Atheists and Agnostics Negotiate Religion and Family

Atheists and Agnostics Negotiate Religion and Family ELAINE HOWARD ECKLUND Sociology Department Rice University

KRISTEN SCHULTZ LEE Sociology Department University at Buffalo, SUNY

Through in-depth interviews with scientists at elite academic institutions—those particularly likely to have no firm belief in God—we provide insight into the motives scientists who are not religious have for joining a religious group and the struggle faced by these individuals in reconciling personal beliefs with what they consider the best interests of their families. Narratives stress the use of resources from identities as scientists to provide their children with religious choices consistent with science and in negotiating spousal influence and a desire for community. Findings expand the religious socialization and identities literatures by widening the range of understanding of the strategies parents utilize to interface with religious communities as well as lead to more nuanced public understanding of how atheist and agnostic scientists relate to religious communities.

Keywords: atheist, agnostic, family, identities.

INTRODUCTION Religion and family are linked institutions in the United States, with many parents drawing on religious resources in raising their children (see, e.g., Edgell 2005). Yet, given the strong ties between religion and family in the United States, little is known about if and how atheists and agnostics interface with religion when raising children. We examine this very question by looking at one group, scientists who are parents, which is likely to have a much larger proportion of atheists and agnostics when compared to parents in the general public. We use this group to ask other questions such as: How do atheist and agnostic parents frame their approach to religion (particularly the religious socialization of their children)? Do atheist parents seek out religious communities in which to parent and how do they interface with such communities when they do?

What is their approach to parenting and how do they negotiate the religious socialization of their children with spouses who may hold different beliefs than their own?

To examine how atheist and agnostic parents relate to religious institutions (if at all), we draw on in-depth interviews with scientists at 21 elite U.S. universities. Previous work shows that although the dominant narrative is that scientists are irreligious due to the secularizing effect of science (Leuba 1934; Smith 2003), recent work shows that scientists are religiously complex, and there are various narratives about religious life alive within the scientific community (Ecklund 2010). Yet, it is clear that the community as a whole, especially among academic scientists at elite institutions, tends to have more self-identified atheists and agnostics when compared to the general public. Because of the consuming nature of their professional lives, scientists who work at elite academic institutions may be particularly likely to have an existing community of

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Grant #11299, Elaine Howard Ecklund, PI. We thank the Center for the Study of Religion social sciences seminar at Princeton University for comments on an earlier version of this article, Kris D’Amuro for research assistance, and Katherine Sorrell for help with manuscript preparation.

Correspondence should be addressed to Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University, Sociology Department, MS-28, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251. E-mail: ehe@rice.edu Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2011) 50(4):728–743

C 2011 The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion

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like-minded others. Scientists then become a theoretically intriguing case for analyzing narratives of religion and family among those who are not traditionally religious. Examining parenting among this group allows particular access to how those who are the least likely to be religious utilize and negotiate interaction with religion. And if atheist and agnostic academic scientists— those we would least expect to socialize their children into religion—still develop compelling narratives for engaging with religion, this may have much broader implications for the extent to which religion and family are connected in American society.

The Nonreligious as “Outsiders” Recent sociological research on atheists has focused on others’ perceptions of atheists and the nonreligious as outsiders (Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2006; Hout and Fisher 2002).

In particular, there has been much public discussion about whether atheists should be elected to public office, serve in the military, or teach in the public school system (Banerjee 2008).

And survey researchers show that other Americans find atheists among the most distasteful of all social groups (Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2006). This negative perception of atheists as radical religion-haters and of the religious and atheists as opponents in a culture war has profound social consequences, with atheists only just recently feeling as if they could even be public about their perspective (Goodstein 2009).

And agnostics often receive similar negative attention. In examining how atheist and agnostic scientists interact with religious communities and even draw on the resources of religious communities in raising their children, we are setting out to provide a more nuanced understanding of this group as well as the complicated role of religious institutions in American society. Such findings will lead to better dialogue about the intersection between religion and family, dialogue that includes atheists and agnostics.

In the results, we show that atheist and agnostic scientists who are parents have diverse narratives for interacting with religion and religious people. Such narratives stress the use of resources from their identities as scientists to provide their children with religious choices that they feel are consistent with science. And such identities provide specific ways of negotiating spousal religious influence and a broad sense of community in making decisions about the religious socialization of their children.

Parenthood and Religious Participation An extensive literature examines changing religious involvement at different life stages.

Rates of participation drop when young adults leave the parental home and increase again when they start families of their own (Argue, Johnson, and White 1999; Ingersoll-Dayton, Krause, and Morgan 2002; Petts 2007; Sandomirsky and Wilson 1990; Wilson and Sherkat 1994). Even those who have not been part of a religious organization in many years report coming back to religion upon having children. In particular, those in “conventional” families report higher levels of religious participation (Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995). Scholars have suggested several reasons why the transition to parenthood may be associated with a return to a religious faith—or even the adoption of religion for the first time—including a desire to transmit specific beliefs and morals to children (Ingersoll-Dayton, Krause, and Morgan 2002), a desire to have one’s children participate in religious rituals targeted to children (e.g. baptisms, first communion, bar/bat mitzvah), and a search for social support and moral community (Alwin 1986; Ellison, Bartkowski, and Segal 1996).

Past research provides a rich understanding of why individuals may seek religious communities following the transition to parenthood. Much of this existing literature on religious socialization, however, particularly that on why parents bring their children to religious organizations, assumes religious belief. The contribution of our research is that we examine what

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motivates parents to bring their children to religious organizations in the absence of such beliefs. Particularly given the perceived “outsider” status of atheists and agnostics in religious communities, what motivates these parents to join religious communities? In our investigation, the central theme in the discussion of religious socialization is one’s identity as a scientist and how this identity is used to negotiate between individual atheist or agnostic beliefs and a desire for moral community and, in many cases, a spouse’s religious beliefs. We turn now to a review of the literature surrounding the central themes that emerged from our data analysis.

Overlapping Identities and Cultural Schema Overlapping identities as atheists or agnostics, scientists, and as spouses and parents inform religious socialization decisions. Work in the sociology of culture reveals that cultural schemas are generated by particular identities. Cultural schemas are the knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics and relationships under conditions of incomplete information (DiMaggio 1997; Ecklund 2006; Edgell 2005).

Individuals draw their schemas from institutionally based cultural repertoires, repertoires that are used by organizations and individuals in interpretive ways to define appropriate actions across different arenas of daily life and activities (Edgell 2005).

Individuals have access to different schema based on their diverse identities and conflicts between different cultural schema might arise from different structural locations. The existence of competing cultural schema (or cultural rules of the road) has been investigated in the literature examining competing work and family identities (Blair-Loy 2003; Nemoto 2008). For example, Blair-Loy (2003) argues that in trying to negotiate such competing expectations, “moral dilemmas” arise for the individual as he or she struggles to balance competing devotions to work and family and to choose the appropriate course of action. It is conceivable that this concept of conflicting cultural schema based on one’s identity as a worker and as a mother could be extended to the conflict arising from one’s identity as a scientist and an atheist or agnostic with one’s identity as a parent and spouse.

Religion and Moral Community A search for community also is a central theme in this research. Durkheim (1912/1995) identified the creation of a moral community, in particular, as one of the primary functions of religion. Parents may seek moral communities because membership in a moral community is associated with the receipt of greater social support (Ellison and George 1994), greater family satisfaction (Abbott, Berry, and Meredith 1990), and a strong sense of meaning and purpose in life (Johnson and Mullins 1990), which may be particularly important to adults facing the challenges of parenthood as well as those in family crises (Mahoney et al. 2001). Johnson and Mullins (1990:153) define moral community as “relatively coherent social networks which create and support meaningful human relationships by fostering common attitudes, values, and practices.”

Moral communities are found in various places in American society, however. Social clubs and fraternal organizations (such as the Elks Club or the Rotary Club) also constitute a sense of moral community with like-minded members. Berger and Berger (1983) go so far as to argue that the state has usurped the role of religion as the final moral authority for families. Other scholars argue instead that the moral community reported by members of such social groups is not as strong as that reported by members of religious organizations (Johnson and Mullins 1990) and may not provide families with the kind of child care support and sense of community available through religious organizations (Edgell 2005).

It is clear that many families still look to religious organizations for moral guidance and community (Edgell 2005). Yet while religion in general may provide valuable resources for parents, there is some diversity in the services offered and in the parenting support provided

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by different religious denominations. And nontraditional families sometimes feel excluded from religious social networks in more conservative denominations (Edgell and Docka 2007).

Spousal Negotiation of Religious Socialization A final theme is the negotiation of religious socialization with a spouse. Marriage to or partnership with someone with religious beliefs is one possible reason why a nonreligious individual would consider joining a faith community. Based on a study of Christian couples, Williams and Lawler (2001) found that nearly three-quarters of religiously heterogamous couples raised their children in one parent’s religious tradition while 12 percent raised them in both traditions. When choosing one tradition, couples are more likely to select the mother’s and interfaith couples are less likely than couples with the same religious background to emphasize religion in raising their children (Williams and Lawler 2001). The question of how couples including one partner who is not religious and one partner who is religious make decisions regarding the religious socialization of their children remains unanswered, however.

Why Study Scientists?

This article is a secondary analysis of available data collected to investigate religion among scientists. Although the practical reason for choosing to study scientists is the availability of these data, there are also several theoretical motivations for studying the use of religion by atheists and agnostics in a population of scientists. As previously discussed, scientists are more likely to be atheists, or not to know whether they believe in God, the agnostic position, than those in other professions because of the secularizing effect of science and/or institutional expectations of irreligiosity in the science community (Ecklund 2010; Leuba 1934).

Although previous research has found that atheists in the general population are considered outsiders by most social groups (Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2006), scientists who are not firm theists are more likely than other atheists and agnostics to be part of a community of like-minded others, potentially providing a source of informal secular resources for raising children (at least in comparison to atheist parents in other occupations who are less likely to have atheists in their immediate social networks at work). By studying this particular population, we are able to examine how professional identities as scientists overlap with identities as parents, spouses, and atheists or agnostics, and influence religious socialization decisions.

There are other pragmatic motives for studying nonreligious parents in a population of scientists. Atheists and agnostics represent such a small proportion of the general population that a random sample of the general population is unlikely to yield a sufficient concentration of atheists and agnostics to make meaningful comparisons. For example, 2.1 percent (66 individuals) among those who responded to the 2006 General Social Survey reported a belief about God that is consistent with atheism and 4.3 percent (129 individuals) responded with a belief about God that is consistent with an agnostic classification. In our population of scientists, however, 60.4 percent reported beliefs about God that are consistent with an atheist or agnostic orientation.

While all scientists are certainly not atheist or agnostic, a large enough proportion report such beliefs, in addition to reporting being part of religious organizations, to make an analysis of parenting among atheists and agnostics possible.

We made a choice in our analysis to focus our investigation on the meaning of religious participation among atheist and agnostic parents themselves, not in comparison to religious parents. A comparative design would further the conception of atheists as “other,” and we were more interested in understanding the categories of meaning that emerged from atheist and agnostic parents’ narratives of religious involvement rather than comparing their experiences to those of religious parents. In addition, the experiences of religious parents in negotiating religion and family have been extensively studied elsewhere (Acock and Bengston 1978; Alwin 1986; Bao

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et al. 1999; Boyatzis 2003; Davidson et al. 1997; Dudley and Dudley 1986; Ellison, Bartkowski, and Segal 1996; Ellison and Sherkat 1993; Garland 2002; Mahoney et al. 2001; Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995).

METHOD Here, we draw on data collected as part of the Religion Among Academic Scientists study (RAAS), which proceeded in two stages. First, a survey was completed in order to outline scientists’ basic religious and spiritual beliefs and practices and to compare them with those of the general public. During a seven-week period from May through June 2005, 2,198 faculty members in the disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science, and psychology were randomly selected from the universities in the sample. Since faculty were not recruited specifically for a study of how nonreligious scientists use religion in parenting, it is unlikely that respondents who were either religious or nonreligious were more or less likely to respond to the survey. In all, 1,646 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the natural and social sciences at elite U.S. research universities completed the survey. Extensive findings from the survey are reported elsewhere (Ecklund 2010).

In the second stage of the data collection, it was necessary to employ a method that would allow discovery of nonreligious scientists’ narratives for the connections between religion and family. To this end, 501 of those who completed the survey were randomly selected and asked to participate in a longer in-depth interview. At least 50 individuals were selected from each of the seven fields, including chemistry, biology, physics, sociology, political science, psychology, and economics. Between 2005 and 2008, 275 interviews were completed either in person or over the phone. To decrease interviewer effect, these interviews were mainly completed by the Principal Investigator. A combination of efforts resulted in a 54 percent response rate for the longer interviews, an extremely high response for qualitative interviews, meaning that the demographics of this sample did not differ appreciably from the larger survey. At least 34 interviews were conducted with those in each of the seven disciplines (the smallest subsample was sociology with 34 interviews and the largest was physics with 42 interviews). The qualitative interviews ranged from 20 minutes to two and a half hours and were all transcribed. For this article, questions were analyzed that related to respondents’ understandings of the relationship between religion and family, with particular attention to how scientists who say they have no religious affiliation yet utilize religion in raising children understand these relationships. (It is important to note that even though the population included social scientists that in this analysis no meaningful differences emerged between the social and natural scientists.)

Our central analyses focused on how scientists responded to the following interview questions: In what ways was religion a part of your life as a child? How was religion talked about in your family setting? If you have a family now, are there ways in which religion/spirituality come up, if they do at all? What religious or spiritual beliefs do you hold? For example, to what extent is believing in God or a god important to you? We did not ask respondents directly about their involvement in religious organizations (or lack thereof). Rather this information was generally volunteered in response to questions about religious and spiritual practices as well as how religion comes up in their current families. From these questions (in conjunction with their responses to the survey), we categorized respondents as either atheist or agnostic. The categories of “atheist” and “agnostic” are mutually exclusive and based on the respondent’s answer to questions about belief in God, with atheists indicating they do not believe in God and agnostics saying that they do not know if there is a God and do not think there is a way to find out. Table 1 provides an overview of the demographic characteristics of the interview sample, as well as a comparison of the entire sample with the subsamples of respondents who identified themselves as atheist or agnostic.

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Table 1: Interview sample descriptive statistics Full Sample (N = 271) % N Gender Female Male Age 18–35 36–45 46–55 56 and over Missing Marital Status Currently married Not currently married Missing Number of Co-Resident Children None 1–3 Four or more Missing Race White African American Hispanic Asian Other or multiple races/ethnicities Missing Salary $50,000–$69,999 $70,000–$1,000,000 Above $1,000,000 Missing Academic Field Natural scientist Social scientist Missing Belief in God Does not believe in God Does not know if there is a God and does not think there is a way to find out

Atheists (N = 79) %

N

Agnostics (N = 87) % N

19.6 80.4

53 218

16.5 83.5

13 66

20.7 79.3

18 69

15.2 25.1 26.2 29.2 4.4

41 68 71 79 12

13.9 24.1 29.1 32.9 –

11 19 23 26 –

16.1 21.8 31.0 27.6 3.4

14 19 27 24 3

81.2 17.0

220 46

75.9 24.1

60 19

85.1 14.9

74 13

1.8

5

–

–

–

–

53.1 42.1 1.5 3.3

144 114 4 9

57.0 40.5 1.3 1.3

45 32 1 1

57.4 39.1 1.1 2.3

50 34 1 2

86.3 1.8 .4 7.0 2.6

234 5 1 19 7

89.9

71 0 0 7 1

90.8 2.3 .0 5.7

79 2 0 5 0

1.8

5

–

–

1.1

1

14.0 27.7 51.7 6.6

38 75 140 18

16.4 20.3 63.3 –

13 16 50 –

14.9 27.6 54.0 3.4

13 24 47 3

44.3 53.5 2.2

120 145 6

40.5 57.0 2.5

32 45 2

43.7 52.2 1.1

38 48 1

29.2

79

100.0

79

32.1

87

8.9 1.3

0

0 100.0

87

(Continued)

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Table 1 (Continued) Full Sample (N = 271) % N Some belief in God or a higher power Missing Current Religious Preference Protestant Roman Catholic Jewish Other religion No religion Missing

Atheists (N = 79) %

N

Agnostics (N = 87) % N

0

0

31.7

86

7.0

19

–

–

–

–

15.1 9.2 17.0 5.9 49.8 3.0

41 25 46 16 135 8

2.5 1.3 17.7 2.5 75.9 –

2 1 14 2 60 –

12.6 5.7 20.7 4.6 55.2 1.1

11 5 18 4 48 1

A team of 12 students and the Principal Investigator initially worked on systematically transcribing and coding the interviews. In light of previous research on religion and family, we developed some codes a priori for testing existing theories about the connection between religion and family for these scientists. Once the interviews were sorted according to these categories— for example, whether a respondent was involved in a religious organization—the co-authors then used a modified form of the inductive coding scheme to develop categories about the range of ways that scientists who were agnostic or atheist approached religion and family. We then systematically recoded the interviews. Six variables relevant to these analyses were created from the questions above. Several research assistants systematically coded the interview transcripts for these variables, achieving a 90 percent intercoder reliability statistic. (This means that 90 percent of the time when two research assistants coded the same interview transcript their analysis was identical.)

In order to discover how scientists categorize the relationship between religion and family in their own terms and, in particular, how scientists who are not religious see the relationship between religion and their family lives, we needed data that would allow us to apprehend scientists’ definitions and relationships between religion and family from the ground up rather than imposing categories only from surveys used in the general population. To this end, while the study began primarily with a survey, here we focus almost exclusively on the qualitative interviews, where even respondents who were not at all religious were asked to simply give their own narratives of the relationship between religion and family. No other research has delved so deeply into the views about religion and family held by a group of irreligious people.

RELIGION AND PARENTHOOD AMONG THE NONRELIGIOUS We initially started our analyses by responding to other researchers’ findings about the role of religion in the lives of atheists and agnostics. For example, Sherkat (2008) found in an analysis of General Social Survey data that atheists attend church at a somewhat higher rate than agnostics.

In results from our survey, however, a smaller proportion of atheist scientists with children, when compared to agnostics, attend religious services more than once a year. A surprising difference exists between atheists with children and those without children, in comparison to agnostics with and without children, however. We find no substantive difference in the attendance rates of agnostics with and without children. There is, however, a considerable difference in attendance rates between atheists who are parents and those who are not. Seventeen percent of atheists

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with children had attended a religious service more than once in the past year, compared to 10 percent of nonparent atheists, results that are statistically significant at conventional levels.

It is surprising—given what we know about religion and family in the general population—that some scientists without religious beliefs decide to become involved again or involve their children in religious communities when they begin their own families. We thought that members of the scientific community would be particularly unlikely to attend because their positions as academics might provide them with numerous alternatives to religious communities. But the numbers in this group of those who attend certainly cannot be considered substantial. What is much more relevant to this analysis is how atheist and agnostic scientists talk about their participation in religious communities, in particular if there are consistent narratives they use to understand their involvement.

Listening to scientists’ narratives and negotiations for how they understand the connection between religion and family given their own irreligiosity provided several dominant reasons for why these nonreligious parents engage in religious socialization. Noticeably missing from these narratives was a sense of giving their children a spiritual understanding. Dominant reasons included providing religious choices that are consistent with their identities as scientists, having a religious spouse, and providing children a sense of moral order and moral community. Taken together, these themes suggest that atheist and agnostic scientist parents are participating in religious communities primarily for reasons that, ironically, are shaped by their identities as scientists.

The Role of Spirituality Scholars who examine religious shifts in the general population have written a great deal about the evolution of spirituality in American society. Although there is a strong stream of a religious spirituality that has been and is present among Americans of the type Ralph Waldo Emerson found through nature (Schmidt 2005), this spirituality devoid of traditional religion or a god is found mainly among intellectuals (expressed organizationally by some Unitarians). By far the largest proportion of Americans view spirituality and religion as interconnected. For example, most Americans who are spiritual also say that they believe in God or a god (Armstrong 1996; Wuthnow 1998).

However, few of our nonreligious scientists mentioned spirituality as a primary motive for involving their children in a religious community. Among those who did identify spiritual reasons for joining, a dominant theme was the difficulty in trying to find a religious organization that appreciated or at least condoned the scientist’s own form of spirituality. A chemist who considers herself agnostic, although she was raised Protestant, explained that she and her partner are searching for a religious community that, in her words “jives with her (partner’s) spirituality, which she and I see very eye-to-eye on.” If they are able to find a religious community that fulfills their spiritual needs without making them feel like outsiders for not being Christian, where they do not end up “feeling like a fraud,” they will join. This chemist is looking for “that ideal world where spirituality and religion are actually reinforcing.” And “instead of destructive interference, we’d like some constructive interference there,” she explained. “That’d be good. If [my partner] ever does find that community, then we fully intend to go as a family,” she said. Notice that this respondent puts the onus on the religious community itself to decrease a type of boundary. She is looking for a faith community that will not make her family feel like “outsiders” for not being Christians.

Other parents similarly described their search for a religious community where they would feel comfortable as atheists or agnostics and where their children could have a spiritual community.

A sociologist, who was raised Jewish but is an atheist, explained that “it’s having children that reactivated this connection to religion.” He sought out a religious group because “there’s some kind of spiritual window that I want to open.” A political scientist, who was also raised Jewish

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and is an atheist, introduced his children to organized religion for a mix of secular and religious reasons. He sees the Bible stories that he reads his children as “a great opportunity to talk about evolution” and hopes that they will not fall “for the simplifications that are often presented there [at religious services].” At the same time, he hopes that they will find a spiritual connection as well: “I’m hoping to give them this tool that I think can help elevate people spiritually to achieve something that’s somehow beyond this material existence.” These narratives about spiritual experience are particularly interesting because they are from respondents who joined Jewish communities, and Judaism is the tradition that we would most expect to have a group of secular adherents and to be overrepresented in the academy (Datta 1967; Herberg 1955; Hollinger 1996). We should also point out that, overall, nonreligious scientists who involved their families in organized religion were part of a variety of traditions outside of Judaism.

However, the majority of the scientists without a religious identity specifically stated that “spiritual aspects were less important”—in the words of one physicist—in motivating them to join a religious community and, in some cases, the spirituality associated with religious organizations actually discouraged them from joining. A political scientist was at first hesitant to become involved in a formal religious organization because “we don’t regard it as sort of a spiritual need in our life to be part of an organized religion.” At the same time, he saw other, “practical” reasons for joining: “For children there is a certain benefit in teaching [them] values that may come out of affiliation with a certain religious tradition.” Others mentioned their children’s religious involvements as “an intellectual pursuit,” as a way of “following up on traditions,” or as simply “aesthetically pleasing” and not connected to spirituality.

Exposure to Religious Choices Consistent with Identities as Scientists Scholars who examine religion and family consistently argue that most children eventually adopt the religious beliefs of their parents in some form (Sherkat and Ellison 1999). Sherkat and Ellison have argued that one reason individuals often partake of or return to the religion of their youth or a faith tradition like that of their youth is because learning the rituals and traditions of a new faith is simply too culturally costly. We expected then that nonreligious scientists who are parents might seek alternative social organizations (e.g., communities with other atheist and agnostic scientists who are parents) to raise their children according to their own belief systems.

Rather than social reproduction, however, we found that atheist and agnostic scientists who were involved in religious communities tended to emphasize just the opposite: a narrative of choice.

This cultural schema of choice helped them make sense of their identities as scientists while providing them a framework to negotiate spousal influence on their children to be religious as well as a desire to have their children exposed to a moral community.

Atheist and agnostic scientists stressed involving their children in religious communities as a way to expose them to diverse religious ideas so that they do not inadvertently indoctrinate them with atheism, so that children might have the opportunity to make their own decisions about to which, if any, religious traditions to belong. The biologist who was raised in East Germany explained that another reason he might choose to involve his young daughter in a religious community would be to expose her to religion. Although he and his wife are still discussing different possibilities of how to raise their daughter religiously they have decided that they will “probably leave [their] daughter the decision about which church [she] wants to join. And [they] will expose her to everything.”

A chemist explained that he does not believe in anything supernatural. He did have a church wedding but deliberately asked the minister not to mention the word “God.” Every place where the minister would have normally said “God,” he said “love” instead. This chemist was raised in a strongly Catholic home and came to believe later that science and religion were not compatible.

What he wants to pass on to his daughter—more than the belief that science and religion are not compatible—is the ability to make her own decisions in a thinking, intellectual way. He wants

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to be sure not to indoctrinate her. As he explains, “I don’t indoctrinate her into not [emphasis his] believing in God. I certainly don’t indoctrinate her that she should [emphasis his] believe in God.” He sees himself as accomplishing this by exposing her to religious choices: “We’ve been to churches before and she’s even . . . been to some ceremonies . . . we also travel a lot so I bet she’s been to more Buddhist temples than she’s been to churches actually. She’s been to Japan many times, and we just went to India. We went to a mosque. We’ve been to all kinds of different ceremonies like that, so I think we’re just trying to show her what options there are.” He went on to say that a big part of teaching his child about religion is being very open to any questions she might have as a way of helping her be culturally enlightened.

A psychologist explained that when he has discussions with his children about religion, he tries to emphasize choices: “they’ve heard about God and Jesus and heaven and hell and life after death. They’ve heard these concepts and they come home occasionally with some questions and we talk about choices . . . and try to get back to that notion that this is what some people believe.

‘Here’s what your mommy believes and here’s what you daddy believes. After a while when you get older you’re going to have to figure out what you want to believe.” A sociologist said that he would describe himself as an atheist and, although he was raised Jewish, went through a period when he had no real involvement in Judaism. He explained how having children changed this and, specifically, why he and his spouse involved his children in Judaism: “To some extent, it’s having children that reactivated this connection to religion. We wanted the children to be in the position to have some sense of choice as to whether they wanted to accept or reject Judaism . . . .

Sometimes spiritual issues will emerge in the family discussion. There are religious things that live in our family life.”

Notice in particular that the connection between science and religion is particularly salient in the interpretive category of choice. One of Robert K. Merton’s normative categories of science is the idea of “free thinking” or the scientist having the ability to decide on scientific evidence untrammeled by the strictures of previous theories or doctrines (Merton 1973). This schema generated from respondents’ identities as scientists was also used when raising children. Even though they had themselves decided not to believe in God, their narratives stressed the greater importance of providing their children with “choice resources” about religion rather than imparting specific views about the connections between religion and science. In particular, we found that the decision to expose their children to religious “choices” was part of the scientists’ negotiation of the religious beliefs of spouses and a desire for moral community with their own identities as atheist or agnostic scientists.

Spousal Influence Involvement in a religious community is likely to be decided upon jointly by spouses rather than unilaterally by one parent. We found that having a religious spouse or partner was the main reason that scientists who were not religious involved their children in a religious community, with no clear gender differences. (Both men and women reported attending church because of their spouse’s religious beliefs. Although we should note here that, because there are many more male respondents because of the gendered nature of the sciences at elite research universities, the religious spouse is more likely to be a woman.) Atheist and agnostic scientists who participate with their children in a religious organization because of a spouse’s greater commitment to a tradition often have a nonreligious narrative for explaining their participation. Such narratives function to help a scientist feel that she is being true to her own lack of religious commitment and are often structured through the language of religious choices. Having a spouse who was more religious was simply a deeper instantiation of helping the parent provide his or her children ways to think through religious options.

A chemist explained that it is not important to have a belief in God. It is important to her, however, to take her children to a religious organization. She was raised Catholic and in her words,

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“I’m also married to a Jewish man, so I’m trying to get all the rituals in for our children and to have them exposed to spirituality and religion.” This chemist went on to explain that these rituals are probably even more important to her—a non-Jew—than they are to her husband. She makes it clear to the interviewer that God is not as important to being part of a religious community as the morals and rituals that it provides to her children: “I can’t say that I worship in a church or synagogue and have that particular worship to a god be important to me. But certainly, our religious culture and our rituals are important in my family.”

An economist commented that while he was raised Jewish, it was not important to him to remain part of a synagogue. He participates, however, because it is important to his wife. In his words: “It’s really important to her to make sure that our kids have that type of upbringing knowing what the Jewish holidays are about.” His beliefs about God or a god do not seem to influence his choice to be part of a synagogue. This respondent went on to tell the interviewer that he firmly believes that “a God as the way fundamentalist Christians portray him is just wrong.”

Instead, this respondent sees himself as agnostic, although he admits that he is on the spiritual side of agnostic.

Such results bring new fodder to the existing literature on religious heterogamy and parenting as well as complexity to the ways that the public understands atheists and agnostics. Although religiously heterogamous unions face higher risks of marital instability (Heaton 2002), these couples were able to negotiate their different religious beliefs by maintaining their individual beliefs and allowing the religious parent to guide the children’s religious education in a way that the nonreligious parent thought of as completely in keeping with their own identity. Further, these atheist and agnostic scientists were open to a variety of ways of negotiating religion within the context of their family lives.

Communities: Moral and Otherwise Scholars argue that religion and family are often so connected because religious organizations provide a sense of community for families, community with others who are also raising children as well as specific forms of moral community (Edgell 2005). And supporting the existing scholarship, we did find that atheist and agnostic scientists took their children to religious organizations to provide them with a sense of community, although the desire for community took more diverse forms than have been previously discussed in the literature.

A biologist said that she was simply looking for a place where her family could just be part of a community with other families, rather than a place where a specific religious ethic would be passed on to her children. This biologist does not believe in “God as a personality.” She thinks it is important to be kind to others and “love thy neighbor as thyself,” which she sees as residual beliefs from her Christian upbringing. She draws meaning of life from her scientific understanding. For instance, she believes that having children is a way of “perpetuating that link in the chain of humanity.” In this way, she stressed that there is a “connectedness to life” of which she is a part. Although she left behind her Methodist upbringing as a young adult, when she had children she found herself asking: “Was there something there that we might find if we found the right congregation—was there something we could find that would be a compromise that would allow our kids to have that sense of community and tradition?” This scientist was not specifically looking for a place to provide a moral framework for her children but just a place where her children could have a sense of community in general. She went on to say that it was also important that her children explore religion in a way that made her and her husband feel comfortable: “in a way that wouldn’t make me very, very uncomfortable. So that’s when we sought out this Unitarian Universalist congregation and that kind of led to the latest round with religion.” Even though this scientist did not see herself as religious or think of having a belief in God as particularly important, she said it was important for her children to be a part of

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a religious community for the sense of tradition it provided. Part of that tradition was being with a community of others.

For other scientists, the search for community was a specific search for a moral community, a place where religiously based ethics—often minus the strictures of specific doctrines—would be communicated to their children. A chemist said that she did not find a belief in God important but took her children to a synagogue because her husband is Jewish. She also thought that being part of a synagogue would expose her children to religious culture and rituals and provide them with a venue to talk about morality. She explained: “I think that’s great to just have some more religious rituals. Rituals are valuable. Talking about morals is valuable. Talking about why religion might be important is valuable. I can’t say that I worship in a church or synagogue and have that particular worship to a God be important to me. But certainly, our religious culture and our rituals are important in my family life and they were growing up too.” Another chemist reflected on his own Catholic background and the particular morals that he learned through his Catholic school upbringing: “A very important thing is that in the hands of the right teachers, in the Church, you learn the right values.” This sense of “right values” is something that he mentioned as being important to pass on to his own children: “When I got married, I agreed the kids would be raised as Catholics . . . [the] teachings of the Roman Catholic Church are basically good teachings and they coincide in terms of the morals I want to teach my kids.” And a biologist, when asked whether he finds questions about God’s existence to be meaningful, said that he does not find such questions important to be thinking about. Yet, at the time he was interviewed, this biologist—who was raised in East Germany—had a young daughter and said that he was leaning toward exposing her to religion, “more for ethical things and especially because [he] think[s] that religion is part of what can bring people together peacefully.”

Scientists even went in and out of religious communities, specifically to expose their children to the moral training they felt religion could provide in their children’s early lives. According to a chemist: “With my son . . . we took him to church when he was younger more often and then as he got older we took him to church less . . . We wanted him to have a strong sense of ethical understanding. We wanted him to have a strong sense of what is right and wrong. But now we really don’t go to church anymore.” Another chemist similarly explained the kinds of discussions that he and his wife, also a chemist, had about how to raise their children: “We talked about giving them an ethical structure and we tried various ways to achieve that. Even after we had sort of given up on organized religion we still took them to a church and let them go to a Sunday School class once a week just because we thought they might need something like that at the ages they were.” Like this scientist, others often discussed involvement in a religious organization as one of the only ways that they could provide their children with an ethical framework within the context of a community.

Projecting into the future, a political scientist, who was raised Catholic but is no longer a practicing Catholic and would like to have children, said that he would consider returning to religion if he has children because, “for children there is a certain benefit for them; in teaching kids values that may come out of affiliation with a certain religious tradition.” A psychologist who has two young children and is married to an atheist described himself as a lapsed Catholic.

He explained that he and his wife had their children baptized largely to please their families and that they have some involvement in Catholicism. According to him: “My wife believes that religion is important to train morality into people, but you don’t need religion to do that. So we’re trying to teach our kids right from wrong without relying on the concept of heaven and hell and that kind of stuff.” This social scientist’s view mirrored that of many of the natural and social scientists interviewed: exposure to moral community was important, but it was generally devoid of the desire to have their children learn or uphold specific doctrines. These findings also reveal the extent to which identities as scientists informed the types of religious moralities to which they chose to expose their children. It was particularly important that the moral frameworks that allowed free thinking were communicated through religion rather than a set of specific religious doctrines.

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CONCLUSION In the broadest theoretical sense, our data reveal the ability of religious communities to provide resources that atheist and agnostic scientists find useful in raising children and in shaping their own religious identities. Atheist and agnostic parents who are scientists are more likely (than parents in other occupations) to be part of a social network of atheists and agnostics, given the higher proportion of the nonreligious in the academy. In addition to the availability of an informal network of other atheist and agnostic parents, atheist and agnostic scientist parents have access to organizations like the Center for Inquiry,which offer family programs targeted to atheists, and organizations like 4-H and Campfire USA, which offer secular youth programs.

That those with other secular parenting resources available to them, and for whom there is a perceived conflict between religion and science, utilize religion in this way shows just how inextricably linked religion and family may be in American society. Scientists in our study drew on a schema of “free thinking,” which flowed from their identities as scientists in negotiating their overlapping identities as scientists and agnostics or atheists and their identities as spouses and parents.

The explanations that the respondents gave for taking their children to religious organizations expand our understanding of religious socialization by removing the assumption that parents engaging in religious socialization hold religious beliefs themselves. Previous researchers have examined how religion informs child-rearing orientations (e.g., Alwin 1986), and parent-child relationships (e.g., King 2003), but this research looks at how being an atheist or agnostic may inform childrearing. Consistent with the previous literature, we found parents were motivated to join religious organizations by a desire to have their children participate in religious rituals (Johnson and Mullins 1990), and to be a part of a moral community (Abbott, Berry, and Meredith 1990; Garland 2002). We added to these motives evidence of a desire to expose children to different religious choices. From the narratives collected, we found that respondents drew on a schema of “free thinking” in negotiating competing expectations stemming from their atheist and agnostic beliefs and their family roles. These narratives shed light on how people often seen as religious outsiders think of religious labels. As these scientists practice social reproduction through options, they also choose to expose their children to forms of religion that will then allow their children to have options. For example, we did not find respondents who exposed their children to more particularistic forms of religion that are more exclusive, such as evangelicalism.

Rather, it was important to the scientists interviewed that children not abandon the skepticism inherent in their identities as scientists in the course of their religious education. This unique approach to religious socialization is consistent with the respondents’ identities as scientists, and thus, these findings also contribute to our understanding of how professional and religious identities might interface.

The findings from this research contribute to several other literatures as well. We found that spouses negotiate the religious socialization of children, with the more religious spouse often guiding children’s involvement in religious organizations. Such a finding adds to the literature dealing with religious heterogamy and parenting (Petts and Knoester 2007; Voas 2003; Williams and Lawler 2001). While Williams and Lawler (2001) examined such negotiation in interfaith couples, we add an understanding of the negotiation in couples in which one spouse is an atheist or agnostic. To the literature addressing changes in religiosity with age (Argue, Johnson, and White 1999; Sandomirsky and Wilson 1990; Wilson and Sherkat 1994), we add an understanding of why even nonreligious individuals may change their religious affiliation with age. More specifically, we found that several nonreligious parents joined religious organizations when their children were small in order to participate in rituals and to provide moral and religious training, but later disengaged when their children were older. Such changes in religious participation with age are consistent with the previous literature; our findings contribute evidence that such changes do not apply exclusively to those with a belief in God or a god but also to some atheists and agnostics.

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Some scholars and religious communities may interpret these findings as consistent with a view of atheist and agnostic parents as utilitarian “free-riders,” consuming the resources of religious communities without participating in any kind of spiritual exchange (see, e.g., Stark and Finke 2000). Rational choice theorists may claim that these parents are acting in a utilitarian, self-interested manner, in choosing to join religious communities based on a rational cost-benefit analysis rather than on the basis of shared spiritual beliefs. We argue that such interpretations of the motives of atheist and agnostic parents are not possible with these data. We do not know the extent to which these respondents give back to their religious communities vis-`a-vis those with a belief in God and would argue that religious faith is not a prerequisite for being a good citizen in a secular or religious community. Whether or not atheist and agnostic parents are acting in a more or less self-interested manner than other members of religious communities is not something we can evaluate with the data at hand.

By analyzing a population of scientists, we have identified a group with a high enough concentration of atheists and agnostics to conduct an analysis of the negotiation of religion and religious groups among nonreligious parents. Since systematic research regarding atheists has not been conducted in the United States, we do not have a good understanding of the characteristics of the general population of atheists. The specific population analyzed here is likely, however, to be more educated than the small proportion of the general population of atheists and agnostics, meaning that our results may be limited. Social class differences in parenting styles found in previous research (Lareau 2003) may influence our findings. According to Lareau (2003), the parenting style of the middle class focuses on engaging a child’s cognitive development through enrollment in structured activities while that of the working class allows children to structure their own time, engaging in free play with relatives and friends. It is possible then that some of our findings regarding atheist and nonreligious parents’ enrollment of their children in religious education classes may be related to their middle-class parenting style. Working-class and poor atheist and agnostic parents may allow children to come to their own conclusions regarding religion without enrolling them in the classes and activities of specific traditions.

Further, such findings show that there is greater diversity among atheists and agnostics in approaches to religion, particularly religion and childrearing, than conventional stereotypes about atheists and agnostics as religion-haters might lead us to expect. In this sense, our findings broaden the range of ways that we understand religious outsiders. Although atheists and agnostics are part of the majority of scientists and are thus insiders in the scientific community, we know that the general public perceives atheists as an undesirable group (Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2006) and thus they are considered outsiders in the nonscience community. It is then interesting that religious outsiders are creating a religious identity for themselves. In a society where the proportion of atheists and agnostics is growing but theists remain by far the majority, our findings may provide the backdrop for more informed dialogue between atheists and agnostics and theists.

Future research is needed to disentangle the influence of social class, identities of different professional groups, and of atheist or nonreligious identity on parenting styles and the decision to enroll children in religious education. Collection of data from both spouses would be highly desirable in furthering our understanding of the negotiation of religious involvement in religiously heterogamous couples. In future research, longitudinal data mapping changes in religious engagement as atheists become parents and as children age would allow us to examine the timing of religious participation in the life course as well as patterns of stability and change in religious activity. The strength of this research in examining parenting among different groups of nonreligious parents far outweighs the shortcomings, however. This research is the beginning of an important agenda on family and religion that will continue to answer questions about the characteristics of a growing U.S. nonreligious population as well as how the nonreligious develop resources for parenting while they negotiate their own relationship to religion.

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