ABSTRACT
One of the contributions of the influential work on religion by Mahoney et al. (2001) is that they differentiated between psychosocial and substantive aspects of the sacred, and then suggested there are two questions about these aspects that deserve attention. First, “What are the substantive and psychosocial aspects of religion in family life? The other question to address is, What are the potentially helpful and harmful roles religion may play in family life?” (Mahoney et al. 2001, p. 586). Our goals in this chapter are to examine the previous literature for ideas about which aspects of the psychosocial are important and how these aspects influence family processes and then to bring our data to bear on this issue. As we reviewed the previous literature, we discovered there has been almost no research in this area other than the Mahoney et al. paper.
