RELIGIOUS HERITAGE AND TEENAGE MARRIAGE

Teen marriage may be a way of legitimately culminating a sexual relati onship and attaining adult status. Our purpose is to investigate wheth er the religion in which a young person was raised has an impact on th e decision to marry early. Extrapolating from our findings on premarit al sex as well as previous research of others, we hypothesized that Fu ndamentalist and Institutional Sect backgrounds produce higher rates o f teen marriage. We utilized data from the NLSY between 1979 and 1984 for whites and female blacks. The logistic regressions indicated subst antial differences in the likelihood of teen marriage by religious her itage category for male and female whites, but not for female African- Americans. Using mainline Protestants as the comparison group, we find that young whites with Fundamentalist and Sect-like backgrounds are m uch more likely to marry by age 19, while Catholics and non-Christians are significantly less likely to marry early. These differences persi st even when controlling for geographic factors, parental and family c haracteristics, church attendance, and expectations for adult roles.