflicts emerge. The theory identifies the combination of the social geometry of interpersonal encounters along with the mechanisms that typically are used to justify the grievances that individuals express toward one another.

Religious Heterogamy and the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion: A Cross-National Analysis

This study examines the effect of religious heterogamy on the transmission of religion from one generation to the next. Using data from 37 countries in the 2008 Religion III Module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), I conduct a cross-national analysis of the relationship between parents’ religious heterogamy and their adult childrens’ religious lives. By estimating fixed effects regression models, I adjust for national-level confounders to examine patterns of association between having interreligious parents during childhood and level of adult religiosity as measured by self-rated religiousness, belief in God, and frequencies of religious attendance and prayer. The results indicate that having religiously heterogamous parents or parents with dissimilar religious attendance patterns are both associated with lower overall religiosity in respondents. Parents’ religious attendance, however, mediates the relationship when each parent has a different religion. Having one unaffiliated parent is associated with lower religiosity regardless of parents’ levels of religious attendance. The negative impact of parents’ religious heterogamy on religious inheritance is independent of national-level factors and has implications for anticipating changes in the religious landscapes of societies characterized by religious diversity and growing numbers of interreligious marriages.