Why Don’t Religious ‘Nones’ Want Kids?
(ANALYSIS) OK, so I was looking at my high school yearbook the other day. Don’t judge me. It’s something that people who grew up in small towns do on a regular basis when they see something on Facebook about someone roughly their age who is being arrested or has died. Sometimes I can’t remember if I went to school with that person, so off to the yearbook I go.
I started thumbing through the first couple of pages and found a layout that featured my graduation from Salem Community High School. There was a nice picture in the bottom corner of one page featuring me and six other guys from my high school friend group. That got me thinking about where all of those fellas ended up. All seven of us still live in Illinois, and I still talk to a few of them.
Then I started counting. Of the seven, three have no biological children. One has just one kid. Two of us have two kids, and one guy has three. Seven guys and eight kids. Since we are all in our mid-forties now, I can confidently say that this group of graduates from the class of 2000 is not going to reach replacement fertility level. This is obviously one of the biggest shifts in American life over the last couple of generations—young adults aren’t having kids.
Most surveys are not particularly good at digging into the reasons why people aren’t reproducing anymore. However, we have a great new addition to the discourse about fertility because Pew has posted their American Trends Panel 147 on the Association of Religion Data Archives. The first line of the summary tells the whole story: “The purpose of this study is to discover why people choose not to have children, exploring factors like career, finances, world concerns, or personal choice.”
Now, the full sample does contain younger adults who said they were unlikely to have children, but I excluded them from this analysis. Instead, I restricted the sample to people who were at least fifty years old and had never had children. Put simply, for nearly everyone in this group, childlessness is likely to be a permanent life-course outcome.
These folks were asked to describe their thoughts on having children and were given three primary response options: there was a time they wanted kids, they never wanted children, or they weren’t sure if they wanted children. I broke this sample down into four of the larger religious traditions: Protestants, Catholics, the unaffiliated (the “nones”) and those from other faith groups.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.