Maternal religiosity and social support to mothers: helpers’ religious identity matters

Abstract

Research demonstrates that religious people are trusted more, receive and provide more cooperation, and have larger cooperative networks. This line of research also suggests, that religious prosociality is not always parochial, and often extends to people outside of a religious ingroup. Here, we test whether the intensity of religious practice associates with received support from coreligionists and/or non-coreligionists among a sample of American mothers. Specifically, we test the association between self-reported behavioral religiosity of religious (here Christian) and non-religious mothers from the Greater Pittsburgh area, USA, and the frequency of emotional support (Nmothers = 517, Nsupporters = 1999) and housework help (Nmothers = 447, Nsupporters = 997) they received from Christian and non-religious supporters. We found that maternal religiosity was positively associated with the frequency of housework help received from Christian supporters, but not from non-religious supporters. We did not find evidence for an association between maternal religiosity and emotional support received from religious nor non-religious supporters. We interpret our results through the lens of religious signaling theory.