Blurring the Faith? Religious Intermarriage across Immigrant Generations

Monica Boyd, University of Toronto
Diana Worts, University of Toronto
Michael Haan, University of Alberta

This paper examines religious intermarriage across 6 immigrant origin generations: the foreign born arriving at age 15 or later; the 1.5 generation; the second generation with two foreign born parents; the 2.5 generation; the third generation; and the fourth-plus generation. Data on the currently married population age 20 and older are taken from the 2002 Statistics Canada Ethnic Diversity Survey. We offer three main conclusions. First, religious intermarriage increases with each successive generation through the third generation. Second, logistic regression analysis reveals the persistence of this pattern of rising religious exogamy despite controlling for inter-generational differences in socio-demographic variables. Third, generational differences in religiosity and in parental-respondent religious similarity underlie the greater religious intermarriage of the 2.5 and third generations relative to those generations that are closer to the migration experience.