With regard to the first—the effect of religious denomination on modern contraceptive use—I derived a set of hypotheses that adapt the three main theoretical perspectives on the religion—fertility relationship to the socio-historical context of the study area. The characteristics perspective, which seeks to trace religious differentials in fertility-related behavior to attributes unrelated to religion, suggests a straightforward hypothesis:. The particularistic theology perspective invites us to look for possible differences among various denominations in explicit positions on family planning.
The official position of the Roman Catholic Church on artificial birth control is well known. Assuming that this stance is fully shared by local clergy and enjoined on church members, one should expect Catholics to have the lowest contraceptive rate. Although contraceptives may not enter the family-values narrative explicitly, one could expect that, at least implicitly, the pronatalist discourse would discourage family planning use in all denominations, compared with nonaffiliated women.
Hence the second hypothesis:. To apply the minority-group status perspective, one first needs to define what constitutes a minority group in this socio-religious context. Based on the brief historical outline presented earlier, Catholics and traditional Protestants seem to fit this definition for two interrelated reasons.
First, they have experienced a considerable loss of membership since the end of colonial rule, which has transformed them from numeric majorities to minorities. At the same time, they have maintained their privileged ties to the state in general and to its health care system in particular. Because modern family planning is a state-controlled and distributed resource, the connections that church members may have to the family planning establishment, however informal they might be, could yield an advantage in accessing family planning information and nurturing tastes for and enhancing practice of contraceptive use.
This contextually adapted minority-group status perspective leads to the following hypothesis:. If religious involvement, approximated by church attendance, is a marker of greater religiosity, and greater religiosity is associated with greater pronatalism, as has typically been the case in contemporary Western societies, then religious involvement should be inversely associated with contraceptive use.
For many women in rural and small-town sub-Saharan Africa, however, church provides the only viable channel for nontraditional that is, not kinship- or marriage-based social and civic inclusion and exposure to new ideas, practices, and preferences. Thus, if religious involvement introduces women to novel tastes and technologies, then, on the contrary, it should be positively associated with the likelihood of modern contraceptive use.
Corresponding to the three main theoretical perspectives, three hypotheses concerning the association between religious involvement and contraceptive use can be postulated:. In line with the conceptualization and hypotheses regarding denominational differences in modern contraceptive use, the association between religious involvement and modern contraception may also be denomination-specific: Data for this study were drawn from a representative population-based cluster survey of women aged 18—50 carried out by a research team from Arizona State University and Eduardo Mondlane University in in the Chibuto district of Gaza province in southern Mozambique.
The survey was conducted in 82 randomly selected communities clusters: Thirty households were randomly selected in each urban cluster and 24 in each rural cluster.
Contraception
In each of those households, one woman aged 18—50 was randomly chosen for an interview. The survey had a participation rate of nearly percent; of 2, selected women, only 2 refused to be interviewed. A structured survey instrument was used. The survey instrument and related survey materials are available from the author upon request.
The outcome variable is whether a woman was using a modern contraceptive method the pill, injectables, IUD, condom, or tubal ligation at the time of the survey.
The question concerning contraceptive use was not asked of pregnant respondents 12 percent of the sample , who are therefore excluded from the analysis. Women with a religious affiliation and those without are included in the analysis. Despite clear instructions to interviewers to distinguish between membership and participation in a religious congregation, at least some of the surveyed women probably had difficulty making this distinction.
A Protestant Critique of the Contraception Debate
Therefore, the nonaffiliated group is likely to include women who nominally belonged to a church but chose not to acknowledge this, based on their assessment of their church involvement. Respondents with a religious affiliation are subdivided into five denominational categories defined earlier: Although the hypotheses do not differentiate across all of these denominational categories, I include each of them as separate dummy variables in the statistical model to ensure that I do not miss any unexpected variations across them.
To capture the association between participation in the life of a religious congregation and modern contraceptive use, I use frequency of religious attendance among women reporting a religious affiliation. I do not distinguish between specific reasons for going to church because, as prior ethnographic explorations have suggested, these reasons are often overlapping. Frequency of attendance is operationalized as a set of dummy variables: Because the outcome variable is dichotomous, binomial logistic regression is used for the multivariate analyses. The models control for standard sociodemographic characteristics measured at the time of the survey.
The distributions of the variables used in the multivariate analyses are presented in Table 1.
Religious Denomination, Religious Involvement, and Modern Contraceptive Use in Southern Mozambique
Because respondents residing in the same survey clusters may share some unobserved characteristics, a random-intercept approach is employed to minimize the related bias in the estimates. Percentage of nonpregnant respondents, by selected characteristics, Chibuto, Mozambique, The religious palette of the area is captured in the distribution of denominational affiliation of the survey respondents shown in Table 1. Catholics, once the dominant group, constitute 13 percent of the sample, traditional Protestants 10 percent, Apostolics 12 percent, and other Pentecostals 11 percent.
Women representing a medley of Zionist churches make up a clear plurality—43 percent.
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Notably, 12 percent of survey respondents declare no affiliation with organized religion, and only one-tenth of women in that group report having been affiliated with a church in the past although previous affiliation may have been under-reported. Table 2 shows the educational attainment of each denominational group and of nonaffiliated respondents. These statistics illustrate the educational edge of Catholics and, to a lesser extent, traditional Protestants, and also highlight the huge disadvantage of nonaffiliated women. Percentage distribution of nonpregnant respondents, by religious affiliation, according to educational attainment, Chibuto, Mozambique, Table 3 presents the proportions of nonpregnant respondents who report using a modern contraceptive method, by individual religious characteristics.
Clearly, women who belong to religious congregations 88 percent of all nonpregnant women report a higher level of modern contraceptive use than do women who do not. The distribution of contraceptive users across the categories of denominational affiliation and involvement displays considerable variation. Yielding initial support to hypothesis 1. On the other end of that range are members of Zionist and Pentecostal congregations, among whom only 20 percent report being current modern contraceptive users.
Protestants are close to Catholics, whereas members of Apostolic churches gravitate toward Zionists and Pentecostals. Percentage of nonpregnant women practicing modern contraception, by religious affiliation and frequency of church attendance, Chibuto, Mozambique, Among women who report an affiliation with organized religion, the prevalence of modern contraceptive use appears to increase with frequency of religious attendance, as would be suggested by hypothesis 2. Thus, contraceptive prevalence reaches 28 percent among women who went to church more than two times in the two weeks preceding the survey, compared with 20 percent among those who did not attend church at all in the same time period.
The intermediate group—those who attended only once or twice—stands in the middle but somewhat closer to nonattendees. Table 4 presents the odds ratios from random-intercept logistic regression models predicting current modern contraceptive use among all nonpregnant respondents. Values greater than 1 indicate a positive effect of a given predictor, whereas values less than 1 indicate a negative effect.
Both models includes dummies for religious affiliations—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Apostolic, Zionist—and for nonaffiliated women; Pentecostals are the reference category. The first column presents a baseline model that does not include any controls. The baseline model shows that Catholics are significantly different from Pentecostal women: At the same time, the difference between Catholics and Protestants is not statistically significant not shown. Among Apostolic, Zionist, and nonaffiliated women, the differences from Pentecostals in the likelihood of using modern contraceptive methods are much smaller and are not statistically significant.
Odds ratios from random-intercept logistic regression models predicting current modern contraceptive use among all nonpregnant women, Chibuto, Mozambique, Odds ratios from random-intercept logistic regression models predicting current practice of modern contraception among women having a religious affiliation, Chibuto, Mozambique, The second model in Table 4 adds control variables. Most of the controls are themselves powerful predictors of contraceptive use although, interestingly, neither desire for additional children nor distance to the nearest clinic has a significant effect.
None of the other three denominational groups nor the nonaffiliated is statistically distinguishable from Pentecostal women. In sum, these results provide minimal support for hypothesis 1. To examine the effect of religious involvement on the likelihood of modern contraceptive use, I exclude the respondents who did not report a religious affiliation at the time of the survey, because those respondents were not asked about their church attendance.
Table 5 displays the results of a pair of models that includes denominational affiliation with Pentecostals again as the reference category and frequency of religious attendance in the two weeks preceding the survey interview. As in the previous set of models, the first model includes only the religious variables, whereas the second model adds controls.
For the effects of religious denomination, the results are similar to those in Table 4 , despite the exclusion of nonaffiliated women and a corresponding reduction in the size of the analytic sample. Catholics and, to a lesser degree, Protestants are significantly different from Pentecostals in their likelihood of currently practicing modern contraception, whereas Apostolics and Zionists are not.
Most interestingly, mirroring the earlier observed bivariate pattern, the likelihood of modern contraceptive use is positively associated with high frequency of religious attendance. Whereas women who attended their churches one or two times in the two weeks before the survey were not significantly different from women who did not attend at all, the odds of using modern family planning were 1. The addition of controls slightly diminishes the denominational differences: At the same time, the inclusion of controls does not affect the difference between those who frequently attend church and those who never do.
This result yields support to hypothesis 2. Importantly, contrary to my supposition, the effect of frequent attendance does not vary across denominations not shown. The results of the model that includes interactions between denomination and frequency of attendance are available upon request. Although limited to one sub-Saharan setting, this analysis has produced informative results that have broad relevance and implications. At the bivariate level, women with any religious affiliation, taken as a whole, were more likely to be practicing modern contraception than were nonaffiliated women, but this difference concealed denominational variation among affiliated women.
Catholics and to a lesser degree traditional Protestants showed a greater likelihood of modern contraceptive use than Pentecostals. The detected denomination-based differences in contraceptive use are nontrivial in magnitude and persist after the inclusion of a battery of individual sociodemographic factors and community characteristics. Furthermore, in sub-Saharan Africa, higher contraceptive prevalence among Catholics and Protestants, compared with other religious groups, is not unusual Heaton What makes Roman Catholics and Protestants more receptive to contraceptive technologies?
I propose that their contraceptive edge owes to a large extent to their connections with the state and especially the local medical establishment. The similarity of historical trajectories and resulting political positioning of the Catholic and traditional Protestant churches has translated into similar receptiveness of novel social technologies, including those in the area of reproductive regulation, and these are still doled out largely, if not entirely, by the government. I do not claim that religion is used by the government as a policy instrument or plays a role in the allocation of state resources, akin to what Weinreb described as ethnically biased health policies in Kenya.
Rather, I contend that membership in the Catholic Church or a traditional Protestant Church offers an informal yet potentially significant advantage for individual access to and appropriation of contraceptive tastes and technologies. Reproductive and contraceptive decisions are still made by individuals and couples and are guided by perceived benefits for their families and households Goldscheider and Uhlenberg ; Johnson and Burton Hence, the informal privileged access to contraceptive services among Catholics and Protestants affords opportunities rather than creating imperatives.
Whereas these findings can be theoretically framed within a contextually adapted minority-group status perspective, any connections with the particularistic theology perspective seem much less compelling. In the study setting, the articulated doctrinal repertoires of most church leaders are remarkably similar. Contraceptive use is simply outside of the agenda of most religious leaders. If anything, the standard messages that praise parenting, and especially mothering, are more likely to discourage fertility regulation, even if indirectly, in all religious congregations.
Yet, as I also contend, attending church exposes women to more than the teachings they hear from the pulpit. This latter finding challenges the more conventional, Western-centered notion that religious involvement discourages contraceptive use. It also lends support to the idea that active social involvement with organized religion, regardless of the particular denomination, may be conducive to faster learning and adoption of novel technologies such as modern contraceptives in less developed settings. The finding fits with the general conceptualization of religious involvement as a major, if not the only, form of social participation outside of lineage-based networks available to rural and small-town sub-Saharan women.
The finding is also in line with earlier research that characterizes church participation in developing countries as a modern practice see, for example, Cosper and, more broadly, with the historical view of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the developing world as a conduit for Western modernity see, for example, Keane If the experience of fertility transition in the Western world is of any guidance to sub-Saharan Africa, religion-based differences in fertility are likely to diminish and perhaps entirely disappear—as did, for example, the Catholic—Protestant fertility differences in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century Westoff and Jones ; Mosher, Williams, and Johnson In the same way, greater religious involvement, regardless of denomination, might eventually become strongly associated with marital and reproductive choices that are conducive to relatively high fertility Williams and Zimmer ; Hayford and Morgan ; Berghammer For the time being, however, religion may exert a nontrivial and peculiar impact on reproductive behavior and outcomes as it does on many other aspects of life in the sub-Sahara.
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Abstract The relationship between contraceptive use and religion remains a subject of considerable debate. The characteristics perspective, which seeks to trace religious differentials in fertility-related behavior to attributes unrelated to religion, suggests a straightforward hypothesis: Hence the second hypothesis: This contextually adapted minority-group status perspective leads to the following hypothesis: Corresponding to the three main theoretical perspectives, three hypotheses concerning the association between religious involvement and contraceptive use can be postulated: Characteristic Percent Uses a modern family planning method Open in a separate window.
RESULTS The religious palette of the area is captured in the distribution of denominational affiliation of the survey respondents shown in Table 1. TABLE 2 Percentage distribution of nonpregnant respondents, by religious affiliation, according to educational attainment, Chibuto, Mozambique, TABLE 3 Percentage of nonpregnant women practicing modern contraception, by religious affiliation and frequency of church attendance, Chibuto, Mozambique, TABLE 4 Odds ratios from random-intercept logistic regression models predicting current modern contraceptive use among all nonpregnant women, Chibuto, Mozambique, TABLE 5 Odds ratios from random-intercept logistic regression models predicting current practice of modern contraception among women having a religious affiliation, Chibuto, Mozambique, Does religion matter in contraceptive use among Ghanaian women?
Review of Religious Research. Religion, social milieu, and the contraceptive revolution. Informal social networks and epidemic prevention in a Third World context: Joining, switching, and quitting: That led them to stop using the pill. Given the natural order of things, some months later he sits in my office telling me that his wife is expecting. These students are usually overjoyed, a little nervous, and sometimes overwhelmed. I congratulate them, pray for them, and assure them that God will provide. Many of my students have never been confronted with a view of birth control other than the typical Protestant position of acceptance.
They hold this position because their churches do. Beginning with the Lambeth Conference in and concluding with the wholesale embrace of the pill in the decade or so that followed its release, most Protestants moved away from agreement with the Catholic Church on this moral issue and never looked back. Among Southern Baptists, the drift from renunciation to acceptance of birth control had a clear trajectory. Some forty years later, the Southern Baptist Convention took up the issue of birth control again, issuing a series of resolutions that opposed only contraceptives distributed to minors at school without parental consent.
They did so with little theological reflection. T he key idea in Humanae Vitae is the connection between marriage and procreation. This is not a healthy state of affairs for couples and society. Paul VI offered some predictions regarding the future of sexuality in such a world. No longer are people concerned about out-of-wedlock birth, because the most serious consequence of sexual immorality can be bypassed with the use of a pill, a patch, or another form of birth control. This can be explained in part by increased rates of cohabitation where couples intentionally choose to have children without getting married.
Despite the availability of birth control, as people more readily engage in sexual intercourse outside the context of marriage, the percentage of births to unwed mothers remains high. When procreation and unity are detached, the spiritual meaning of procreation within the context of marriage withers.
The opening chapters of Scripture underscore the clear connection of procreation and marriage that contraception undoes. After creating mankind, God gave instructions to the first man and woman: Foreshadowing the inauguration of the first marriage in Genesis 2, this command gives us our first glimpse of the context for procreation.
Birth control interrupts the procreative potential of male-female union and thus runs counter to the one-flesh formula. The logic may be counterintuitive, but the deliberate intention to render marital union infertile, through artificial means of birth control, leads to a diminished understanding of the purposes of sex.
Sex is now understood to be primarily about pleasure. Procreation is something else.
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It is sex without contraception, no more joyful and meaningful than sex with contraception. And marriage need no longer be directed toward the rearing of the next generation. Are we surprised that a contraceptive culture is also one in which marriage declines? F or many Protestants, acceptance of contraception has created unintended consequences—cohabitation and a growing acceptance of same-sex marriage.
According to the Barna Group, 41 percent of practicing Christians believe that cohabitation is a good idea. While this number is less than half the rate of those who hold the same view and have no faith, the number has increased significantly over time. Nearly two-thirds of all women in the United States have been in a cohabiting relationship.
The normalization of contraception in marriage has fostered the belief that contraceptive sex in marriage is no different than contraceptive sex in a cohabiting relationship. In both relationships, the main consequence to be avoided is the conception of a child. There are certainly many Protestants who hold to the idea of chastity inside and outside the context of marriage. But this stems from a lingering historic connection between marriage and childrearing. Contraceptive sex undermines it. The separation of marriage and procreation opens the door for Protestant acceptance of cohabitation.
We have also seen significant change in the acceptance of same-sex marriage.