Talk Elections

Just ran across this:

http://www.pewforum.org/2016/10/26/one-in-five-u-s-adults-were-raised-in-interfaith-homes

Lots of interesting data but one thing made pretty clear is that mixed marriages sure suck for transmitting "cultural Catholicism".

That is interesting data, actually.  I didn't realize the "more responsible for your religious upbringing" question would be quite so gender-skewed.  Both my boyfriend and my mom grew up with one Protestant and one Catholic parent, but my mom was raised Catholic like her dad and my boyfriend was raised Catholic like his mom.  (Now neither of them is Catholic!  Nor is my boyfriend's mom anymore, for that matter.)

Yeah I think this alone kind of debunks the idea that Catholicism is at least "sticker" than most other types of Christianity. In fact it appears Protestant families have better retention rates:

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Yes, I know that "Protestant" is a much broader category and many of those people raised Protestant who still are are probably in different churches, and most Protestant churches probably have a lower individual retention rate than the Catholic numbers, but as also noted there's often not much difference between said Protestant churches too.

I wonder how much of these numbers with Catholics is due to lapsing/secularization/movement to mainline Protestantism or not-particularly-conservative Evangelicalism among whites and how much is due to Evangelical and Pentecostal conversion efforts among Hispanics. I'm not trying to imply anything by saying that, I'm genuinely curious.

I also think people are understating how important to a successful marriage they think shared politics is, considering that other studies (I'm afraid I can't cite them off the top of my head) have shown that political mixed marriages are actually becoming less common than religious mixed marriages these days.

For some high church Protestants, they'd likely find more in common with the Roman church than with a Baptist or a Pentecostal church.

I wonder how much of this is just due to increased ideological sorting of the parties, though?  Someone who held socially liberal "cosmopolitan" views in the 1960's probably would be unlikely to marry someone who was reactionary/conservative for their day, even if they were both in the same party.  Today, there's a lot more homogeneity in beliefs amongst the two parties, so it seems like the signal of ideology's effect on marriage is just being picked up more strongly than it did in the past because the parties are more ideologically coherent.