Why The Highly Educated Go All-In Or All-Out On Religion
(ANALYSIS) One of my main goals as a professor is to get students excited about the material. In a philosophy of youth ministry class our instructor wrote in big letters on the board, “It’s a sin to bore people with the Gospel.” I’ve taken that to heart and expanded it — it’s a sin to bore people at all.
One way I make data work appealing is by likening it to detective work. We can see a pattern or an odd set of results from a bit of superficial analysis and then we get to poke and prod around to figure out if we can determine the cause of those results. Except we don’t try to pull prints off of doors or windows or extract DNA from dried blood on the floor. We just make graphs.
So, let me introduce you to the puzzle for today’s post. This is a graph that I think may be the one that gets the most traction on social media. It’s an incredibly simple one — it’s the share of respondents who report attending a house of worship on a weekly basis. I break it down by educational attainment and survey year.
Long story short, the type of folks who are the most likely to attend a church, synagogue or mosque this weekend are folks who have earned graduate degrees. The ones who are the least likely to be regular attenders are individuals who stopped at the 12th grade. Yes, dear readers, education and religious activity are positively related.
And, I don’t want to repeat myself too much on this, but the highly educated are less likely to identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. Instead, they’re more apt to report belonging to a recognized faith tradition — Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and so on — than those who stopped their education when they were still teenagers.
So that’s the backdrop of this. On most metrics, educated folks tend to be more religious. Now, let me show you another metric in this same neighborhood — religious importance.
Same basic setup as before, I calculated the share who said that religion was ‘not at all important’ by level of education and I did it for the last 17 years of data in the Cooperative Election Study.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
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.