Religious emphasis correlates with authoritarianism only because parents drive both

Evidence

Students’ RWA scores are correlated with their reports of how much the family religion was emphasized as they were growing up. … Another ten-item scale (EOF, pp. 203-204), which asks more authoritarian-oriented questions about the child’s religious training (about submission to church authorities, fear of God, and so on), correlates about .40. But both of these relationships blow away when you partial out the parents’ RWA scores, which we need to do since parents usually determine religious practices in the home. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 987

Categorization

• XREF: Classic third-variable problem in correlational research — parallels the general point that apparent childhood predictors of ideology often wash out once parent ideology is controlled.