The Impact of Religious Switching on Conservative Protestant Disadvantage in the Transition to Adulthood

Jennifer Glass, University of Texas at Austin
Scott Fitzgerald, University of Iowa
April Sutton, University of Texas at Austin

Research revealing associations between religion and social class is bedeviled by questions of causal inference: are conservative Protestants motivated by religious participation to order their lives in certain ways, or are those who order their lives by the early assumption of adult roles simply more attracted to the message and resources of conservative Protestant organizations? Religious switching offers a way to help understand the causal ordering of religious participation and demographic behavior. We look at adolescents who change their religious affiliation across four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and then observe their transition to adulthood using four markers – educational attainment, age at first marriage, age at first birth, and current income. By observing youth in conservative Protestant households who do and do not persist in their religious affiliation, we can model whether those who disaffiliate diminish their disadvantage relative to those who remain.