Transcript for Episode 42

Grant:

My guest today is Amy Adamczyk. She is a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at City University of New York. She has broad research interests that generally focus on how different contexts and personal religious beliefs shape people's deviant, criminal, and health-related attitudes and behaviors.

She has specifically studied topics of intergenerational faith transmission and public opinion related to homosexuality and abortion. She's the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the International Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences for her book Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality. Amy holds a PhD in sociology from Penn State University.

So, Amy, welcome to the podcast, and I thank you, especially, for joining me after delivering a baby just over a week ago. So, I'm very grateful that you've carved out some time in your now very hectic schedule.

Amy:

Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

Grant:

So, I like to start out with my guests to get a little sense of your biography. You know, we look at your CV, but I'd like to hear you fill that out a little bit.

So how did you get to where you are now at John Jay studying the wide range of topics that you investigate? I think I saw a fashion institute somewhere, so you have a very unique background. I'd like to hear a little bit about how you got to where you are right now.

Amy:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I grew up on a farm, actually, in rural Wisconsin. My parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement that was happening in the late seventies and early eighties. And they were from Chicago, and they moved to Wisconsin to start this dairy farm. It didn't go very well, but we had a lot of interesting adventures along the way.

And, when I was growing up, my mom taught me how to sew, and I always thought, "Oh, someday, I'm going to move to the city and become a fashion designer." And so, when I went off to college, one of the first places that I went to was the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. And I got a degree there, an associates degree in fashion design. And then I worked a little bit in the field and really wasn't that crazy about it. I think it was a little bit different than what I anticipated.

And so I decided to go back to school, and that's when my career as a sociologist really began to develop. I first went off to Hunter College, which was one of the local City University of New York schools that was near where I was living. And then, eventually, made my way to University of Chicago. I was back in New York in one of the doctoral programs in sociology at the Graduate Center. And then I ultimately went to Penn State to finish my PhD because there were some people there that were doing research that really interests me, and a lot of that research focused on sociology of religion. And so that's sort of how I got my start, and I've been doing a lot of work within the area of sociology of religion ever since.

Grant:

Yeah. So, would you consider yourself a social theorist or are you more of a quant person?

Amy:

You know, it's evolved over time. I initially did a lot of quant stuff, and I still do, but more recently I've been doing tons and tons of interviews and thinking a lot more about theory than I ever had before. And so, over time, it's begun to shift. I still do quant stuff cause it's something I get and I understand, but I'm really excited about, you know, other types of research. [I've] even done a lot of stuff with newspaper coding. We've been doing some big data stuff. And then, of course, with these various books, a lot of interviews—a lot of international interviews—which has been really fun to try to put together.

Grant:

We'll talk a little bit about how you got connected with Christian Smith, but that's one thing I've really appreciated about his work is he really connects quantitative, qualitative, and theory in a way that I think creates well-rounded investigation of phenomena, which, I think, you're most recent book is.

So, I want to talk first about your most recent work, at least from a book perspective, that's focused on the sociology of intergenerational faith transmission. The book, Handing Down the Faith, which you co-authored with Christian Smith, sociologist from Notre Dame, is one of the largest and most sophisticated studies of religious transmission in the United States, based on statistical analysis of a number of large national surveys of religion in America, as well as over two hundred qualitative interviews.

So, what was the impetus for the book? It seems a little different from some of your previous work that really focused on public opinions on homosexuality and abortion. So, how did this book come about?

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah. So I had known Chris Smith for a long time. He's done a lot of research on religion and young people, and I've known him probably twenty years at this point. And I had done some research looking at the role of religion in shaping various things for young people, including their likelihood of engaging in delinquency and drinking behaviors, sex-related behaviors, abortion behaviors. And so him and I were always a little bit, somewhat similar in that we were interested in what shapes young individuals' attitudes and behaviors. And so we started talking about this project maybe about five years ago, and he had some really wonderful funding and asked me to come in and do some of the interviews.

And, as you noted, we did a ton of interviews. We did well over two hundred interviews, and we did them all over the country, sometimes in Spanish. We had them in English. We had them from a variety of different religious groups. And so I started out working with him doing the interviews, and then, as things evolved, I think we just both felt like this is really exciting and we had a good working relationship. And so we moved it to the next level, which is, like, "Let's put this book together."

And so the impetus to the book is that Chris had done a lot of studies looking at the role of religion for young people as they transition from adolescence into young adulthood, and then even further than that. And he had written maybe two or three books in that area. And so we knew a lot about young people's perspectives about religion and how it evolves and changes over time, but what we really didn't know is what parents thought they were doing during this process, because they often weren't the ones that we interviewed or that Chris had been interviewing.

And so that's what this book became about is: How are parents thinking about this? What is the logic that they're using? What are the resources that they're drawing on? What is it they think they're trying to do, whatever that ultimate outcome may be? And so this book was sort of the flip side. We knew so much about the young people and their perspectives, but we really didn't know what parents thought they were doing and what the similarities were across religions or what the major processes were. And so that, that's what led us this latest project.

Grant:

Yeah, and like I told you before we got started, I had the privilege of giving a talk about this book at a Catholic parents’ retreat, and it was very helpful to help us think through the context in which we were trying to transmit the faith. What was going on amongst our coreligionists? How they were thinking about these things. And then, what are the things we needed to do in order to help our kids adopt the faith into adulthood?

So, as you know, we're in the midst of rapid secularization in the United States. In the last thirty years, the proportion of Americans who describe themselves as being unaffiliated, or the "Nones" as some people call them—N-O-N-E-S—it's nearly tripled from 9% to 25% of American people. And among Millennials, that number is 40%. And even among those who are affiliated, about half go to religious services on a regular basis, which is a large decline, historically.

So, you can imagine this is very troubling for parents who are wishing to pass the faith onto their children. But you argue in your book that if children do adopt the faith into adulthood, parents remain crucially important, more so than congregations, priests, friends. So why is it that parents are so important in the adult religiosity of their children compared to other institutions, particularly in this modern moment as our conception of religious faith has changed?

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah. No. So, and Grant, I think you know this, today's parents are extremely involved with their kids in a way that parents haven't been in a long time. So, you know, today parents spend more time with their children than mom and dads did even fifty years ago, and that's when, often, there was only one parent working outside of the home. And this trend is the most pronounced amongst better educated people. Parents are really interested in shaping every aspect of their child's lives.

And there may have been a time when parents, sort of, dropped their kids off at church or at synagogue and said, "Okay, I'll be back in two hours." And then they didn't really talk about religion when the kids got back together with them. That era, at least for the parents we interviewed, was really not here anymore. It was really over. And so parents want to be involved in every aspect of their kids' lives, and they use congregations and they use other supports to help them. But they're the ones that want to be there helping their kids to learn about religion, hear about religion, understand religion, and that's most interesting and valuable to them.

And so I think there's just been a shift in how parents think about kids and how they think about their development and the role that they want to have in it. It's very much a hands-on approach and an approach where we're not going to just leave this to some institution or to some other individuals to try to foster.

And that's, that's, we had almost every parent say something along those lines when we talked to them, like, "Well, why aren't you just letting the congregations do their thing? Why are you so involved?" And they very much wanted to be involved. They were very, very hands-on.

Grant:

Yeah. So, you know, some parents that I've spoken to, particularly at this retreat where I was presenting this book, were really concerned that if they push the faith too hard, their kids will rebel and that they should maybe consider passing the faith on osmotically, like, just letting the kids catch the faith through some osmotic process.

So, what would you say to a parent who's concerned that it's natural for kids to rebel and that the faith is best passed osmotically to their kids, rather than through active promotion in the home?

Amy:

Yeah, well, your parents may be onto something there. We did find a lot of parents were influenced by their own experiences growing up. And so, often, they were either trying to emulate what their parents did with them because they thought it worked and made sense, or they were trying to rebel against it.

And if they were trying to rebel against it or they didn't like it, we had a lot of parents sort of say that they felt like religion was preached to them, or it was sort of shoved down their throats. Or it was, there weren't two-way conversations, or it wasn't discussed organically. And so these particular parents were much more interested in having two-way conversations with their kids, finding more organic ways to discuss religion. It's not that they weren't intentional—and sometimes the more successful parents were a bit more intentional—but that intentionality was not, it was not fake; it wasn't, you know, kind of preaching to the young people. But it was more like, "Oh, let's, you know, you go to church and then maybe we can talk about this." Or, "You have a question, like what happens to dead bodies? You know, I'm not going to shut you down. Let's talk about that. Let's investigate that." And so the parents were constantly looking for opportunities to have these two-way, more intentional conversations.

The osmosis approach, where maybe they're just quietly reading the Bible in the background, that was there too. And some parents who didn't want to push religion too much certainly were using that approach to some extent. But the most successful parents were kind of, you know, trying to use a little bit of both.

And then, parents were worried about their kids rebelling. They, they wanted to have a good relationship with them. And again, I think that's something that we see more frequently now than we would have during a different era. And we even had some parents who, like, when activities, extracurricular activities, conflicted with church, the parents would actually go to the extracurricular activities. Like, there was something about parents really wanted a good relationship with their kid. And so that sort of seemed to, you know, trump some other things. And so, if the parents you were talking to felt that way, that definitely makes sense. There was this concern like, "Well, at the end of the day, we sort of want our kids to be a little bit like us and to do things with us. And so, if we can foster that in some way, then we'll definitely try."

Now some parents, obviously, just had faith that if their kids wandered or they gave up religion or they rebelled that they would come back to the fold. And we've, we definitely found some parents saying that, especially, I can remember some very vivid conversations with Mormon parents talking about that.

So there was, you know, some variation in there. But I think the most important things for parents is to keep those two-way conversations going, like this religion shouldn't be shoved down their throat. They should be engaged with their kids, look for opportunities to bring it up, but it has to be organic. And, obviously, the parents need to be involved. Right. So it, it can't just be something that is an add-on. That's probably not going to work out very well.

Grant:

Yeah. What, I think one of the most important parts of the book was the analysis that you did of the National Study of Youth and Religion, which is a large national survey of, well, exactly what it sounds like, youth and religion. And, essentially what this data set does, this study, is it surveys kids three times during childhood about religious belief in the home, practice within their family, and their own religious belief. And then surveys them again, I think ten years later, into adulthood. So, it has this longitudinal aspect. And so you're able to see what their parents did as they were children and then how that impacted their faith in early adulthood.

So, you showed the biggest factors for parents passing on the faith, whether osmotically or actively, is one the importance of the religion to the parents, going to religious services, and talking about faith in the home. So, are any of these particularly important? How did these sort of play out in terms of the young adult faith experience of children?

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the one thing is, is of course, parents have to be into the religion, and that just relates a little bit to their own religious importance, as well as their own level of religious engagement. And so, if the parents weren't that involved, forget it. It just, it had to be meaningful. It had to be organic. You know, that era where your parents just drop you off at church and they'll meet you afterwards or something, really didn't do anything for anybody. So it was these, these are very, you know, intentional kinds of things. And then, talking about faith was, you know, again, just really important, those two-way conversations where parents can kind of pick up on what the kids are saying and develop that further. And then, also, the interconnectedness amongst all three of these things. And so parents would often use congregations to begin those conversations with their kids. And so the parents would drop them off—or not drop them off, but, you know, take them to Bible study, take them to Sunday school—and then say, "Afterwards, I'm going to ask you about what you learned during that class or what was going on." And so the congregation would sort of help parents by giving them some material to feed off of that they could then revisit at a later time. And now they have a topic of discussion that they can dive into and move forward with. And so we saw those three things as sort of interrelated, but if you had one and not the other, it was just tough to see how it was going to lead to much development of religious faith later in life.

Grant:

Right. Another thing from the National Study of Youth and Religion was there had a measure of parenting style, which I thought was really interesting. And it's humbling in some ways. So, they looked at the extent to which—it was four different types of parenting style, and I'll have you explain those in a second—which are very common in developmental psychology. And you found that those parenting styles are actually an important factor for determining future adult religiousness, both independently of the parents’ religious practice, but also in combination, in interaction. So, can you first describe those different parenting styles, so listeners have a sense of what we mean by parenting style?

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so we found, so we focused on four different parenting styles. We had the authoritative parenting style, authoritarian, permissive, and then, kind of a, what we call a "disengaged" parenting style. And what we found is that the parents who had an authoritative parenting style tended to be more successful at passing on religion to their children later in life.

And so what is an authoritative parenting style? Well, first it's this idea that the parents hold clear and consistent expectations for the students, that there are clear boundaries. Excuse me, for the young people. There are clear boundaries for their children and that, you know, the children know what those are, and the parents reinforce them. But they don't stop there. It's not just that they're, you know, demanding and they have a clear intentionality. But secondly, parents have a lot of warmth and support and care with their children.

And so, if the children know what the boundaries are, but just, you know, as children might do, they're going to push the boundaries. Well, the children know that the parents aren't going to just abandon them if they don't do, you know, exactly what they want. Like, there's a lot of warmth and support and care there. And what that does is it sets up the children to one bond with their parents and like their parents and want to emulate their parents later on in life. So, if the parents are religious, the kids might be like, "Oh, that's kind of a cool thing. That's, that feels good." And at the same time, because the parents have these expectations and have set up these boundaries, that means that the parents are setting up the expectation and boundaries with regards to religion—whatever, however much they want to transmit to their children or whatever type of religion that is that they want to pass on. They're able to, you know, to do that because they are intentional and they have these boundaries and so forth. So, it's kind of that combination of both love and support but also strictness and boundaries that seem to have the most important effect for transmitting religion to the children.

Now, the other styles, like the authoritarian style is where parents are strict and demanding, but they don't have as much emotional warmth and support. And that didn't work as well. We also found we had permissive parents, right? So permissive parents are ones who have a lot of affection and empathy, but they offered their children almost no boundaries or standards or expectations. Again, not so great at passing on religion because you don't have those boundaries; you don't have those expectations even with regards to religion. And then, of course, we had what we called disengaged parents. They had, sort of, neither affection or warmth, and they also didn't have a lot of standards. They didn't know the names of their children's friends, things like that, where they just weren't that involved.

Grant:

One thing I found interesting is there's this interaction effect that you alluded to that, if you really want your kids to adopt your religious faith, you have to think it's important, you have to go to church, talk to your kids, but then also be—maybe not demanding, maybe that's not the right word—but, you know, have the limits and be loving and kind to them. So, hopefully—and this is what I said to the parents that weekend—is hopefully that's kind of what we're doing. So, that should give you some comfort that you're, sort of, doing the right stuff, right, if you want your kids to adopt the faith.

Amy:

I agree.

Grant:

Another thing we found interesting was that your results show that Catholics, liberal Protestants, and Jews are especially bad at transmitting the faith of their kids.

[laughter]

Whereas conservative Protestants are relatively good at it. What factors do you think explain those differences?

Amy:

Yeah. No. It's a great question. So, I mean, first off, for the conservative Protestants, what we tend to find is that they are a bit more intentional in trying to transmit religion. And so they have more expectations for their children on what they would like. So, they're a bit stricter; they're a bit more demanding. They also have a lot of warmth and affection, and so that definitely can make a difference.

I would say, too—and we talk a little bit about this in the book, but within sociology of religion, we talk a lot more about this—and that is, is that a lot of times conservative Protestant faiths are just more demanding of their adherents than Catholics and mainline Protestants and Jews. And so they ask a lot more of their religious adherents, and when they ask more of them and people are willing to give them more, people often feel like they're getting more out of their religion. And so, that again, kind of contributes to parents being more intentional.

Often these conservative Protestant faiths, which have been the ones that have been growing in America, unlike Catholicism and some of the mainline Protestant faiths, they offer a lot of activities. They offer, you know, big communities where people can spend time with other parents. They have a lot of activities for the children. They, you know, they have people, they have other people that are highly committed to the religion in ways that some of the other religious adherents maybe aren't as committed. And so we find that as well.

We also find with conservative Protestants, they have a lot of freedom to choose their congregation. And so, if there's a congregation that is either highly convenient to them, or they see a congregation that looks really exciting for kids, it has lots of activities but, say, maybe it's a twenty- or thirty-minute drive away. They can seek out that congregation without any repercussions. Sometimes that's a bit harder for Catholics, who might be more confined to their parish church, which doesn't have as much going on, and, you know, that maybe limits their kind of engagement with it as well.

And so, within sociology of religion, we do find that conservative Protestants often have a little bit more success, certainly compared to Jews and mainline Protestants and Catholics as well. And part of that is just the type of religion, that it might be a bit more demanding, but we also found that these parents were more intentional in how they were passing on religious faith.

Grant:

Yes. I'd like to put this conversation in conversation with chapter two of your book, which talks about how our understanding of religion has changed over time, from what you referred to as a community solidarity project to a personal identity accessory. I wonder if that has something to do with it. Where, in many ways, Catholicism was a community solidarity project where it carried the tradition, particularly of ethnic communities and urban areas, and maybe didn't connect so much with the heart. Whereas conservative Protestantism, in many ways, is very much about your personal identity and connecting with the phenomenological experience of being a person. And I wonder if conservative Protestantism, in many ways, simply is more consistent with the understanding of the world and religion to the modern man than other faiths. Like Catholicism and Judaism are much more positioned in a world in which religion is seen as a community solidarity project.

Amy:

Yeah, no. That's a great point, and I would definitely agree with that. Yeah, I mean, and as you mentioned too, Catholicism kind of, historically, especially in the United States, it was also part of a kind of a cultural identity or an ethnic identity. And so people could feel connected to the Catholic Church, even if they weren't that involved. But as long as they, you know, maybe engaged in various rituals or they felt certain ways about things, then they were connected. But it didn't have the same demands that some of the conservative Protestant organizations would place on people, where they're really like, you know, going to church many times a week or heavily engaged in Bible studies or being asked to do a lot of stuff. Well, when people are asked to do all of those things and they they're willing to do all of those things, they feel like they're getting more out of their religion.

And the Catholic Church, in some ways, they've made things a little bit easier for people, which I know a lot of Catholics probably love, but it also takes away some of the feeling of sacrifice. Like when you feel like you're really sacrificing something, you might feel like you're getting a little something more in return for it. So I can, you know, definitely see how those two things would align.

And today, people use religion in a different way. It's not just about following rituals or doing various things. It's, it is indeed, as you know, I mean, it's much more about connecting with the heart, using religion as almost a therapy or as a way to have a better life. And to do that, you need a little bit more—I don't want to say flow in the religion—but you need, maybe, this different type of connectedness to the religion to help that come through.

Grant:

Yeah. And that connects that back to Christian Smith's work on moral[istic] therapeutic deism.

Amy:

Yeah.

Grant:

Another result that I found sort of interesting is that political conservatives, independent of their own religious practice, tend to produce children that are more religious as adults. And again, this effect holds even when we're accounting for parents' religiosity, religious traditions, parenting style. What's going on there? What's your sense of why your political beliefs actually, in some way, determine your children's adult religious practices?

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, one thing to keep in mind is with the political conservativism, often those perspectives are consistent with religion. And so, even if you're accounting for religion per se, it's like you have this second force that is sort of setting you up to support this. And so this kind of more conservativism can be found in the political arena. We've certainly seen a lot of this in the last handful of years. And so it's consistent with religious faith, even if it isn't necessarily being drawn from it. And so I think that can have sort of a play. It, it doesn't feel uncomfortable for more religious people to also be politically conservative, whereas it might be a little bit more uncomfortable for less religious people to feel, you know, to be politically conservative. So, I think there's a consistency there.

I also think that, you know, if your parents are more politically conservative, there's a good chance that they are bringing people into your life that are politically conservative and that you might be living in areas that are more politically conservative. And all of those things can have an independent influence on kind of your level of socialization over the years. And again, it's consistent with religion even if it's not necessarily coming from religion, but there's a level of consistency there that can bring about, you know, some comfort with religion later in life.

Grant:

The last thing I want to talk about in this section, as we talk about intergenerational faith transmission, is one thing that we need to recognize is that your statistical models, actually, they do show that parental religiosity and parenting style and political beliefs are important for transmitting the faith to adult children, but actually the model explained very little of the variation in adult religiosity. So, for those folks that are statistically inclined, the R-squared values were less than 15%. So, this means that there's still a lot about adult religiosity that cannot be explained with the variables in this large quantitative data set. So, just very quickly, what are some big things you learned from the interviews that might explain this transmission that you couldn't really get at with the quantitative data? And I know there's lots, but maybe a couple of big ones that you think are particularly important.

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. And our qualitative interviews were really rich, so there was a lot there that we could grab onto. One of the processes that I don't think we found that much in the statistical models but that was really important that came up over and over again were those two-way conversations. So, the extent that parents were enacting them had a huge difference in what would be happening later on in life. And that was just much harder to capture with the statistical analysis. That idea that you don't just preach to the kids, but you help them kind of develop their own ideas and be there to support them. But you're not pushing this down their throat all of the time.

We weren't always able to capture how much parents were compartmentalizing religion. So that was difficult to get into the statistical models that came up a lot when we actually went and talked to parents. So, how much was religion just something that they did on Sundays or on Saturdays? And how much was it something that kind of flowed throughout the day or throughout what, you know, whatever the week that was happening, where parents were talking about religion and trying to engage their kids?

You know, we couldn't get at the extent to which parents would shut down controversial discussions. And that again goes back to those two-way conversations. So, if a kid brought up and said, "Well, why should I believe in God?" or, you know, "Does God do this?" or "Does God do that?" We would find, you know, some parents would talk about their own parents and the influence they had on them and the extent to which their parents would shut them down and say, "Well, we don't want to talk about that," or "Of course you believe in God, what, why are you saying that?" Or, you know, not encouraging them to sort of develop their own sort of rhythm and thoughtfulness and patterns to these things.

So that, those are some of the things that I would say we just couldn't really capture with the statistical models. And that's the same thing, too, that just made the qualitative analysis, the interviews, so much more exciting to look through because that's when you can start to see these other things like, "Oh, I wish we could have done more with that." And if we designed another survey, maybe we would, but you know, I, I don't know. I don't always believe in the models,

[laughter]

but the interviews were obviously much richer than some of the statistical analysis. But the statistical analysis helps, and I think it's really useful to put some numbers to these things. It drives home how much we don't necessarily...how much we can't always model.

Grant:

Yeah. No, I think you're right. In my career, you know, I was trained as an economist in graduate school, in an interdisciplinary department, and so much of my work is qualitative for this very point. There's so little we can know. I mean, it's important and we get really useful information from the models, but I find talking to people fills it out in ways that are even more illuminating.

So, I want to turn now toward some of the work you've done in public opinion, particularly on homosexuality and abortion. You know, I was reading your work and I kept thinking, "I wonder if she's going to take on any hard topics at some point in your career." But abortion and homosexuality are obviously two of the most controversial issues in the United States, politically. So I commend you for taking on these topics that are exceptionally difficult and divisive, and I think you've done them with great thoughtfulness. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the work that you've done.

So first, talking about homosexuality, I'm going to draw from your book Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality from 2017. Just a quick summary. Obviously, this book is showing that the overall acceptance of homosexuality has grown significantly over the last twenty or thirty years, though there remains significant cross-national variation, which you try to explore, again, both in a large-scale macro level but also then in a—not necessarily micro level—but in the case-study style to help really tease out what's driving this public opinion in different countries.

So, one thing that I was thinking about as I was reading the book is there seems to be this important definitional issue around the term "acceptance" of homosexuality. And here's what I mean: I can see many scenarios in which individuals are able to differentiate between judgments about the inherent morality of homosexuality or homosexual sex versus the civil rights that are afforded to homosexuals, whether that's marriage or the legal status of homosexuality and homosexual sex. So I think of someone like Pope Francis, who affirms traditional Catholic teaching on what the Catholic Church would consider to be the sinful nature of homosexual sex but also seems to support something like civil unions for homosexuals, although, you know, his declarations on these things are often a little bit confusing.

So, and this seems to be the very definition of liberalism, right? That we can disagree about moral issues but also allow for equal protections under the law and certain civil rights. So how important is it to differentiate between our moral positions versus our positions on civil rights?

Amy:

Yeah, no, that's a really important issue. In the United States, we'd find that distinction. So people are often much more willing to support civil rights for LGBTQ individuals. And so that would include things like the right to get married, participate in the military, whether books or speeches by these individuals should be banned. That was a more popular topic in the seventies; today almost nobody would say that. So that's the civil rights kind of dimension of it. And I think a lot of people often feel like, “I may not like those people over there, but I'm not going to deny them rights because other people may not like me and the groups I belong to, and I don't want them to deny me rights.” Right? Like, there's this idea that you have certain rights, especially in the United States, and then that's contrasted against, sort of, the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality. And we find that religion tends to have a much greater effect on the rightness or wrongness of how people view LGBTQ individuals, as opposed to the civil rights dimension. So those are pretty important distinctions in the United States.

It gets much murkier when we leave the United States and we start to look at other countries. So, in Africa, many places in Africa, people wouldn't necessarily draw this distinction. It's sort of a distinction that better-off countries tend to make. Whereas, in other places, it would just be much more conflated. It's sort of seen as, “Well, it's all part of one same thing. We're not going to draw that level of distinction.” And so that's kind of the different sort of aspects of these two dimensions.

Grant:

Right. So I want to explore a couple of tensions related to public attitudes about homosexuality. As I was reading, a number of things came into my mind that I'm like, "Oh, this is..." As I was reading your book alongside some other books, particularly Robert Putnam's book Upswing, which looks at what he calls "I" versus "We" orientation over about the last hundred years. So, sort of trading off individuality versus solidarity. I'll return to that idea in just a second, but it made me think about this sort of central tension in liberal democracies around homosexuality, that I want to explore a little bit.

So, in your book, you state that, quote, "As economic development increases, a nation's cultural value shifts and residents increasingly begin to value self-expression, creativity, and the pursuit of happiness." So, at the same time, as we know, liberal democracies place significant focus on the rights of the autonomous, self-expressive individual. And you show and argue in your book that it's this sort of posture towards individual rights, self-expression, creativity that has contributed to changes in attitudes and laws about homosexuality. However, these significant gains over the last sixty years in self-expression, sexual creativity, pursuit of individual happiness are occurring simultaneously with massive erosion in solidarity, erosion in orientation towards the common good. Again, this is Robert Putnam, primarily, although other people have thought about this. So, you know, we've not been more economically unequal. We've never been more polarized. And we've never had such an "I" orientation since, he argues, the Gilded Age, the late eighteen hundreds. So, and I want to be clear here that I'm not suggesting that advancement in the acceptance of homosexuality has led to the erosion of solidarity, but it's the cultural priority of the autonomous, self-expressive individual that's made expansive acceptance of homosexuality and the related rights possible.

So, with that introduction, here's the question: is solidarity the unfortunate casualty of a cultural atmosphere that made it possible for these significant gains in individual sexual rights?

Amy:

Yeah, no, it's a great question. So, in the book, the parts that you're talking about, a lot of these ideas are drawn from some of Inglehart's research, as well as other cultural social scientists who've been working in this area. And in a lot of ways, it does fit kind of with what Putnam would talk about in terms of solidarity and the erosion of solidarity.

I would say to some extent there might be that indeed solidarity is a bit of a casualty in this situation. It's, especially when you look at other countries, that that solidarity has done people a lot of good for a long time, especially when there's a lot of uncertainty. Often you want to stick with the larger group. That's safe, that's protective, that's useful. And you give to them and they give to you and you guys can protect each other. That obviously changes as we shift societal types and we move into these more self-expressive societies where it's okay to be more of an individual. And that people may not always like what you're doing, but they think you have a right to it and they're willing to support it and respect it and so forth.

So yeah, I do think that solidarity sorta is indeed a casualty to some extent of these things. Yeah.

Grant:

Do you think we can have both, sort of this hyper individualism and—again, that made sexual rights possible—as well as solidarity. I mean, I think that we do bemoan sort of the polarization that we're experiencing. I mean, this is probably the theme of the Trump presidency was what we have realized is this erosion of solidarity, particularly between the working class and whatever we want to call the managerial class. Do you see any way forward, both to maintain these rights that we seem to think are culturally important but also to bring us back together and less polarized, more oriented towards the common good?

Amy:

Yeah, I mean, I see new forms of solidarity forming. And so before, you know, people who might've identified as LGBTQ really didn't have, you know, much of a space for their voices to be heard. Well, so when you start to switch over and say, "Hey, you can be, you know, more individualistic. You can be self-expressive. Everybody can be different. People can be unique." Well, then those unique individuals tend to find each other. And that's maybe what we're finding a little bit with regards to the polarization in the United States right now is that these individuals, through a range of different things, including social media, are starting to find each other and connect with each other. And then they're developing their own kind of level of solidarity, which, you know, some people would say is problematic and other people would say, "Well, that's good. They found each other." Maybe a lot of people were feeling this way for a long time, and Trump just helped to solidify that and bring it together?

So, I see this as very much an organic process where old types of solidarity are maybe disintegrating and then new ones arise as people can connect with each other through various forms of media and find out who else is out there like them.

Grant:

Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's true. And, you know, obviously this is an exceptionally difficult question. And probably the question of our age is: how do we work together within this very individualistic moment? And I think that's probably our quest. And I tell my students this in one of my classes, that this is probably your quest, your generation's quest is to figure out the new forms of solidarity that no longer hold us together. So yeah, this is such a, I mean, like I said, it's probably the, in my opinion, the most important question of the day.

So, another tension that I found interesting as I was reading your book, again, I was reading in combination with a number of other books that were related but were a little bit different. So, as we get richer, we no longer need to focus on promoting large, stable families to ensure survival. You no longer need fifteen kids to work the farm. Right. At the same time, there's other significant economic and social forces that prevent families from having as many kids as they would otherwise want.

I think I read a piece by Ross Douthat that showed—I forget what survey he was using, what data source—but that on average, when you ask women how many children they have, they give you a number. And then how many do you want? How many do you have is almost always lower than the number that you want. And he was writing—I think it was in Plough Quarterly—that he was talking about the car seat laws. Right? Civil car seat laws probably led to a nontrivial reduction in birth rates, because as soon as you had the third child, you had to get the minivan.

[laughter]

And there are some economists who show this relationship. So, but my point is only that there seems to be these economic and social forces that make it less likely to have large families. Right?

Amy:

Yeah.

Grant:

So, at the same time, there's this strong cultural posture towards non-procreative sexual expression, right? This sort of ushered in rights for gay couples. But again, we know that in these wealthiest liberal democracies, we're in the middle of a baby crisis. Many of the wealthiest nations are not reproducing at replacement rates, and this has big economic and social implications, which, to be fair, are raised both by the Left and the Right. I think people on both sides of the political spectrum are concerned about the baby crisis.

So I guess the question is, have we tipped over too far culturally and economically in promoting what maybe we could call non-procreative sexual creativity at the expense of stable, procreative sexual coupling. Can we hold these together? Are they mutually exclusive? Have we gone too far?

Amy:

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I can talk a little bit. As you know, in the United States, there's a lot more that could be done to support families and to support fertility. And that includes, obviously, more generous paid parental leave, childcare support, better health care. And what I hope is going to happen is that with this little bit of a baby bust that we're experiencing—definitely in the United States related to COVID but, of course, in a lot of East Asian nations, they really have this problem, where there's many fewer kids than they need for their societies. I hope it ushers in a new way of thinking for the government and what they can do. Now, some countries have tried to, you know, support fertility through various programs. The United States, we're just so far from it. We're just so different from other nations. And so, I hope, if nothing else, they will at least try to experiment more with, you know, finding a way to get that third baby seat in the back seat or, you know, come on, find a way to—I say this as a new mother—make childcare more affordable or to provide better healthcare in general or more generous paid leave. And that might be the thing that, if nothing else, maybe that will, you know, try to come out of this.

But you're right. There is this kind of split. And I found this a lot—we're going to talk more about this, I think, but—when I was doing this research in China on attitudes about abortion. You know, China for a long time had this one-child-only policy where they really were trying to limit fertility—for some good reasons. They really had a very large population, and this is what the government thought would work. It's come to an end; it's over now. But, when you talk to people, the government policies have had almost no influence, at least in their perspective, on shaping how people feel about children. It's this other thing, which is just, economically, it's just really expensive to have kids. And if you're not in the right place for it, you really don't want to do it. And so that much more so than, you know, kind of the history of this policy has been shaping how a lot of people view that issue there.

And certainly it's shaping how a lot of people view that issue here. It's perhaps not surprising that it's women over forty who are having the highest birth rates, within that age bracket, compared to younger women, because it's those women that have their careers established and have been able to save enough money, have reached a lot of milestones, often are in stable relationships or figured out how else they're going to manage. So, it takes a lot of time and resources, so it would, yeah, it'd be neat for the government to do more.

Grant:

Yeah. So I want to wrap up a little bit talking about abortion. Again, you've picked some very hot topics. But I want to talk a little bit about your abortion work, just a few questions.

One interesting thing that you mentioned throughout your work on abortion, particularly in the introduction sections of your papers, is that public opinions about homosexuality and also marijuana use, so two controversial topics, have largely liberalized over time, but the opinions on abortion have largely stayed the same. Why is that? What's different about abortion compared to things like homosexuality and marijuana and other controversial social issues that seems to be pretty sticky in terms of public opinion?

Amy:

Yeah, no, it's a good question. And, as a researcher, these are all quote, unquote "deviant issues" and to some extent, maybe, morality issues, if you're talking about homosexuality and abortion. And so, you would think, "Oh, they should maybe fit together. That would make sense." But, of course, that's not what is found.

Now, I think part of the reason for that is that abortion affects many more people. So about a quarter of US women have an abortion and most Americans have children. So I think, these issues aren't seen as having a lot of commonality. There's relatively, as you know, the community of LGBTQ individuals or lesbian and gay individuals is relatively small compared to the, you know, who would be affected by abortion. And I'm not sure people look at them as the same things. I think people feel like abortion is, is much more personal because, you know, many people are parents. Whereas, you know, knowing someone who is gay or lesbian, or even your feelings about that, it's just more distant. Often, people don't necessarily know someone who's LGBTQ or is somebody that they're likely to come into contact with. And so it's just not as important of an issue or as interesting as an issue or is something that they feel so strongly about.

Additionally, you know, we never had a coming out moment for abortion. And it's not that I would necessarily advocate that. Certainly, I wouldn't, because I think it's so controversial. But the coming out movement did a lot for LGBTQs because suddenly you found out that someone you knew maybe claimed this identity or felt this way, and that changed how you then felt about it. With regards to abortion, it's just such a deviant issue that most people know someone who's had an abortion, but don't know that somebody who's had an abortion. They've never been told, and they never would be. So I think that is also an important distinction.

With regards to abortion, I also think that the religious Right—I've got to give them a lot of credit—I think they've been really successful in framing the debate as harming an unborn child, as to, for example, a medical procedure, like, I don't know, a root canal or something. They're really good at that. And I think a lot of pro-choice activists are impressed as well at just how good they've done at framing this in a certain way. And that's a tough frame to challenge. And again, I think that's another reason why people just, attitudes just really haven't changed much. And in the United States, it's been really quite consistent since the late 1970s, how people feel about abortion.

Grant:

So you mentioned in an email to me that you're working on a third book, which is examining cross-national opinions on abortion, similarly to the way that you looked at cross-national opinions on homosexuality. Unfortunately, it's still a work in progress, so I didn't get a chance to read it beforehand, but I was hoping that maybe you could just, you know, obviously there's probably a lot that you're learning, but maybe a couple of lessons learned from those interviews. Oh, and I should mention that this is comparing abortion opinions, particularly in China and the United States. So I'm wondering if you can give us a couple of lessons learned of what you're learning about the public opinions of abortion in China and the US through these interviews.

Amy:

Yeah, absolutely. So, the book itself is going to be using a lot of cross-national quantitative survey data to look at broad trends in how people view, you know, abortion across the globe. And so that'll be exciting. There's not that much work that's doing this. But, in addition to that, I have also conducted about thirty interviews, combined between the United States and China. I was actually supposed to be in China this past year, but COVID made that too challenging for me.

Grant:

Yeah, for sure.

Amy:

Yeah, so. But I was able to do many of the interviews, and that was just a heck of a lot of fun. I had great translators and I had, you know, Zoom helped. I was able to actually talk to more people than I think I would have normally and all over the country.

So a lot of the groups I talked to included abortion doctors, it included religious officials, both Christian and Buddhist. I talked to a lot of academics. Other people that are sort of in, I guess you would call 'em, you know, civil servants within the government. And I learned a lot. And it's really neat because I think we know a lot about abortion in the United States because we've been doing this for a long time and we're a well-developed country. We have a very rich academic infrastructure in play. And so, sometimes it's hard to see where are the most interesting things about abortion in America, but contrasting it against China, that definitely puts things into perspective and helps you understand things in a whole new way.

So just a couple of highlights of various things that I found. One of them I already mentioned. There was this big policy change about six or seven years ago where, you know, they used to have this limit, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, on how many kids you could have. And it was one as the one-child-only policy, and they changed that about six or seven years ago. And so, when I would talk with people about abortion, I'd often try to bring that up. But it really was a fight that their mothers maybe went through, or it was an issue that, you know, other women, older women maybe had to contend with, and it really wasn't something that was affecting many of them now or in the current era.

What is affecting them though was the economic circumstances, the challenges of having a child in China right now, especially more than one. Oh my God. People were just really attuned to the fact that it is very expensive to have children, especially in cities. You need to have the right setup. You need to have the right situation. And if you don't have that, you get an abortion. You really don't mess around with that. And that discourse is a little bit different than what you would find in the United States, where a lot of people would say, "You can make this work, even if you're a single parent." But I didn't find any of that. They were just like, "No, why would you mess around with this?"

And that was really consistent, too, with how they viewed the potential health of an unborn child. So again, in the United States, you know, I think a lot of parents, if things weren't looking great for their child, they would consider that, but they wouldn't necessarily have an abortion. They'd say, "Well, you know, what kind of health problems might there be?" I had, you know, a couple of abortion doctors tell me, like, if this unborn child even has the chance of a cleft pallet, right?—which is fixable with surgery, usually, after birth—they said, if there was a chance that it had this and they knew this before birth, they would just get the abortion.

So there, and I think some of that relates to the one-child-only policy, the legacy of the one-child-only policy where you get one shot at this. And if it doesn't, if things are not perfect, you don't mess around. So, if you took some funky medication when, you know, you were ten weeks into your pregnancy and then you found out you were pregnant, don't mess around. Just get the abortion, like, because it just, you were going to get one shot at this, for a lot of women. So it had to be the absolute ideal circumstances, or you don't do that. So that was interesting. I don't think we would think of it necessarily in those ways in the United States.

Other things that were, you know, really interesting, you know, because this was the government said, you know, kind of laid down the policy in China, and China's not very religious, not religious at all, not like the United States. A lot of people just didn't even have a religious framework to challenge that perspective. And likewise, they didn't have a human rights framework, and they didn't have a feminist framework to challenge that. So there really wasn't, you know, much there to even, even to like put that into some sort of framework where you would want to challenge it.

When I started the project, I thought, "Oh, this, is this controversial? We're talking about one-child-only policy, you know, especially compared to the United States." And people would just laugh it off. They were like, “This isn't controversial. This isn't any big deal. What's controversial is democracy. You know, you want to talk about political protests? Now you're going to get me in trouble. But abortion? Nah, this isn't, this is just a health procedure. This isn't, you know what, you know, whatever.”

Now, I say all of that, but there were people who were definitely affected by abortions that they had had or stories of other people who had abortions. There, it was challenging for people at times, and they had to mourn the loss, and we talked a lot—and I'll be putting this in the book—about how do you, when do you think life begins? A lot of people did say life began early. So then, how do you, kind of square that off with the fact that you're getting an abortion? What does that feel like? Or, you know, what does that, how does that look? So, I thought there might be more differences there. I thought, "Oh, maybe the Chinese, like, they just don't think of it as life until maybe after they have it or something." But that wasn't the case. A lot of people did say, "No, no. We felt like this was life or we saw life." And even my abortion doctors, they struggled a little bit trying to, you know, rectify those two things. But there was this idea that, you know, you're going to get one shot at this. The government has historically laid that down for us, and you got to make sure that the circumstances are best.

It was a much greater emphasis on: Can you raise this child? Can you bring this child into the world under the best circumstances? And from a more Buddhist-oriented perspective, some people would say this just wasn't the time for this child. So he or she will come back another time. But maybe this, you know, this idea of, you know, it's, that's for another life. That's not for this life right now. It's not ready.

So those are the highlights.

Grant:

We do know that there are some…a nontrivial Christian community in China. Did you interview anyone who sort of had that worldview that might be a little bit more informed by a particular Christian understanding of human dignity and the dignity of the life of the fetus, because that's really in many ways what drives opinions on abortion? Was that different? Did they adopt a more Christian understanding of the dignity of the child or the dignity of the baby?

Amy:

They tried to. So, I'm thinking, for example, I talked to some people from the Catholic Church in China. So I was just talking with one sister and I, you know, trying to ask her, like, "Well, how do you manage this? You know, we obviously know how the Catholic Church feels about this issue. And then you're in China. And then you're talking to women who might be in this predicament where they have to make this decision." And, yeah, I mean, she was just like, you know, there was a limit to how much you could protest or there was a limit to how much you could say this is a problem just because of the way things were structured. But she would say, "Well, we try to encourage them to have the baby and then maybe we will take it and we'll take care of it. Or we'll, you know, there's, we have orphanages and stuff that we can manage. So we try to encourage that." But probably nothing like what it would be like in the United States given the constraints of everything.

And the Buddhists, too. I mean, the Buddhist perspective is that you don't hurt life. So, in a lot of ways, they're more consistent with Christians than you might otherwise think. And so talking with them, too, there was a little bit of this kind of sadness that, you know, went with that. But, at the same time, yeah, the government is really powerful there and that's kind of laying down the perspective that people are going to take. And then you have that, you know, mixed in with the fact that there's no, there's so few people that are even looking at this from a religious framework, that, yeah, I guess you can manage it a little easier.

Grant:

Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. I'm really intrigued to read this book. When…do you have any sense of when it might be done and in press?

Amy:

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully we'll have it done within the next year. And then, maybe another six months to a year before I can get it published. Yeah.

Grant:

Right. Well, this is great. So, Amy, we're sort of at the end of time. This is a really fun conversation. I'm so grateful that you took time to chat with me and, hopefully, maybe someday, we can meet in person once travel begins again.

Amy:

I would love that.

Grant:

All right.

Amy:

Absolutely.

Grant:

That sounds great. All right. Well, my best to your new family. I'm very happy for you. And thank you so much for joining me today.

Amy:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Grant:

All right. Take care.