Sex Differences in Religiosity: The Role of Attachment to Parents and Social Learning

We employed aspects of both attachment theory and social learning theory to develop an understanding of sex differences in young adults’ attachment to God, their concepts of God, and other aspects of their religiosity. We found that attachment to God is more likely to be associated with attachment to the same-sex parent than to the opposite-sex parent. We found that this is also true for concepts of God as loving, controlling, and distant in female, but not male participants in our study. For both males and females, mother’s level of religious involvement when they were growing up was associated with participants’ later attendance at religious services, but for males, attachment to father was an additional influence. In neither males nor females was attachment to either parent or their parent’s past religious involvement a significant predictor of strength of religious faith.