Are Religious Parents Better Parents?

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Religious people, in many societies, tend to have more children than their secular counterparts. But does this come at a cost?

Life history theory suggests that it should. According to this theory, organisms trade offspring quantity for quality. In other words, the more children one has, the less likely any one of these children is to exhibit high reproductive potential. It's a very Darwinian idea, but there are lots of data to support it, both in human cultures and across a variety of other species.

But researchers from New Zealand and the United States appear to have found an interesting wrinkle in this well-established theory. Piggybacking on the finding that religious communities don't exhibit the same quantity vs. quality tradeoff in offspring fitness, they suggest that heightened parental cooperation in religious communities is the key ingredient.

They arrived at this conclusion by examining a sample of over 12,000 New Zealanders. New Zealand society is split approximately 50/50 between religious and secular identification. Therefore, they were able to compare religious people to non-religious people on a variety of behavioral, demographic, and attitudinal measures. Here's a summary of what they found:

• Religious identification and ritual frequency are associated with having more children, after adjusting for demographic differences. This confirms the key assumption: Religious people, on average, have bigger families than secular people (at least in New Zealand).
• Religious identification and ritual frequency are associated with higher levels of alloparenting (i.e., caregiving provided by non-biological parents) among people who don't have children. This, according to the researchers, is the first demonstration that religious cooperation extends to sharing parental responsibilities for non-biological kin.

Their argument, therefore, is that parental cooperation and alloparenting can overcome the offspring quality vs. quantity tradeoff, and that these characteristics are more prominent in religious communities. The researchers write:

"This model may […] help to clarify how cultural norms simultaneously drive the fitness of individuals and the growth of cultural groups. These dynamics, in other words, may contribute to an explanation for the continued resilience of religion in the modern world."

Perhaps evolution and religion can co-exist after all.

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