Does Education Have the Same Impact on Church Attendance in Europe and the U.S.?
(ANALYSIS) If there’s anything I know will get a lot of engagement on social media, it’s the simple relationship between education and religious attendance.
I think that the assumption that most people have is that educated people tend to be less religious, which is a viewpoint that I have thought about a lot over the last couple of years. I’m really fascinated by where that whole understanding came from.
I think it may be the ghost of Karl Marx haunting us. That famous quote from the “Communist Manifesto” about how religion is “the opiate of the masses” has seemed to soak into the groundwater of the United States.
I also think it was accelerated by the emergence of the New Atheist movement, which energized a whole generation of young, very online White males to refer to God as “skydaddy” and say that they “don’t need to believe in fairytales to get through life.”
Well, the understanding that American churches, synagogues and mosques are filled with people who barely managed to finish high school is just empirically, demonstrably false. There’s no simpler way to say it than that.
I have looked at almost every survey that contains a component about religion and analyzed the relationship between educational attainment and religious attendance, and it’s never a negative relationship. Sometimes the slope of the line is basically flat, but more often than not, the trend line points upward.
For example, this is data from the 2022 and 2023 Cooperative Election Study, which represents a sample of almost 85,000 people.
As you can plainly see, the relationship between weekly church attendance and education is a positive one. Among those with a high school diploma, only 23% indicate they attend church regularly.
For those who have an associate’s degree, it’s 26%. It’s 2 points higher for people who completed a four-year program. And among those who went beyond an undergraduate education, 30% are weekly attenders.
For high school graduates, 23% are weekly attenders. For those with graduate degrees, it’s 30%. A 7 percentage point difference.
Said another way, someone with a master’s degree is 30% more likely to be a weekly attender than an individual who has a high school diploma. If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you’ve seen this finding before.
But here’s a question that I wanted to answer in this post: Does that same relationship exist in Europe? I’ve never tested it, but data from the European Social Survey makes it possible to do this type of analysis pretty easily.
The sample is from 24 European countries, and the total number of respondents is about 40,000. I am looking at Wave 11, which is data collected in 2023 and 2024.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
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.