Parents and Religion
We recently included several winning Top Question Tuesday selections on an interactive poll. Stay tuned to this blog as we’ll be releasing the results over the next several weeks! And don’t forget to submit your own nominations for Top Question Tuesday using the box on the right of this blog.
One question asked whether respondents were more religious, less religious, or about as equally religious as their parents. Overall, 21% felt they were more religious than their parents, while 34% felt they were less religious, 41% said they were equally as religious, and 4% were not sure.
Groups that are more likely than average to say they were less religious than their parents include respondents aged 18-29 (41%), those who live in small cities (44%), and those who are single (42%) or divorced/separated (40%). Groups that are more likely than average to say they are more religious than their parents include those who live in rural areas (25%), Protestants (26%), and those with some college education but not a college degree (23%).
Do you believe you are more, less or equally as religious as your parents?
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Way more. Demographics: 46 yo, Protestant, live in the ‘burbs, master’s degree.
More religious, Protestant, live in the suburbs with a BS degree and divorced.
This question is a bit humorous in my case, since both of my parents were not merely atheists, but militant atheists at that! They also belonged to several different “secular humanist,” “skeptical inquiry,” and “critical reasoning” organizations and received piles of journals, which they often saved up and sent to me after reading themselves — perhaps out of concern for my level of commitment to the cause!
For my part, I consider myself to be only strongly “agnostic,” since while I, like most people who have received a rigorous scientific education, certainly see no reason to violate “Occam’s Razor” to introduce invisible spiritual invisible entities to explain the existence or nature of this peculiar world of ours, I can hardly feel CERTAIN that such an entity or entities do not, or absolutely could not exist. After all, how much can my tiny three pound brain, or anybody else’s for that matter, really KNOW for sure about such eternally mysterious matters as the whys and wherefores of the vast cosmos?
I must admit it gives me some real comfort, however, to know that whatever the answers to such huge philosophical and religious questions may ultimately be, they simply are what they are; blessedly independent of mine, or any other human’s, opinion about them.
So does this view make me “more religious” than my parents? I suppose in some weird sense it does, since, for them, even such a highly skeptical agnosticism would be considered more or less but a “cowardly cop out”!
Much less. My parents, very traditionally religious with public school educations, enrolled my siblings and myself in Catholic parochial school. That took care of religion for me!