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. 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 attendance and their determinants over time. We construct a dataset of parent-child pairs from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and investigate (1) the frequency of transmission of attendance; (2) the attendance gap between parents and children and its persistence over cohorts and individuals; (3) whether and how various family and contextual variables predict the extent of religious transmission. We find that there is a high transmission of church attendance, but also a substantial parent-child attendance gap. This gap persists across individuals and cohorts. Family disruption and the percentage of nones in the state slightly increase the attendance gap. All other predictors have effects that are either non-significant or contrary to the expected direction. In general, it is difficult to attribute the incomplete transmission of churchgoing to specific predictors. Rather, secularization happens largely independently of attributes of the parents and their immediate surroundings.