Religion results in larger families, but the new patriarch is not the 1950′s patriarch.

see Charlotte Allen, in “First Things”

“. . . when the Southern Baptists issued a statement in 1998 affirming the father’s headship of the family as defined in the New Testament letters of Paul of Tarsus, we heard journalists Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts warning the nation that this sort of thing could “lead to abuse, both physical and emotional.”

“‘Soft Patriarchs, New Men by W. Bradford Wilcox, a young sociologist of religion at the University of Virginia, is a study of the actual surveyed attitudes and practices of the married men of the so-called “religious right” that turns this stereotype on its head. Wilcox reports that Christian conservative fathers, at least the ones who attend church frequently, are actually far more affectionate with and emotionally invested in their wives and children than are their counterparts among either mainline Protestants or the unchurched. They are patriarchs, says Wilcox, with a “traditional, authority-minded approach to parenting,” but they are soft patriarchs (more akin, shall we say, to Ned Flanders in “The Simpsons” than to the Commander in Atwood’s novel). Wilcox concludes—and this is richly ironic—that Christian conservative fathers display many of the qualities of the sensitive, thoroughly domesticated “iconic new man” whom the feminists lionize.