Fertility in Russia: Does Religion and Religiousness Matter?

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the share of believers, as well as practicing believers among young Russians increased. All four so-called traditional religions in Russia - Christian Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism - encourage large families. Although the data from official statistics does not allow finding a correlation between fertility and religion, this can be done with the data of sociodemographic surveys. We use the Russian part of “Generations and Gender Survey" (conducted in 2004) and “Person, Family, Society" (conducted in 2017) to analyze the differences in the number of children ever born among women in the generations 1930-1989 depending on their religion and religious activity. Our results show that the fertility of Muslim women from 1940-1979 birth cohorts is close to or above the level of reproduction. Total fertility rate of Orthodox and nonbelievers is stable at about 1.7 children per woman. Women from the 1930-1939 birth cohorts demonstrate the variability of reproductive behavior depending on personal religiosity. However, women from 1940-1969 birth cohorts follow the same two-child ideal scenario. The survival analysis revealed that we could expect the spread of childlessness both among Orthodox Christians and especially among non-believers. Our results also demonstrate a weak effect of personal high religiosity on the chances of women from the 1980-1989 birth cohorts becoming mothers for three or more children.