Highly Educated Men More Likely To Attend Church Than Highly Educated Women
(ANALYSIS) Let me get this out of the way right up front — this post probably hangs together a bit less than other things I have written because it was more of a “stream of consciousness” in terms of graphs than anything else. But I saw something in a piece of analysis that I couldn’t stop thinking about and wanted to make more sense of it by chasing some loose threads.
Here’s the setup: Educated people are more likely to attend religious services weekly than those with a lower level of education. I wrote a long piece about that a while ago.
But someone (I can’t recall now, it was maybe in a Twitter reply) asked if that same relationship held for both men and women. And so I put together this piece of analysis. It’s just a simple graph of weekly attendance, broken down by level of education and gender. I tested it across multiple waves of the Cooperative Election Study. Here’s what I get.
In 2008, it’s a positive relationship for both genders — higher education leads to higher attendance. But in 2012, the shape of the trend lines begins to look different. For women, there’s really no appreciable benefit of education on church attendance. About 30% of women with a high school diploma or less attended weekly — it was 32% of those with a college degree. For men, that gain is pretty large, at 7 percentage points. Education gets men to church. It doesn’t for women.
In 2016, that same finding reappears. For men, the weekly attendance rate jumps 8 points. It only rises 2 points for women. It’s there in 2020 (22% to 30% for men. 24% to 27% for women). It’s an 11 point gain for men in 2022 and 2023. The increase for women is just 3 percentage points.
Education still drives weekly attendance up, but the effect for men is three times larger than it is for women. That’s … something.
Let’s go on a bit of a journey here where I try to pull apart several variables of interest — gender, education, partisanship and religious attendance to see if I can make any sense of this disparity between men and women.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.