Family Structure, Market Competition and Local Culture: The Mechanisms of Religious mobility beyond Christianity

Abstract Based on pooled data drawn from a representative Taiwan Social Change Survey dataset, this article analyzes the pattern of transmission of religious belief from parents to adult children in Taiwan from 1999 to 2009. As a society imbued with diverse religious traditions, Taiwan as a region of China serves as an ideal point of departure to examine religious mobility beyond the Western and monotheistic world. The article has three main findings. First, there is a gendered pattern in exchange mobility. Mothers play a stronger role than fathers overall, but Christian families have an inverse situation. Sons are more likely to adopt their parents’ religious belief than daughters. Second, a parent’s capacity to transmit his/her religious belief greatly depends on the religious group to which he/she belongs. Daoism shows more robustness than other religions in transgenerational transmission, which contradicts the prediction drawn from religious economy theory. Third, religious communities significantly differ from each other in structural mobility. Buddhism has the highest retentive capacity for reducing religious switching, and folk religions have the highest attractive capacity to win over switchers from other religious communities