Across the world, religious people have more children than their secular counterparts. In post-industrial environments family size is inversely related to child success. Yet children born to religious parents often flourish.

Currently, we have limited understanding of how religion impacts the number of children people have or their children’s educational, economic, and health outcomes, and why these dynamics vary across religious groups. Moreover, processes of market integration greatly affect fertility, but it is unclear how these processes of socioeconomic change interact with religion’s influence on reproductive decision-making and child success. 

As a continuation of work (funded by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religious Trust) interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, this project will provide support to an international research team that aims to explore the relationship between religion, family size, child success through the lenses of evolutionary anthropology and demography.

The team hypothesizes that religious children flourish despite large family sizes due to the high levels of cooperative support available to religious parents. They also predict that religious involvement by parents has a stronger effect on child outcomes in more market-integrated economies. 

The team’s expert evolutionary anthropologists and demographers will systematically test hypotheses on data collected from over 6000 participants and over 7400 of their children in five countries on three continents that represent six religions and varying degrees of modernization (Bangladesh, the Gambia, India, Malawi, and the United States). These results will be contextualized and further explored using cross-cultural qualitative data, collected from mothers and fathers across over 70 focus groups.

With this project, the researchers aspire to usher in a new scholarly field focused on the evolutionary demography of religion. They anticipate results of this study contributing to methodological advances and policy and development initiatives in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries, and informing public debates on the resilience of religion in the modern era.