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Religion and Family

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the l icence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Arizona State University; date: 22 September 2015

Print Publication Date: Feb 2011 Subject: Religion, Social Science Studies of Religion Online Publication Date: Sep 2009

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199588961.013.0036

Religion and Family Penny Edgell The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion Edited by Peter B. Clarke

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Based on extensive and in-depth research on religion and the family, this article focuses on such questions as the ways in which religion shapes family life and how families sustain and change religious institutions, described here as social locations, for the production and transmission of religious familism or ideology about what constitutes a family and what a good family should be like. It also asks a set of pertinent questions that seek to understand the fit or lack of fit between religion and the family today. This already-complex topic is made ever-more complex by the increasingly diverse and pluralistic character of modern society.

Keywords: religion, religious familism, religious pluralism, family

Introduction

Throughout the history of the United States, religion and family have been intertwined and interdependent institutions, and in this, the present-day United States is no exception (Pankhurst and Houseknecht 2000). Mainstream religious institutions respond to evolving family life and household arrangements by providing new ministries to meet families' needs in an ever-changing social context, and new religious groups and movements— from the Shakers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to feminist spirituality groups—emerge and are organized around alternative understandings of the family. Changes in family life shape how religious institutions are organized, as seen in the Sunday School movement in the early twentieth century and in the new profile of ministries organized around a breadwinner father and stay-at-home mother that emerged in the booming post-war suburbs of the 1950s. Religious institutions depend on families to pass on the rituals and beliefs of a particular faith tradition (Myers 1996).

Religious institutions provide moral guidelines that shape family practices, the organization of family life, and our perceptions of “the good family” (Edgell 2005). Moreover, a person's religiosity, religious practice, and participation in religious institutions have important and wide-ranging effects on both her experiences of family life and on the way she conducts her roles within the family (Sherkat and Ellison 1999). Religious involvement is associated with marital stability, happiness and satisfaction in marital and parenting relations, gender-role ideology, and lower levels of delinquency in adolescence. It also influences how men and women choose to (p. 636) invest their time in home making and financial provision for the family, which can have long-term effects on occupational and status attainment (Glass and Jacobs 2005).

Understanding how religion shapes family life and cultural understandings of the family and how families sustain— and change—religious institutions are central to the sociology of religion, and this is evidenced by the well- developed literatures on religion and relationship quality, religion and adolescent development, how religious institutions retain their youth, and family formation effects on religious involvement (see Sherkat and Ellison 1999). It is also evident in newer work on religion and gender-role ideology and the effect of religion on women's

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educational and occupational attainment, literatures which have been greatly influenced by the increasing visibility and public involvement of American religious conservatives since the 1980s (Gallagher 2003; Glass and Jacobs 2005). Increasingly, sociologists who study family life and work-family management are paying attention to the effects of religious involvement, whether conceptualized as religious variables that shape family-related outcomes or as religiously based moral frameworks that shape cultural expectations about gender, work, and family (Gerson 2002; Sherkat and Ellison 1999).

Religion and the Cultural Repertoire of Family and Gender

One of the most important religious influences on family life is a cultural one. Religious institutions are social locations for the production and transmission of religious familism, or ideology about what constitutes a family and what a good family should be like. Religious familism varies over time, and differs according to important dimensions of social location like race and class. In the United States, most versions of religious familism have had important elements in common, promoting marital stability and prohibiting divorce and extramarital sex, emphasizing the centrality of child bearing and rearing to family life, and taking for granted a heterosexual union with a traditionally gendered division of labor (Christiano 2000; Sherkat and Ellison 1999).

Religious familism is an ideology that bridges the public and the private as traditionally understood, because it is fundamentally concerned with defining the public, the private, and the nature of the boundary between the two. Religious familism lends the weight of religious conviction, the power of religious authority, and the rhetoric of ultimate causes to inscribe the family as an embodied, earthly representation of a divine, cosmological order (Friedland 2001). As such, religious familism influences understandings of the private as a separate, feminine- gendered (p. 637) realm, and the state and market as public, male-gendered realms (Lakoff 1996). It encodes citizenship as more fully embodied by those who marry and raise children, providing discourses that justify the provision of public resources to support marriage and child rearing and the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of marriage, and linking marriage with ideals of public order (Cott 2002; Hull 2006). Religious familism also shapes individuals' political activism and social movement participation (Ginsburg 1989). The involvement of religious groups on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate is only one recent example of the stakes involved in designating some family forms as morally worthy and of conflating religious and civil understandings of the institutions of marriage and the family. Welfare policies that privilege marriage as a solution to poverty for poor women are another.

In any society there is a cultural repertoire for thinking and talking about family life, a repertoire that includes family schema (or cultural models of what a family is and what a good family is like), family-related discourses, and family- oriented practices. In the United States, and some would argue more widely, religion has a powerful, even a fundamental, influence on the available cultural repertoire of family life (Pankhurst and Houseknecht 2000). Religious family ideology provides cultural frameworks that apportion moral responsibility for financial provision and caretaking within the family, and it systematically links these with understandings of men's and women's innate natures, with what is a public concern and what is private, and with discourses on the good society (Bellah et al. 1991).

Questions about how religion shapes our cultural repertoire for thinking about family life are newly relevant after a period of more than thirty years of changes in family life. Since the 1960s, the United States, like most Western Societies, has seen high rates of divorce and an increase in the number of adults who live a substantial portion of their lives without a partner (see tables 35.1, 35.2, 35.3). There has been a large and sustained movement of women into the workforce that spans racial and social class divisions and includes mothers of young children, and the dual-earner couple has emerged as a new, and newly dominant, family form. There has been a shift in gender- role ideology; most Americans now prefer egalitarian relationships between men and women, which is part of a larger transition in which increasing value is placed on freedom and self-expression.

There has also been an increase in the numbers and the visibility of same-sex unions, single-parent families, blended families, and other “alternative” family arrangements that are contested but still far more accepted than they were a few decades ago. Many of the post-1965 wave of immigrants came to the United States with a different understanding of family life, preferring an extended family model and connections with close kin to the dominant nuclear family arrangement they found in the United States. The transition to adulthood is also different now than it

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was two or three generations ago; the links between education, establishing one's own household, and starting a family have been loosened, and no longer constitute a “package” of markers of adulthood which most young adults undertake to acquire at the same time. We live in an era of pluralism and flexibility regarding (p. 638) family life. Family formation, disruption, and reformation play a different role in adult lives than used to be the case. There are different cultural understandings of what is normal and desirable in family life, and the families that people form do not all look alike (Coontz 1997; Furstenberg 1999; Skolnick 1991; Treas 1999).

In my work on religion and family, I have concentrated on two interrelated sets of questions that stem from the desire to understand religious familism today. How do religious institutions orient themselves to the wide range of families in our society now? Who do they include and exclude, and do they take an authoritative stance that seeks to define some family forms and arrangements as more appropriate than others? And how do the people who live in and through a diverse and pluralistic set of family arrangements orient themselves to religious institutions? Do they perceive them as relevant? Do they get involved? Or do they find religious communities to be unwelcoming or irrelevant, and seek out other venues for social connection, community involvement, and spiritual expression? This is a set of questions that gets at the fit—or lack of fit—between religion and family today.

Cases

Recently, my research has concentrated on the links between religion and family, based largely on a study of four communities in upstate New York (Edgell 2005), but also including ethnographic work on three urban congregations in the Twin Cities (Edgell and Docka 2007). These studies explored how local congregations produce religious familism through both their rhetoric—what is said in sermons, small group meetings, and echoed in the conversation of members and lay leaders—and through their practices—the practical routines of congregational life, found in both formal programming and in informal ways of doing things.

When scholars study how religion shapes family ideals, they often concentrate on the formal statements of elites— doctrines and position statements on women's roles or same-sex marriage, or the discourse produced by special- purpose groups like Focus on the Family or Promisekeepers. These are important sources of family-oriented discourse, but it is in local congregations that most Americans encounter, interpret, and come to understand the implications of their religion for their family life. There are more than 300,000 local congregations in the United States, and there are strong family formation effects on religious involvement at the local level. Investigating the religion-family link in local religious communities provides a window onto “lived religion” and helps us to understand how official viewpoints and elite discourse shape religion as most people encounter it in their daily lives.

In upstate New York, I investigated the religion—family link by studying congregations and community members in two rural counties, one working-class neighborhood in Syracuse, and one middle-class inner-ring suburb of Syracuse. These communities were largely white (ranging from 76 percent to 95 percent), and they (p. 639) were filled with congregations from mainstream religious denominations—Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Evangelical Protestant (for details see Edgell 2006). These communities are not a “microcosm” of America; they are exemplary of a particular portion of the religious landscape, the religious institutions which comprise the largest and a culturally influential portion of organized religion in the USA. The history and culture of these mainstream religious institutions in the USA has been deeply intertwined with changes in religious familism; these institutions have defined themselves in part through the way that they understand and orient themselves to family life (Bendroth 1993; 2002).

Most of the congregations in these communities, in their rhetoric and programs and routine ways of doing things, took for granted that, though there are many kinds of families, the ideal family is a heterosexual, nuclear family with children in which the father is the breadwinner and the mother is the primary caretaker. That is, most of them upheld the “Ozzie and Harriet” family as ideal. However, they had adapted in incremental and partial ways to some new family realities as well. Although they valued marriage, they were welcoming of single adults, including single parents, and did quite a bit to provide support for the divorced. They had adapted to the reality of dual-earner schedules by holding women's meetings in the evenings, providing baby sitting for many meetings and events, and rearranging the preparation for rituals like confirmation and baptism so that these did not require ten or twelve weeknight meetings. In more liberal Protestant churches, and some progressive Catholic parishes, feminist understandings of women's lives and concerns were expressed, and inclusive language was widely used.

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Evangelical Protestant churches embraced women's contributions to the community and were the most willing to accommodate the time constraints of dual-earner families with children. These conservative Protestant churches also had active support groups for single parents and members going through a divorce, and their pastors were involved in finding such members, usually women, community-based sources of support as well.

These changes, however, did not displace the emphasis on the importance of an intact family with children, preferably with a male breadwinner, as the ideal family arrangement. This ideal was expressed in part through congregational practices, the programming offered, and informal ways of arranging the daily and weekly life of the congregation. I found that most congregations, liberal and conservative alike, still based most of their programming on a “standard package” of ministries, oriented mostly to women, children, and youth, that emerged as a template during the 1950s post-war religious expansion. Changes to this standard package were incremental and sometimes instituted only after a period of some resistance on the part of the leadership. And in liberal and conservative churches alike, the rhetoric, particularly of pastors and lay leaders, still upheld an Ozzie and Harriet family as ideal.

In conservative churches a neo-patriarchal family ideology was explicit, and was linked to a theology that designates the male as the head of the family as Christ is the head of the church. In these churches, divorce and single parenting were spoken of as forms of “brokenness”. Individually, pastors and lay leaders were welcoming (p. 640) and supportive of those who do not fit the two-parents-with-children norm. But in sermons and in informal conversations they upheld a male-headed family with children as a biblically based ideal still relevant today. In mainline Protestant and progressive Catholic parishes, the official rhetoric about the family was progressive and inclusive. But in unofficial discourse—in everyday conversation, in themes that emerged in small group meetings— there was a nostalgia for the Ozzie and Harriet family of the past. This nostalgia was often linked to memories of a 1950s “heyday”, when the Sunday school was overflowing, when to be a pastor was to be a respected and even influential member of the community, and when the church ran largely on the volunteer labor of women.

It has become common in the religion and family literature to emphasize the differences between liberal and conservative Christians in family ideology. The family-oriented discourse of conservative Protestants has received particular attention, and this is partly because sociologists who study religion take modernization to be a central problem for their research. Elite conservative Protestant discourse on the family rejects the universalism and egalitarianism that are hallmarks of the transition to modern ways of thought. Rather, it emphasizes the fundamental differences between men's and women's natures, valuing the importance of ascribed characteristics in determining one's status and moral obligations in the world. Conservative Catholic discourse on the family echoes this gender essentialism, but has received less scholarly attention. These differences in official religious discourse were present in the local congregations I studied. Liberal Protestant pastors and progressive Catholic priests never referred to divorce or single parenting as a form of brokenness, and they emphasized the commonalities between men and women, particularly in their parenting roles.

So it is important to understand that, while the elite religious discourse of liberals and conservatives differs a great deal when it comes to what is an ideal family, the congregations I studied, across the liberal/conservative divide, had institutionalized a neo-patriarchal family schema. This points to the importance of balancing our studies of official and elite discourses on the family with analyses of how particular institutional forms become embedded in organizational structure and routines such that they shape and limit an organization's capacity to adapt to change or to express new cultural schemas. Studies of religion and family privilege ideas, beliefs, and official religious discourse and often ignore how institutional forms—like the typical ministry profile of mainstream congregations— are the products of and reproduce cultural models of “the good family”.

In the communities included in my study in New YorkState, about 85 percent of congregations had adapted to some changes in family life (while mostly avoiding more controversial and contested changes like whether to welcome same-sex couples). But they were still operating with a kind of Ozzie and Harriet family ideal regardless of official religious views. This tempered differences based on a left/right ideological divide; evangelical congregations and conservative Catholic parishes (p. 641) in fact welcomed single parents and provided support for those undergoing divorce. Mainline Protestant and progressive Catholic congregations embraced changes in gender roles and the family in theory, while maintaining a considerable nostalgia for an idealized version of the time before these changes occurred (Coontz 1992).

There were some exceptions. About 15 percent of the congregations in these communities were innovators, who

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had embraced a very different understanding of what the ideal family is like and, attendant to that, a different understanding of the role of the family in the life of the congregation. Innovators were all large congregations with many resources, and they were mostly liberal Protestant, although a few progressive Catholic congregations were innovators, too. Innovators had many programs for people who do not fit the Ozzie and Harriet ideal, and they also had many programs that were not organized around gender and life stage, in which people's family status (married or parent) was not signaled by their participation in a particular activity. These congregations innovated in multiple ways—they had daycare for members, tutoring for youth, and had made some public commitment to welcoming gay and lesbian members and same-sex couples. They also had progressive family rhetoric, with none of the nostalgia for the past found in other congregations. Though only 15 percent of congregations, they comprised over 40 percent of the average Sunday attendance in these communities, and interviews with the pastors and long-term lay leaders suggested that, although they were large and resource-rich before they innovated, they also grew after they decided to do so. These congregations suggest that, particularly in informal programs and practices, but through some formal programs as well, a new family schema is being embodied in daily congregational practice in some parts of the landscape of mainstream American religious institutions.

This new, alternative family schema is largely organized around parenting, but parenting as divorced from either a nuclear family structure or a traditionally gendered division of labor. This schema is also open to same-sex couples. It corresponds most closely to what is called “the nurturing family” (Lakoff 1996). Specific roles and duties are less important than the nurturing and mutual caretaking of members. Innovator congregations, which already privilege practices organized around caretaking, have found caring practices to be a natural way to extend and adapt their model of the family. Informal rhetoric in these congregations is congruent with this nurturing and open approach to the ideal family, emphasizing that God approves of all kinds of families. In these congregations, Ozzie and Harriet belong to the past, and the ideal family is one in which members are loving and committed to one another's well-being.

The Ozzie and Harriet ideal is a very white, middle-class understanding of the family, although as a cultural ideal it has historically been powerful beyond the white middle-class, shaping institutions, as well as popular culture, that affect many other Americans (Meyerowitz 1994). My study of upstate New York was based in communities with an almost exclusively white population. It was unclear how much what I found there was due to the racial composition of the communities and how much was (p. 642) due to fact that the mainstream institutions represented there are themselves pervaded by white, middle-class assumptions, values, and ways of doing things. The research I conducted in the Twin Cities with my colleague Danielle Docka allowed me to begin to investigate whether congregations in a different setting would exhibit a different kind of family-oriented rhetoric and practice (Edgell and Docka 2007). Docka was the lead researcher conducting most of the fieldwork in three urban congregations— a Black church, a parish with a large Hispanic ministry, and a White liberal church active in local justice-oriented ministries. These three congregations were chosen to exemplify those social locations where we would expect considerable distance from the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet ideal.

And these congregations display a range of family ideals wider than the one I found in upstate New York. In the Black church and the Hispanic parish, the extended family was the cultural ideal, and it was supported in a range of practical and symbolic ways that elevate it to near-parity with the nuclear family ideal, including youth-oriented programs that the entire family attends together and mentoring programs that match children and youth with adult, non-familial role models from among the congregational leaders. These congregations did not show incremental variations on an older standard approach; they started from and institutionalized a fundamentally different model of the family. Likewise, the liberal Protestant church was an innovator, particularly in the degree to which it has taken the nuclear family out of the center of congregational rhetoric and practice. At this church people are encountered and embraced as individuals more than as couples or families, and that, too, is based on a different model of what the family is and how the family should and does relate to the religious community.

There is also tension between the more innovative family models that each congregation has developed and that make sense of the lives and experiences of the members, and the Ozzie and Harriet model that most lay and pastoral leaders in these congregations recognize as a preferred one in their particular denomination or faith tradition. This tension comes out particularly in regard to understandings of gender, and was evident in the kinds of boundary maintenance we observed regarding the gender implications of certain family ideals. At the Catholic parish, the affirmation of extended family ties and the support ministries for single parents were things of which the deacon and priest were proud. But when we discussed them in interviews, we were repeatedly told that these

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should not be taken as an indication of any kind of support for couples living together without marriage. And the rationale for these ministries was firmly rooted in a patriarchal understanding of gender. Both of these pastoral leaders explained that their ministry assumes that women and men have fundamentally different natures, needs, and roles. In the Black church, mentoring programs for African American youth create extended family-like ties while being embedded in a thorough critique of the emasculating conditions that African American men encounter and the forces that undermine their ability to take their rightful place as breadwinners and (p. 643) providers for their families. In both of these congregations, the limits of innovation with regard to family ministry occur whenever a traditional understanding of gender roles could be called into question. These limits are well established, publicly spoken, and often reinforced by the leaders.

One of the implications of this research is the importance of understanding the links between religious familism and the production of other social knowledge and forms of culture. This is especially the case regarding gender. Family ideology is one of the primary ways in which cultural understandings of gender are produced, and religious institutions are a primary location for the production of gender as a social institution (Coontz 1992; Martin 2004). Moreover, many men and women are aware of the messages that religious institutions send about gender and respond to them directly. Religious communities are gendered social spaces in two senses: producing cultural ideals of gender and being locations in which men's and women's religious commitment is expressed in, and means, very different things.

Churchgoing is a gendered activity in all of the congregations I have studied. Men are more likely to become involved as an expression of and to find support for a family-oriented life in a society in which they have few sources of support for decisions to place family and children over work and career. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to seek out religious involvement as a place to express and explore their own faith and spirituality. Heterosexual men understand religion as a family-oriented activity and tend to join when they marry and have children; women are more likely to see religion as a place to express and explore their own faith, and so are more likely to be religiously involved throughout their adult lives. The White, middle-class women I interviewed are more critical of religious institutions and religious authority than are men in the same congregations, and try to teach their children to be the same. Involvement in a local congregation is influenced not only by one's own family structure (married or single, parent or childless), but also by the cultural frameworks through which one interprets the appropriate relationship between religion and family life.

My research has been centrally concerned with how religious institutions produce family-oriented culture—models of the ideal family, symbols and rhetoric through which experiences of family formation and disruption are understood, and forms of programming and daily practices that make it easier for people in some family arrangements to participate in congregational life and harder for others. I have also found that cultural factors shape men's and women's religious involvement. People who interpret participation in a local congregation as an expression of a family and community-oriented lifestyle show different patterns of religious involvement over the course of their lives, and in-depth interviews suggest that the causal relationship between involvement and interpretive frameworks for understanding that involvement may work differently for different people. Some people seek out a religious community when they marry or have children because they already understand this as appropriate, and some people come to view their religious participation as expressive of their family commitments through their experiences in local congregations.

(p. 644) Religion and Family in a Diverse Society

My analyses of the cultural and institutional connections, along with the changes that have occurred in both the family and in religious institutions in the United States, have led me to conclude that our scholarship needs to expand its focus in order to engage with the sociological implications of religion in our society today. To some extent, sociologists who study religion and the family are like the religious leaders I interviewed for my study in upstate New York; we orient our research and ask our questions in a way that is a better fit with the past than with the present. We need to investigate how religious and cultural diversity, transformations of the individual life course, and changing attitudes towards traditional institutions of all kinds are reconfiguring the institutional interdependency between religion and family in our society. And the “we” in those sentences is intentional, because the foci for research that I suggest, below, stem in large part from the awareness of the limits of my own research.

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In our studies of religious institutions we need to pay more attention to what feminist scholars term “intersectionality”, or how religious familism is embedded within and shapes understandings of race, ethnicity, social class, and gender (Collins 2001). The production of religious familism occurs in real, historically located communities and institutions that vary by race and social class, and in the context of a society that is both hetero- normative and pervasively gendered. Too often our scholarship adopts the voice of neutrality while reproducing taken-for-granted assumptions about what “counts” as a family and what family forms are “good for” society or individual members. The value of maintaining strong institutions in their current form is another common theme, as evident in the characterization of new forms of spiritual expression as flakey or self-indulgent. My own work has not escaped this tendency completely, in part because our community of discourse is pervaded by rhetorical techniques that simultaneously acknowledge that “gender is important” or “race really matters”, while proceeding as though that were not the case, and it is quite easy to write in and through that dominant language. But it is crucial to learn how to escape it, because of the growing diversity of the American religious landscape and the increasing unease with which Americans confront traditional institutions of all forms.

One way to change our focus is to understand religious familisms as particular, historically rooted representations of ideals that systematically privilege the interests and experiences of some over others, that justify access to resources and particular social policies, and that have implications for inequality. Research in two different environments, upstate New York and the TwinCities, though some of it very exploratory, showed that different racial and ethnic groups construct different kinds of religious familism even when they participate in mainstream (p. 645) religious institutions. But it also suggests that mainstream religious institutions are influenced in fundamental ways by neo-patriarchal understandings of gender, and that this is true not only of institutions overtly identified with conservative religious traditions. But we have only just begun to understand the intersection of familism, gender ideology, social class, and race (see, e.g., Read 2003).

The recent scholarly focus on religious conservatives in the United States, particularly conservative Protestants, has led to renewed interest in the links between gender, family, and religion for women and, recently, for men (e.g., Wilcox 2004). Sociologists have concentrated on this part of the religious landscape in part because conservative Protestants seem to be anti-modern in important respects, and modernization is a central sociological problematic. The vitality of conservative Protestantism has provided an impetus for debates about the implications of modernization and privatization for religious authority, religious involvement, and religious institutions. In addition, religious conservatives have been publicly visible and vocal on issues related to gender, sexuality, and the family. But this literature has been largely silent about the intersection between conservative religious familism, racial ideology, and social class location (for an exception, see Heath 2003).

Moreover, American religion is much more diverse than our scholarship reflects, and in ways that bear directly on questions about the link between religion and family. In the Twin Cities, where I now live, we have a large Hmong population which, like many other immigrant communities, values the extended family as a cultural ideal, and maintains strong intergenerational ties that aid in the transmission of resources long after children have reached adulthood. Many immigrant communities form parallel religious institutions, but some are transforming “mainstream” institutions, as Hispanic immigrants are transforming Catholicism in many parts of the United States. Some long- resident non-White populations also value the extended family and have a very different set of expectations than do middle-class whites about everything, ranging from meaningful styles of worship to whether activities for women, children, and youth should be separate or combined in “families all together” ministries. A focus on white Protestant Christian conservatives is only a partial focus, and does not help us to understand how religious pluralism affects the cultural pluralism surrounding the family which characterizes the USA today.

Other transformations are taking place in how Americans relate to religious institutions. One of the most sociologically significant generational changes in family life is in the loosening of the previously tight connection between completing high school or college, marriage, parenting, and the establishment of one's own family household (Furstenberg 1999). The emergent church movement is just one example of how generational changes are linked to changes in spirituality and the transformation of religious institutions. In addition, there has been a rapid growth of “alternative” religious practices and groups, and the growth of religious seeking or reflexive spirituality. More than 80 percent of Americans now identify as either “spiritual and religious both” or “only spiritual”, and estimates of how many (p. 646) Americans participate in some kind of organized spiritual group or practice range from 20 to 40 percent (Marler and Hadaway 2002; Roof et al. 1999).

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Scholars embedded within a modernization paradigm have often treated religious “seeking” and exploration of non-Western and non-institutionalized forms of religious and spiritual practice as somewhat flighty, an expression of a form of individualism that is dangerous to community-oriented commitments and troublesome because it undermines healthy institutions (see Marler and Hadaway 2002; Roof et al. 1999). This is occasionally true even of some who treat these forms of spirituality sympathetically, because our understanding of what “counts” as religion that is sociologically relevant takes for granted that what matters is structure—organized groups and movements with resources “count” more than loose networks of spiritual practitioners, and individuals who engage seriously with a highly elaborated, rationalized, and historic doctrine are perceived as more rational, in the classic Weberian sense of that word, than those who cast runes, read Tarot, or meditate.

But at least two things are sociologically relevant about these newer, or newly expanded, forms of religious expression. One is their disinterested, even critical, orientation to mainstream religious institutions, which may stem in part from a sense that these institutions are unresponsive to changes in gender roles and family forms. The other is the way in which they provide an entirely different cultural repertoire for thinking about religious authority, commitment, and experience, and how these might relate to family life, gender roles, and gender identity. Both therapeutic discourse and reflexive spirituality provide language for thinking and talking about transcendent meaning in a highly rationalized, individualized society, and as such, they are excellent tools for the project of identity construction in late modernity.

Scholars of religion and the family also need to expand the range of questions they asks when the focus is on the individual and not the religious institution or tradition. Sociologists have understood religious involvement as a straightforward expression of structural location, and have treated family formation as leading to religious involvement in a uniform way, because of the strong statistical relationship between marriage and parenting, on the one hand, and church attendance, on the other (see Edgell 2006 for a review). But that statistical relationship may not be truly linear. Family formation effects on religious involvement may be mediated by cultural understandings of the “fit” between religion and family, understandings that may not be uniformly shared and that may continue to change as men and women confront mainstream religious institutions that have responded only in partial and incremental ways to new family realities.

The relationship between family formation and religious involvement may be fundamentally different for those who identify primarily as “spiritual” and not religious (Hout and Fischer 2002). And for the growing proportion of Americans who identify as neither spiritual or religious, family formation and religion may be disassociated, with other institutional and familial commitments providing the moral socialization of children (Marler and Hadaway 2002). Our scholarship (p. 647) should also focus on the reconfiguration of the life course over the last thirty years in our society by balancing our research on family formation effects on religious involvement with studies of how religious involvement is affected by family disruption, reformation, and transformation—including the links between religion and family life for same-sex couples and others who are generally treated as exceptional cases and excluded from the kinds of analyses that dominate our field.

Finally, we should do more to understand how religious involvement shapes a broad range of behaviors that have effects on family life. Work has begun on how religion shapes women's labor-force participation, and this is a good beginning. But how does religion influence the work and family life of men, or of working-class Americans, and how do race and ethnicity shape these patterns? How does religiosity influence the intergenerational transfer of resources in populations that value the extended family, and do these dynamics play out in a gendered way, favoring either sons or daughters in patterns of family investment? This overview is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to share with others how my own experiences of conducting research on religion and family life has made me sensitive to particular ways in which our knowledge is partial, oriented to particular theoretical questions, focusing on particular groups and institutions, and leaving other important questions unaddressed. The society we live in is increasingly diverse and pluralistic in ways that are both transforming our dominant religious institutions and opening up new spaces for religious expression. These transformations are occurring in a society in which religiously based ideologies about good, acceptable, and appropriate forms of family life have public as well as private implications. In such a landscape the institutional link between religion and family is being transformed in ways that call for new questions, new approaches, and a broader scope for our scholarship.

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