Religious groups don't just have more kids because of their faith—they do it because they build 'friend networks' that make raising kids a lot cheaper.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Solidarity as a Demographic Mechanism: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Fertility in Religious Communities
SSRN · 6367098
The Takeaway
By comparing groups like the Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jews to post-revolutionary Iran, the author found that pronatalist ideology fails to maintain high birth rates unless it's backed by specific institutional supports like collective childcare and alternative economic systems.
From the abstract
This article proposes a conceptual framework for explaining the sustained high fertility of religious communities under conditions of generalized demographic crisis. Despite an extensive literature documenting the correlation between religiosity and fertility, existing explanations suffer from categorical underdifferentiation and fail to integrate ideational and structural approaches into a unified analytical model. This article addresses that gap by introducing the concept of solidarity infrast