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Second, the wealthy Christian nations built the most generous welfare states, which directly subsidize illegitimacy by removing the provider-dependency relationship you describe.

Franklin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 11:20 am http://fschmidt.luan.software/christian ... imacy.html

Explanations or thoughts?

Prompt for GPT-5.5-Pro wrote:```
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Please add a nuance to this analysis; analyse the difference in illegitimacy rates between Christians who attend church services at least 3 times per month, and put them in the "practicing Christian" bucket. Take ones who do not attend church that often and put them in the "nominal Christian" bucket. Then redo the analysis in a tripartite fashion, comparing both of those to both each other and also to the non-Christian populations.

ChatGPT 5.5 Pro Extended wrote: I would revise Claude’s analysis this way: high national nonmarital-birth rates are mainly a nominal/post-Christian-world phenomenon, not a practicing-Christian phenomenon. Practicing Christians often live inside high-rate countries, so they are counted in those national averages, but their own family-formation behavior is materially different.

A few caveats first. “Births outside marriage” means legal marital status at birth; it includes cohabiting couples and does not necessarily mean father absence. The OECD explicitly warns that cross-country differences partly reflect whether couples legally marry before parenthood, and notes that in much of Central/South America high rates are driven by cohabiting “free unions.” Source: OECD Family Database, SF2.4: Share of births outside marriage

Also, global data that cross-tabs Christian attendance >=3 times/month with births outside marriage is not available in one clean dataset, so the practicing/nominal split has to be estimated from regional attendance data plus studies that measure attendance and nonmarital childbearing directly.

The key empirical correction

For the United States, the best direct evidence shows a clear practicing/nominal divide. An analysis of the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that 25% of mothers who attended church at least weekly had had a child outside wedlock, versus 34% of mothers who attended monthly or less; after controls, weekly attenders were about half as likely to have a child outside wedlock as less-frequent or never-attenders. Source: Institute for American Values research brief

A Fragile Families study of urban parents found the same directional pattern: church attendance was strongly associated with being married at childbirth; father attendance raised the odds of marriage at childbirth by 95%, mother attendance by 40%, and mothers-to-be attending several times a month or more had 63% higher “shotgun marriage” rates than less-frequent attenders. Source: Then Comes Marriage? Religion, Race, and Marriage in Urban America

So the split is not:

• []Christian/post-Christian........Crude expectation: high.
  []Non-Christian........Crude expectation: low.

It is closer to:

• []Practicing Christians........Lower nonmarital childbearing than their surrounding national culture, but often living inside high-rate countries.
  []Nominal/post-Christian populations........Main driver of high nonmarital-birth rates in the Christian/post-Christian world.
• Non-Christian civilizational populations........Usually low, especially Islamic, Hindu, East Asian/Confucian, and many Asian/North African contexts; with African, Latin American, and local exceptions.

Tripartite redo

Using Pew’s 2020 global religion benchmark, Christians were about 2.3 billion people, or 28.8% of world population; Christians are now regionally spread, with about 31% in sub-Saharan Africa, 24% in Latin America/Caribbean, 22% in Europe, and 10% in North America. Source: Pew Research Center, global religious landscape, 2010–2020

Pew’s cross-national commitment data show why a practicing/nominal split matters: among Christians, weekly attendance is above 60% in every surveyed African country, high in some Latin American countries, 47% among U.S. Christians, but below 10% in several European countries. Source: Pew Research Center, the world’s most committed Christians

A reasonable rough decomposition is therefore:

• Practicing Christians
  ........Definition: Christian and attends services weekly / several times per month.
  ........Approx. population: ~0.9–1.1B.
  ........Living in nations where the national nonmarital-birth rate is probably >10%: ~85–95%.
  ........Individual-level interpretation: They mostly live in Christian/post-Christian countries where national rates are high, but their own nonmarital-childbearing rates are substantially lower than nominal Christians in the same societies.
• Nominal/post-Christian populations
  ........Definition: self-identified Christians who do not attend often, plus secular/post-Christian populations of historically Christian countries.
  ........Approx. population: ~2.3–2.6B.
  ........Living in nations where the national nonmarital-birth rate is probably >10%: ~90–97%.
  ........Individual-level interpretation: This is the core high-rate population: Europe, the Americas, much of Oceania, and large parts of Christian Africa.
• Non-Christian civilizational populations
  ........Definition: Islamic, Hindu, East Asian/Confucian, Buddhist, and other non-Christian-majority contexts, excluding secular post-Christian Westerners.
  ........Approx. population: ~4.6–4.9B.
  ........Living in nations where the national nonmarital-birth rate is probably >10%: probably ~5–15%.
  ........Individual-level interpretation: Mostly below 10%, especially Asia/North Africa and East Asia; important exceptions exist, especially parts of sub-Saharan Africa and some Southeast Asian or Latin-influenced contexts.

So, in the original format:

• Practicing Christian
  ........Population in >10% national-rate setting: ~0.8–1.0B.
  ........Total population: ~0.9–1.1B.
  ........Percent of group in >10% setting: ~85–95%.
• Nominal/post-Christian
  ........Population in >10% national-rate setting: ~2.2–2.5B.
  ........Total population: ~2.3–2.6B.
  ........Percent of group in >10% setting: ~90–97%.
• Non-Christian civilizational
  ........Population in >10% national-rate setting: ~0.25–0.7B.
  ........Total population: ~4.6–4.9B.
  ........Percent of group in >10% setting: ~5–15%.

That preserves Claude’s country-level observation, but changes the explanation. Practicing Christians are not the main source of the high-rate pattern; they are mostly passengers inside high-rate national environments. The high-rate phenomenon is better described as post-Christian secularization / nominal Christianity / Westernized family formation, not Christianity as actually practiced.

Why the distinction matters

In the OECD, the overall average share of births outside marriage is now 43%, with very high rates in Latin America — Colombia 87%, Chile 78%, Costa Rica 74%, Mexico 73% — while Japan, Korea, and Türkiye are only about 2–4%. Source: OECD Family Database, SF2.4

The United States sits in the high Western pattern: CDC data for 2023 show 40.0% of U.S. births were to unmarried women. Source: CDC, Unmarried Childbearing

For lower- and middle-income countries, Bongaarts and Casterline find a sharp regional divide: extramarital fertility averages 15.2% in sub-Saharan Africa, 13.9% in Latin America, but only 1.5% in Asia/North Africa; southern Africa is an outlier at 47.6%. Source: Bongaarts and Casterline, Demographic Research

China also appears low by Western standards: one study using the 2017 China Fertility Survey found out-of-wedlock births were 8.96% of live births overall and had fallen to 4.3% in 2016. Source: Study on out-of-wedlock childbearing in China

So the revised implication is:

High nonmarital birth rates cluster in societies shaped by Christianity historically, but within those societies the strongest contrast is between practicing Christians and nominal/post-Christian populations. Practicing Christianity appears to retain a marriage-before-childbirth norm; nominal Christianity and post-Christian secularity do not. Non-Christian civilizations often retain stronger marriage-childbirth coupling through Islamic law/norms, Hindu family systems, Confucian family culture, or other kinship structures, though this varies by region.

The cleaner conclusion would be:

High legal nonmarital birth rates are not primarily a “Christian” phenomenon in the sense of active Christian practice. They are primarily a post-Christian / nominal-Christian / Westernized phenomenon. Practicing Christians mostly live in the same high-rate countries, so they are counted in the national figures, but they behave more marriage-normatively than nominal Christians in those same countries.

Franklin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 11:20 am http://fschmidt.luan.software/christian ... imacy.html

Explanations or thoughts?

barnhart wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 12:38 pm

Franklin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 11:20 am http://fschmidt.luan.software/christian ... imacy.html

Explanations or thoughts?

My thoughts:
Belief in Jesus that captivates the mind and inspires obedience is not something easily captured, controlled or used to other ends. If your goal is to utilize Christian faith to accomplish goals that are foreign to the New Testament, you will fail. You will join the ranks of all the failed Utopian cult leaders, Christian themed Nationalists and culture builders who imagined believe in Jesus is a force that can be turned by strength of will into personal goals.

barnhart wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 12:38 pm

Franklin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 11:20 am http://fschmidt.luan.software/christian ... imacy.html

Explanations or thoughts?

My thoughts:
Belief in Jesus that captivates the mind and inspires obedience is not something easily captured, controlled or used to other ends. If your goal is to utilize Christian faith to accomplish goals that are foreign to the New Testament, you will fail. You will join the ranks of all the failed Utopian cult leaders, Christian themed Nationalists and culture builders who imagined believe in Jesus is a force that can be turned by strength of will into personal goals.

Soloist wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 11:38 am Honestly, I wasn’t even sure what you were talking about it first so I asked Claude what you were talking about and Claude says your data is flawed to begin with.

I think the problem with talking to Claude for these sort of things as you can introduce bias without meaning to.
I also think it’s almost impossible too conclude the Christianity is responsible for this situation given that most of those places have abandoned what Christianity even teaches long ago.
It’s not really like Muslim countries are going to publish their data for us to look at either.

Arguably, you could say I introduced bias into Claude myself, but I’ve never discussed this sort of thing with Claude so I don’t think I have and I don’t really discuss religion with Claude so I don’t think that is a factor either.

JohnH wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 11:58 am You gave the wrong prompt to Claude; you should have asked it to identify Christians by church attendance.

Let's re-run your query with church attendance at least 3 times a month and compare illegitimacy rates; here's the prompt. (I would also argue that lazily prompting chatbots like this is not a valid way to do sociological research.)

...

ChatGPT 5.5 Pro Extended wrote: For the United States, the best direct evidence shows a clear practicing/nominal divide. An analysis of the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that 25% of mothers who attended church at least weekly had had a child outside wedlock, versus 34% of mothers who attended monthly or less; after controls, weekly attenders were about half as likely to have a child outside wedlock as less-frequent or never-attenders. Source: Institute for American Values research brief

In addition, an obvious thing to check is for people who practice actual Christianity, like plain Anabaptists, versus Christianity that ignores much of what Jesus teaches. In my own congregation, the illegitimacy rate is 0. There is one girl who had a baby out of wedlock, but that happened a few years after she left our church because (in her own words) "I just cannot live a Christian life and I'm not a Christian". I have found the same to be true in German Baptist congregations, Amish ones, other types of Mennonites, Hutterites, Bruderhof communities, and Apostolic Christians.

Franklin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2026 6:41 pm
Please share your chat with Claude here.

This is a previous conversation where an earlier model walked through an argument that high "illegitimacy" rates are overwhelmingly a Christian/post-Christian phenomenon, with a population breakdown by religious bloc and several proposed explanations.

A few things worth flagging about what it actually says, since you asked what it's about:

The numbers are largely fabricated. The figures presented as data—"89% of the Christian world," "3% of the non-Christian world," the per-region rates—aren't drawn from a real dataset. They're back-of-envelope estimates dressed up in a precise-looking table. The non-Christian figure in particular is unreliable: out-of-wedlock birth statistics for much of South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia are genuinely sparse, and the response essentially guessed, then built a sweeping conclusion on the guess.

The framing does most of the work. Terms like "illegitimacy," "contagion," "immune system," and "subsidize illegitimacy" aren't neutral. They encode a conclusion—that nonmarital birth is a pathology spreading through a population—before any analysis happens. A real demographic discussion would note that nonmarital birth rates track cohabitation norms, welfare structure, female labor participation, divorce law, and how countries define "marriage" for statistical purposes. Many children counted as "illegitimate" are born to stable cohabiting couples (common across the Nordics and Latin America).

The category is doing sleight of hand. Lumping secular Western Europe, the post-Soviet bloc, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa into one "Christian/post-Christian" bucket, then attributing their wildly different family patterns to a shared Christian origin, isn't a finding—it's an artifact of how the bucket was drawn. You can make almost any correlation appear by choosing the grouping after seeing the outcome.

If you want, I can pull actual OECD and UN nonmarital birth data and we can see what the real cross-national picture looks like. It's an interesting question; the version above just isn't a reliable answer to it.

Yes. "Illegitimacy rate" is an older term for the share of births that occur outside marriage—out-of-wedlock births.

One precision point: it's measured at birth, not pregnancy. The statistic counts whether the parents were married when the child was born, so it doesn't capture conceptions, abortions, or pregnancies that don't result in a recorded birth.

The word "illegitimate" itself is largely archaic now and carries a judgmental connotation (it once had real legal consequences for inheritance and status). Demographers today use neutral phrasing like "nonmarital births" or "births outside marriage," partly because in many countries a large share of those births are to stable cohabiting couples rather than single mothers—which is the distinction the older term obscures.

I need to pull the actual numbers to answer this properly—let me get current cross-national data.The data exists for OECD countries, but it actually undercuts the original argument rather than supporting it. Here's what it shows.

The low-rate countries aren't "the non-Christian world"—they're a handful of specific places. Among countries with reliable data, the ones under 10% are Japan (2.4%), Korea (4.7%), Türkiye (3.1%), Israel (8.6%), and Greece (9.7%). That's three East Asian/Near Eastern societies, one Jewish state, and one Orthodox Christian country. Greece being Christian and Türkiye/Israel being non-Christian already breaks the clean "Christian = high, non-Christian = low" split the original response drew.

The high-rate leaders are heavily Catholic Latin America. Colombia leads with 87% of children born outside marriage, followed by Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico—all above 70%. These are among the most religiously Christian countries on earth by self-identification, which contradicts the framing that high nonmarital birth tracks secularization or "abandoned Christian ethics." The actual driver cited is structural: cohabitation has long been socially accepted and legally recognized, reducing the importance of formal marriage, a pattern predating any modern secular trend.

The crucial caveat the original buried: this isn't measuring family breakdown. The statistic is legal marital status at the moment of birth registration, nothing more. In many high-share countries, a large part of these births occurs within stable cohabiting unions, so the indicator is better read as a measure of decoupling childbirth from legal marriage than as a direct measure of family breakdown. The Nordic high numbers come from the opposite of social collapse—cohabiting couples often enjoy rights similar to married ones, making marriage a personal choice rather than an economic necessity.

What actually predicts the rate, per the sources, is the interaction of cohabitation norms, legal recognition of unions, welfare structure, and registration systems—not religious bloc. It should not be read as a simple scale from "strong families" to "weak families."

The honest answer to what he was asking: you can't do the global Christian-vs-non-Christian breakdown he wanted, because reliable comparable data essentially doesn't exist outside the OECD and a few partners. Most of the Muslim world, India, China, and Sub-Saharan Africa have no comparable nonmarital-birth statistics—so the original response's "3% of the non-Christian world" figure wasn't a measurement, it was an assumption filling a data vacuum. And within the data that does exist, the pattern doesn't sort by religion the way the argument claimed.

You're right—I mischaracterized the direction. Re-reading it, the original argument was that high nonmarital birth is a Christian/post-Christian phenomenon (the ~89% figure for the Christian world vs ~3% for the non-Christian world). The "Christian world bad / non-Christian world resistant" framing. The closing lines about Christianity being "the weakest immune system" against the contagion make that explicit.

So the data actually cuts against that argument in a different way than I framed. Two points matter:

The "non-Christian world is at 3%" claim is the weakest part, and it's invented. There's basically no comparable data for the Muslim world, India, China, or Sub-Saharan Africa. The low numbers that genuinely exist come from Japan, Korea, Türkiye, and Israel—a tiny, atypical slice. The original took those few measured cases and projected "3%" onto roughly 4.7 billion people who simply aren't measured. The contrast it's built on is an artifact of where data collection happens, not a real difference in behavior.

The within-Christianity spread destroys the "Christianity is the vulnerability" thesis anyway. If the mechanism were Christian-specific, you'd expect the most devoutly Christian places to behave similarly. Instead the highest rates on earth are intensely Catholic Latin America (Colombia 87%), while a Christian country—Greece—sits at the bottom at 9.7%, right alongside non-Christian Türkiye and Israel. A single religious category that contains both the global maximum and one of the minima isn't explaining the variation. Something else is.

That "something else," per the sources, is cohabitation norms and whether unions get legal/registration recognition—which is why Latin America's pattern predates the welfare state entirely and the Nordic pattern reflects strong institutions rather than collapsed ones. The variable the argument reached for (Christianity, or its abandonment) isn't the one doing the work.