Today’s guest post comes to us from Emma Green for TheAtlantic.com.
The idea is peppered through the writings of scholars, great thinkers, and New Atheist-types: Education is the cure for religion. Freud wrote that civilization “has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers” who have rejected religion. And “if religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason,” maintained Christopher Hitchens, “we would be living in a quite different world.”
New data from the Pew Research Center doesn’t disprove these claims, but it does challenge them.
There are at least two different ways to think about the relationship between education and religiosity: how schooling affects belief, and how it affects practice. Pew’s researchers looked at data from a number of recent surveys, including their 35,000-person study of American religion from 2014.
Among Christians, the pattern of educated people being more involved in their religious communities makes sense. As I’ve written before, communal involvement of all kinds is increasingly becoming a luxury good of sorts, with higher levels of income and education making people more likely to participate in activities like church, book club, parent-teacher association, and more. It could be that high-school-educated Christians feel less able to find and connect with a religious community in a broader context of financial strain, family stress, and geographic isolation. Or it could be that college-educated Christians put more of a premium on connecting with their brothers and sisters in the church.
Click here to read the full article.
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