Fertility in Russia: Does Religion and Religiousness Matter?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the share of believers, as well as practicing believers among young Russians increased. All four so-called traditional religions in Russia - Christian Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism - encourage large families. Although the data from official statistics does not allow finding a correlation between fertility and religion, this can be done with the data of socio-demographic surveys. We use the Russian part of " Generations and Gender Survey" (conducted in 2004) and " Person, Family, Society" (conducted in 2017) to analyze the differences in the number of children ever born among women in the generations 1930-1989 depending on their religion and religious activity. Our results show that the fertility of Muslim women from 1940-1979 birth cohorts is close to or above the level of reproduction. Total fertility rate of Orthodox and non-believers is stable at about 1.7 children per woman. Women from the 1930-1939 birth cohorts demonstrate the variability of reproductive behavior depending on personal religiosity. However, women from 1940-1969 birth cohorts follow the same two-child ideal scenario. The survival analysis revealed that we could expect the spread of childlessness both among Orthodox Christians and especially among non-believers. Our results also demonstrate a weak effect of personal high religiosity on the chances of women from the 1980-1989 birth cohorts becoming mothers for three or more children.