Religious Heterogamy, Marital Quality, and Paternal Engagement

Abstract

Using data from a nationally representative sample of married fathers of school-aged children, we examined the association between religious heterogamy of parents and fathers’ involvement in children’s lives. We further examined whether that association is mediated by marital quality and father–child religious discord. Results showed that greater religious heterogamy is associated with less interaction and more relational distance between fathers and children. Results also suggested that fathers’ reports of marital happiness play an important role in mediating the association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement. We concluded that religious fathers are more involved in their children’s lives insofar as their wives are equally religious and they are in happy marriages.

1. Introduction

The last half-century has seen a substantial increase in the percentage of Americans taking an egalitarian view of the role that fathers should play in the lives of their children (Ishizuka 2018). Nevertheless, the shift in cultural norms of paternal parenting is not consistently reflected in the actual behavior of fathers (LaRossa 1988), and some fathers appear to meet these cultural expectations better than others. A large body of research has shown, for example, that religious fathers tend to be more involved in children’s lives than nonreligious fathers.

Despite a large amount of evidence supporting the positive relationship between religion and paternal engagement, research is often conducted without due consideration to the mothers’ religiosity or the role that they play in fathers’ parenting. This oversight is surprising in light of the fact that fathers’ parenting is correlated with mothers’ parenting, and vice versa. In this study, we took into account the religiosity of mothers as well as fathers and addressed the following question: Does religious heterogamy of parents discourage fathers’ involvement in children’s lives? If so, why? Using data from a representative sample of heterosexual married men of school-aged children in the US, this study examined the association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement. We also attempted to explain why religious heterogamy—especially in couples where the husbands are more religious than the wives—discourages paternal engagement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to focus on the effects of religious heterogamy on paternal engagement.

2. Theoretical Background

2.1. Religion and Paternal Engagement

Over the past two decades, numerous researchers have investigated associations between religion and paternal engagement. Earlier studies of this topic focused on the role that religious culture plays in paternal engagement. Bartkowski and Xu (2000) and Wilcox (2002) found that conservative Protestants were more likely to be affectionate in their interactions with and supervision of their children and to spend more one-on-one time with them. However, beginning with King (2003), later studies found little denominational differences (DeMaris et al. 2011; King 2010; Petts 2007; Wildeman 2008), and traditional measures of religiosity, such as religious affiliation and attendance, have been criticized for their inability to measure the extent that religion affects everyday life and relationships, including those of a father with his children (DeMaris et al. 2011; King 2003; Mahoney et al. 2003).

To fill this gap in the literature, religious salience was introduced as an additional measure. While attendance and affiliation are publicly oriented indicators gauging immersion in religious culture, religious salience captures a private aspect of religion, namely, how important religion is to an individual’s daily life (DeMaris et al. 2011; King 2003; King 2010). Religious salience, thus, provided a more direct measure of the association between religion and father–child relationships by narrowing measurements of religion to the private, family sphere, where the relationships between a father and his children have their primary place. The results showed that measures of religious salience were positively associated with paternal involvement. That is, fathers who rated the importance of religion in their life and their overall religiosity as high were more likely to enjoy a good relationship quality with their children and to put greater effort into the relationship than those who gave lower ratings (King 2003). Additionally, the father’s religious salience was positively associated with his adult children’s reports of paternal involvement during the child’s teenage years and with high ratings of current relationship quality between the father and the child (King 2010). Although some other measures of religiosity have been employed to understand paternal involvement, the three noted here have received the most attention.

2.2. Research on Religious Homogamy/Heterogamy

One important aspect of religion that has remained understudied with respect to paternal engagement is religious homogamy—the extent to which husbands and wives share religious beliefs and practices. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the present day, there has been a steady increase in interfaith marriages (Kalmijn 1991; Lofquist et al. 2012). This trend provokes the question of whether couples benefit from religiously homogamous marriages.

A large body of research has documented influences of religious homogamy on marriage and family outcomes. First, religious homogamy has been shown to support the stability of marriages and relationships. Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), Call and Heaton (1997) found that differences in religious attendance within couples predicted higher rates of divorce. More recently, another NSFH study reported that the effects of denominational affiliation homogamy were dependent on religious attendance, meaning that same-faith couples only experienced higher relationship stability when they also frequently attended religious services together (Vaaler et al. 2009). Cohabiting couples also appear to benefit from religious homogamy. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), Petts (2016) found that denominational homogamy increased the stability of cohabiting unions. These findings suggest that marital and relationship stability are greatly influenced by religious homogamy.

Second, religious homogamy influences other family outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction and marital adjustment, which indicates a couple’s ability to adapt relationally to each other and contributes to positive marital health and well-being. Two studies, which used nonrepresentative samples from select US states, found positive results for religious homogamy for couples in their first marriage. Schramm et al. (2012) found that when husbands and wives both reported high levels of religiousness and shared a religious denomination, they reported better marital adjustment. Likewise, remarried couples with the same level of religiousness and similar beliefs experienced increased marital adjustment and suffered fewer negative effects from their past divorces. Olson et al. (2015) also found that religious homogamy was positively correlated with marital satisfaction.

Lastly, religiously heterogamous marriages are associated with negative outcomes for child well-being. Using measures of religious affiliation, school-aged children with religiously dissimilar parents have been found to be twice as likely to use alcohol and three times as likely to use marijuana than children with same-faith parents (Petts and Knoester 2007). Using measures of religious salience, children younger than school age of low-income, urban parents have been found to experience a negative correlation between parental religious heterogamy and positive behaviors (Petts 2011). Additionally, the frequency of parental arguments over religion is negatively associated with child development in homes of kindergarten-aged children (Bartkowski et al. 2008). Taken together, these studies show that children can benefit behaviorally from religious similarity between their parents.

2.3. Religious Heterogamy and Paternal Engagement

Although much research has been done on religious heterogamy and relationship outcomes, virtually none has been done in relation to paternal engagement. There are a few studies, however, that provided some insight into the role that religious heterogamy plays in family outcomes. Using data from Waves I and II of the NSFH, Petts and Knoester (2007) included parental engagement as a moderating variable between religious heterogamy and child well-being. Their measure did not differentiate between the time spent by the mother versus the father with the children; thus, the mean score of the couple was used to measure overall engagement. The authors hypothesized that parental involvement would moderate the negative effects of marital conflict and low religious participation on child well-being, dispelling any potentially harmful effects of religious heterogamy. The results showed that, while parental involvement was associated with positive child well-being, it had no moderating effect on marital conflict or religious participation. In a later study, Petts (2011) found comparable results in a sample from the FFCWS: Parental involvement found a place as a family structure variable, but no hypothesis or subsequent results noted any link among religious homogamy, parental involvement, and child well-being. DeMaris et al. (2011) examined both religious homogamy and fathers’ child care. It was hypothesized that similar spousal levels of theistic sanctification and spiritual investment would increase the amount of fathers’ child-care work. However, greater religiosity, by any measure, was found to negatively affect paternal involvement, and no further explanation was provided on the relationship between religious homogamy and paternal involvement. As a result, little has been established about the association between religious heterogamy and paternal involvement. Despite this dearth of evidence, it is plausible to predict that religious heterogamy would discourage paternal engagement in children’s lives for the reasons we describe in the next section.

3. Explaining the Association between Religious Heterogamy and Paternal Engagement

3.1. Marital Quality

We examined marital quality as a mediating variable that may account for the effect of religious heterogamy on paternal involvement. It is plausible that religious dissimilarity between spouses would lead to a negative impact on marital quality, which in turn would lead fathers to be less involved in children’s lives. It is well established that religious homogamy is positively associated with marital quality (Myers 2006) and marital stability (Waite and Lehrer 2003; Lehrer and Chiswick 1993). This implies that religious heterogamy will reduce marital quality. The impact of this factor would be particularly consequential for couples in which the husband is more religious than his spouse. Research indicates that couples in which fathers attend religious services more often than their wives have a higher likelihood of divorce than those couples with more equal levels of attendance (Vaaler et al. 2009). Another study found that children whose fathers attended religious services more than their mothers were more likely to be sad and lonely as a result of the frequency of arguments between their parents than children whose parents attended church at similar rates (Bartkowski et al. 2008). This leads to a significant disadvantage for paternal engagement, which is promoted by marital quality, as men with better relationships with their wives experience stronger pulls from their wives toward the family and into the parenting role (Furstenberg and Cherlin 1991; King 2003). Fathers with low-quality marriages may not be pulled as strongly into a paternal role. Of course, it is also possible that men with good-quality marriages are already expending their energy in family life and are already more likely to be involved with their children. For these reasons, we hypothesized that the negative association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement can be explained by marital quality.

3.2. Father–Child Religious Discord

A second theoretical explanation for the relationship between religious heterogamy and paternal involvement centers on religious transmission, which tends to be more successful in families where the parents share religious beliefs and practices. When couples belong to different faiths or have different levels of religiosity, their children cannot easily acquire a shared set of beliefs (Pearce and Axinn 1998; Rossi and Rossi 1990). In such a case, children often identify with their mother’s religion more strongly than their father’s (Bengtson et al. 2013, p. 116). Thus, religious dissimilarity between fathers and children may occur in these religiously heterogamous families. This religious dissimilarity can be a source of intergenerational tension, indicating value divergence and weakening father–child ties (King et al. 2013; Sechrist et al. 2011). It stands to reason that the weakening of father–child ties would also depress paternal involvement. Thus, when a father is more religious than his wife, his children will be less likely to share his beliefs, which may lead to increased father–child relational distance and decreased paternal involvement. This reasoning leads to the following hypothesis: The negative association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement is explained by father–child religious discord.

4. Methods

4.1. Data and Sample

To test the aforementioned hypotheses, we used data from the Culture of American Families Survey, a nationally representative web-based survey of American parents of at least one child aged 5–18 living in the household. A survey research firm, Knowledge Networks, administered the survey to a random sample of 2904 respondents who were selected from their survey panel between 30 September 2011 and 18 January 2012. The sampling was based on a comprehensive, address-based sampling frame provided by the United States Postal Service. Respondents without Internet access were offered a laptop and Internet connection to complete the survey (Bowman 2012).

Of the 2904 respondents, 2075 (71%) were female respondents and 829 (29%) were male respondents. Of the 829 male respondents, 710 (86%) were married. There were 36 cohabiting fathers (4%), but they were excluded from the analysis because the item on marital happiness, a key mediating variable, was asked only to married respondents. Missing data were less than 5% for all variables in the analyses; thus, cases with missing values (n = 35) were deleted listwise for all analyses, yielding an analytic sample of 675 married fathers.

4.2. Dependent Variables

Paternal engagement was measured using two items, each of which taps the quantity of father–child interaction and quality of father–child relationship, respectively. First, respondents were asked “…on a typical school day, about how much time do you spend interacting with your children?” (1 = none to 7 = more than 3 hours; M = 5.50, SD = 1.25). Respondents were also asked, “How would you generally describe your relationship to your children?” Responses ranged from 1 = very close to 7 = very distant. We reverse-coded this item so that higher numbers indicate greater closeness between fathers and children (M = 5.93, SD = 1.05).

4.3. Independent Variables

Our key independent variable was religious heterogamy. Respondents were asked, “Would you describe yourself as more religious, less religious, or as having about the same level of religious interest as your spouse/partner?” The response categories were “much less religious than my spouse/partner,” “somewhat less religious than my spouse/partner,” “about the same level of religious interest,” “somewhat more religious than my spouse/partner,” “much more religious than my spouse/partner.” We collapsed these five categories into three, creating dummy variables for husbands who reported they were more religious than their wives (17%) and those husbands whose wives were more religious (29%). The reference category was those husbands reporting the same level of religious interest as their wives (54%).

4.4. Mediating Variables

Marital happiness. We measured marital happiness using a single item: “Taking all things together, how happy has your marriage been for you?” A 4-point response scale ranged from 1 (very happy) to 4 (not at all happy). We reverse-coded this item so that higher scores indicate a greater marital happiness (M = 3.44, SD = 0.64).

Religious discord. Parent–child religious discord was measured based on the respondent’s agreement with the following item: “My children share my views of faith and religion.” Respondents answered using a 7-point scale, ranging from 1 = completely disagree to 7 = completely agree. We reverse-coded this item with higher scores indicating a high level of religious discord (M = 2.69, SD = 1.47).

4.5. Control Variables

We employed other measures as control variables that were known to be associated with father engagement in previous studies: religious service attendance (0 = never to 7 = daily; M = 3.33, SD = 1.84), importance of religion (1 = not at all important to 5 = the most important thing in my life; M = 3.18, SD = 1.31), and religious affiliation (Mainline Protestant [22%], Catholic [24%], Jewish [3%], Other [10%], nonaffiliated [13%], evangelical Protestant [27%] as being a reference category). Fathers’ parenting role is a single item tapping fathers’ attitudes toward the importance of fathers in childrearing. Respondents were asked about their agreement with the statement: “The mother’s role in raising children is more important than the father’s.” Responses were originally coded from 1 = completely disagree to 7 = completely agree. We reverse-coded this item so that higher scores indicate a disagreement with the statement (M = 5.13, SD = 1.71).

Finally, we included other control variables as follows: age (M = 44.64, SD = 8.07), race/ethnicity (black/Hispanic/other/non-Hispanic white [reference category]; 79% were white), education (1 = less than high school, 5 = graduate school; M = 3.65, SD = 1.03), household income (1 = less than $5000, 19 = $175,000 or more; M = 13.83, SD = 3.46), employed (77%), having a son (76%), children are all biological (79%), children do not divide their time between the respondent’s home and another residence (89%), number of children in the household (M = 2.23, SD = 1.07), and social support (1 = very independent, 4 = very well supported; M = 2.57, SD = 1.02).

4.6. Analytic Approach

We used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses to test our hypotheses. Because our dependent variables are measured ordinally, we first ran ordinal regression models. A likelihood ratio test, however, revealed that the proportional odds assumption does not hold for all multivariate models (Long and Freese 2006). As a next step, we used Stata’s gologit2 and estimated generalized ordered logit models that relax the parallel lines assumption (Williams 2006), which yielded similar results (results available upon request). Because the results from OLS regression are easier to interpret, we treated ordinal variables as continuous variables and used OLS regression models.

The models are organized into three nested regression models for each dependent variable. Models 1 and 4 are baseline models that include religious homogamy variables as well as control variables. In Models 2 and 5, our first mediating variable, marital quality, is added to the baseline models. Models 3 and 6 exclude marital quality and include another mediating variable, religious discord. All regression analyses were weighted to adjust for different probabilities of selection and nonresponse bias. In order to account for the complex sampling designs, all tests of significance were computed using svy commands in Stata.

5. Results

5.1. Descriptive Statistics

Table A1. Descriptive statistics (n = 675).

	Mean	SD	Min.	Max.
Father–child interaction	5.50	1.25	2	7
Father–child closeness	5.93	1.05	2	7
W, H = religious at the same level	0.54	0.50	0	1
W = more religious	0.29	0.45	0	1
H = more religious	0.17	0.38	0	1
Marital happiness	3.44	0.64	1	4
Father–child religious discord	2.69	1.47	1	7
Religious service attendance	3.33	1.84	1	7
Importance of religion	3.18	1.31	1	5
Evangelical Protestant	0.27	0.44	0	1
Mainline Protestant	0.22	0.42	0	1
Catholic	0.24	0.43	0	1
Jew	0.03	0.17	0	1
Other	0.10	0.30	0	1
Nonaffiliated	0.13	0.34	0	1
Age	44.64	8.07	22	72
white	0.79	0.40	0	1
Black	0.06	0.23	0	1
Hispanic	0.08	0.28	0	1
Other race	0.07	0.25	0	1
Education	3.65	1.03	1	5
Household income	13.83	3.46	1	19
Employed	0.77	0.42	0	1
Having a son	0.76	0.43	0	1
All biological child	0.79	0.41	0	1
Intact family	0.89	0.31	0	1
Number of children	2.23	1.07	1	9
Social support	2.57	1.02	1	4
Father role attitudes	5.13	1.71	1	7

Descriptive statistics are unweighted. W = Wife, H = Husband.

(See Appendix A) presents descriptive statistics for all variables included in our models. Respondents, on average, spent about an hour interacting with their children on a typical school day and reported a close relationship with their children. On average, respondents reported a happy marriage. When it comes to sharing religious views with their children, respondents reported that their children share their views on faith and religion slightly. Respondents, on average, reported that they receive a good amount of parental support from their wives.

5.2. Multivariate Analyses

Table A2. Ordinary least squares regression of paternal engagement on religious heterogamy.

	Father–Child Interaction						Father–Child Closeness
	Model 1		Model 2		Model 3		Model 4		Model 5		Model 6
Control Variables
Age	−0.18	***	−0.17	***	−0.17	***	−0.20	***	−0.19	**	−0.20	***
Black	0.05		0.06		0.05		−0.08		−0.08		−0.09
Hispanic	0.02		−0.00		0.02		0.06		0.04		0.07
Other race	−0.01		−0.01		−0.01		−0.02		−0.02		−0.03
Education	−0.03		−0.05		−0.03		0.04		0.01		0.03
Income	0.04		0.03		0.03		0.12	†	0.11		0.11	†
Employed	−0.00		0.00		0.00		−0.05		−0.05		−0.05
Having a son	0.04		0.04		0.04		0.05		0.05		0.04
All biological child	−0.00		−0.00		−0.00		−0.04		−0.04		−0.04
Intact family	0.11	*	0.12	*	0.10	†	0.03		0.05		0.02
Number of children	−0.04		−0.03		−0.05		−0.08		−0.07		−0.09
Social support	0.16	***	0.14	**	0.15	**	0.09	†	0.06		0.09	†
Father role attitudes	0.12	*	0.12	*	0.10	*	0.11	*	0.12	*	0.10	†
Religious attendance	0.07		0.05		0.06		0−.09		−0.11		−0.10
Importance of religion	0.00		−0.01		−0.05		0.27	**	0.26	**	0.20	*
Mainline Protestants	−0.04		−0.02		−0.02		0.05		0.08		0.07
Catholic	−0.08		−0.06		−0.06		0.09		0.11	†	0.11	†
Jewish	−0.11	*	−0.10	*	−0.10	*	0.01		0.02		0.02
Other	−0.04		−0.04		−0.03		0.08		0.09		0.09
Nonaffiliated	−0.00		0.00		−0.00		0.12		0.13	†	0.12
Religious Heterogamy
W = more religious	−0.07		−0.06		−0.06		−0.06		−0.04		−0.05
H = more religious	−0.11	*	−0.08		−0.10	†	−0.10	*	−0.07		−0.09	*
Mediating Variable
Marital happiness	–		0.13	**	–		–		0.18	***	–
Religious discord	–		–		−0.14	*	–		–		−0.18	**
Intercept	0.65	***	0.68	***	0.66	***	0.63	***	0.63	***	0.63	***
Adjusted R-squared	0.14		0.15		0.15		0.13		0.15		0.15
N	675		675		675		675		675		675

Standardized beta coefficients are presented in the table. Robust standard errors are omitted due to space constraints. The reference categories are non-Hispanic White, not all male child, not all biological child, not intact, evangelical Protestant, religiously homogamous, † p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

reports OLS regression standardized beta coefficients predicting two types of paternal engagement: father-child interaction and father–child closeness. Model 1 indicates that fathers who reported being more religious than their wives spent less time interacting with their children, compared to those fathers whose wives had about the same level of religious interest. There was no difference in levels of paternal engagement between fathers whose wives were more religious and those whose wives had the same level of religious interest. In Model 2, we introduced our first mediating variable, marital happiness, which was positively associated with father–child interaction. More importantly, when we added marital happiness to the model, the difference in father–child interaction between religiously heterogamous and homogamous fathers became nonsignificant. This means that fathers who were more religious than their wives spent less time with children because of the poor quality of their relationship with their wives. We conducted Sobel’s (1982) test to determine whether the indirect effect of religious heterogamy on father–child interaction via marital quality is statistically significant. The results showed that these indirect paths are significant (p < 0.01), accounting for 22 percent of the total heterogamy effect on father–child interaction. Model 3 indicates that religious discord between fathers and children is negatively associated with fathers’ interaction with their children. The addition of religious discord rendered the difference in father–child interaction between religiously heterogamous and homogamous fathers marginally significant (p < 0.10).

When looking at the quality of the father–child relationship, we found similar results. Model 4 indicates that fathers in religiously heterogamous marriages reported less closeness with their children. Model 5 shows that part of the reason is that, as shown in Model 2, they were less happy in their marriage. The Sobel test shows that this mediation model is significant (p < 0.01), with 30 percent of the total heterogamy effect on father–child closeness being explained by marital quality. Interestingly, marital happiness is more significantly associated with father–child closeness than father–child interaction. Contrary to the hypothesis, however, Model 6 provides no indication that religious discord mediates the association between religious heterogamy and father–child closeness.

In addition to the main findings, there are other findings that are worth mentioning. Fathers who are well supported by a network of friends and family tend to be more involved in children’s lives (Models 1–3). Social support, however, is not associated with father–child closeness. Religious salience is significantly associated with father–child closeness, but not father–child interaction (Models 4–6). Father role attitudes tend to be positively associated with both measures of paternal engagement.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

Using a nationally representative sample of married fathers of school-aged children, we examined the association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement. We further sought to examine what might account for such an association. Our multivariate regression analysis produced three significant findings.

First, previous findings of a positive association between fathers’ subjective religiousness and their relationship with their children were confirmed. We found that fathers who believe that religion is important in their lives reported more relational closeness, which is consistent with the findings of previous work such as King (2003). Religious salience, however, was not associated with the amount of time spent with the children. This suggests that a father’s subjective religiousness is more predictive of the emotional aspects of the father–child relationship than the actual amount of time the father spends with his children. As was found by King (2003), religious attendance, a public aspect of religiosity, was not associated with the quantity or quality of paternal engagement. As for religious affiliation, there was little difference in paternal engagement between fathers who were evangelical Protestants and those of other religious denominations. The only significant difference found was that Jewish fathers spend less time with their children than evangelical Protestant fathers. Because of the small sample size (n = 19), however, this cannot be considered definitive, so we simply concur with King (2003), who found only a limited influence of religious affiliation on paternal involvement.

In addition to the findings of previous studies, we provide new findings on the association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement. Our results showed that fathers who were more religious than their wives reported less interaction and lower quality relationships with their children than fathers of equal religiosity with their wives. These findings are important because previous study of religion and paternal involvement has paid little attention to the role that wives play in paternal engagement. To be sure, our study is not the first to recognize that marital quality is important for paternal involvement (e.g., Booth and Amato 1994). To the best of our knowledge, however, no evidence has been found of the mediating role of marital quality on the relationship between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement. Our results showed that fathers’ reports of marital happiness were positively associated with the amount and quality of paternal involvement, and marital happiness fully accounted for that association. This means that those fathers who were more religious than their wives tended to report less happy marriages than fathers whose wives were equally religious. This, in turn, fully explains why they were less involved in their children’s lives and felt less close to their children. These findings are consistent with the belief that if a marriage weakens, the father’s paternal role also attenuates (King 2003, p. 385).

Another mediating factor that we found to be marginally significantly related to paternal engagement was father–child religious discord. Our results showed that religious discord between fathers and children was negatively associated with both measures of paternal engagement (p < 0.05 for father–child interaction and p < 0.01 for father–child closeness). With the inclusion of religious discord in the model, the association between religious heterogamy and father–child interaction was moderately attenuated, which lent some support to our hypothesis. These results suggest that fathers who are more religious than their wives have less interaction with their children, in part because they and their children have different views on religion and faith. The negative association between parent–child religious discord and adolescent reports of parent–child relations has been reported elsewhere (Stokes and Regnerus 2009), but our study is the first to demonstrate that religious discord can partially explain the association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement.

It is necessary to note some limitations of the present study. First, because it used cross-sectional data, it is impossible to make causal claims regarding the associations among religious heterogamy, marital happiness, and paternal engagement. The quality of some paternal relationships may be due more to the fact that some fathers are simply better at relationships than to the quality of the marriage. Further, it is possible that fathers who have fewer interactions with their children are more likely to have children with different views on religion because they do not get adequate religious socialization from their fathers. Future work, using longitudinal data, should be done to fully address the direction of causation. Second, this study relied heavily on fathers’ self-reports of all study variables. For example, religious heterogamy was measured with fathers’ assessment of their own and their wives’ religiousness. Although it would be ideal to measure religious heterogamy using both husbands’ and wives’ reports, our data were not collected at the dyadic level. Paternal engagement was also measured solely from fathers’ self-reports. It is possible that fathers overreported their perception and parenting behaviors (Hernandez and Coley 2007, see Wical and Doherty 2005 as well).

In conclusion, the present study suggests that religious heterogamy discourages paternal engagement. In particular, fathers who are more religious than their wives tend to be less involved in their children’s lives, as a result of the unhappiness of their marriage. These results point to the importance of understanding father engagement within a dyadic context in which parenting takes place. Future work will shed light on the exact mechanism by which wives influence their highly religious husbands’ parenting.