Serving God and Country? Religious Involvement and Military Service Among Young Adult Men

摘要

Despite important connections between religion and military action throughout world history, scholars haveseldom explored the association between religiosity and military enlistment. Using data from the National Lon-gitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we used a person-oriented analysis to categorize young menaccording to patterns of adolescent religious involvement. Youth indentified as "highly religious evangelical"are more likely to enlist in the military compared to their "highly religious nonevangelical" and "nonreligious"counterparts; however, these findings hold only for those young men without college experience. These findingsare discussed along with study limitations and promising directions for future research.