Fertility, Affiliation Transmission, and Religious Reproduction in Germany

Religious groups reproduce across generations through childbearing and the transmission of affiliation. I examine how these processes jointly shape religious composition in Germany. A pseudo-prospective design combines repeated cross-sectional surveys of women’s affiliation and fertility with retrospective information on maternal affiliation and adult offspring affiliations from the German Socio-Economic Panel. I reconstruct five-group distributions for women born in 1931-1950 and their offspring, including childless women in the starting population. Under the assumptions linking these sources, fertility differences modify but do not reverse the generational redistribution associated with affiliation transmission. Catholic point estimates indicate partial fertility compensation for transmission losses, whereas Protestant fertility provides little compensation. Lower fertility moderates but does not eliminate unaffiliated gains. Across maternal cohorts, the unaffiliated generational gap narrows as the maternal share rises toward a comparatively stable reconstructed offspring share. Unaffiliated mothers also account for a growing share of unaffiliated offspring. A conditional reconstruction for women born in 1951-1970 yields the same directions in the point estimates under fixed transmission probabilities. The findings quantify the limited extent of fertility compensation in the reconstructed religious reproduction of these cohorts.