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Family and religion are tightly intertwined—parents provide religious socialization and religions reinforce the importance of families. We examine how parental religiosity relates to attitudes about and the timing of children’s marriage, recognizing that religiosity provides certain schema for living, draws boundaries which may increase social status, and is constructed and negotiated in gendered ways. Using data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study in Nepal, a primarily Hindu and Buddhist setting, we find that fathers’ religiosity is positively related to support for arranged and intra-caste marriage as well as their children marrying earlier, whereas higher mothers’ religiosity is largely unassociated with restrictive marriage attitudes and positively related to later marriage for sons. These diverging associations between parental religiosity and children’s marriage for fathers and mothers suggest it is not only levels of religious belief or practice that can vary by gender, but associations between religiosity and family attitudes and behaviors are gendered as well.

The Sociology Seminar Series is convened by Lucie Kalousova, Per Engzell and Julia Benrman. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.