Faith and Volunteering at Midlife: Variation by Religious Continuity, Discontinuity, or Initiation Since Childhood?

Abstract Volunteer service is an integral part of civic life in America. Prior research consistently finds that highly religious people spend the most time volunteering, but few studies assess the role of religious stability and change through the life course. This study focuses on exposure to religiosity in childhood and the (dis)continuity of religiosity into adulthood, as well as cases where people become more or less religious as adults. Drawing on nationally representative longitudinal data from the MIDUS study (N = 3,025), our results suggest that childhood religiosity, in isolation, does not provide a sufficient account of adulthood volunteering. Rather, people raised in highly religious childhood homes volunteered several more hours per year than those from less religious homes only if they carried religious importance forward into midlife. Moreover, people sustaining high religiosity from childhood to adulthood reported slightly more total volunteering hours than those who decreased and increased their religious importance over time after adjusting for baseline hours of volunteering. Counterfactual mediation analyses suggest that religious attendance partially mediates each of these associations, highlighting the importance of religious communities in encouraging volunteerism.