The relationship between education and church attendance in the U.S. is the opposite of what you would expect in the U.S. according to data in this blog post.
In the U.S., more education corresponds to more church attendance (New Hampshire, Maine, and Wyoming are exceptions to that trend and a number of states seem to be bimodal with the least and most educated people both attending church at higher rates), while in Europe (except for the formerly Communist Lithuania and Slovakia) more education corresponds to less church attendance (although the least religious countries like Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and Iceland, are quite flat and the education-church attendance relationship basically breaks down).
I don't think that this means that more educated people in the U.S. are more religious, however.
Rather, I think that it means that more educated people who are religious are much more diligent in attending church regularly as their religion dictates (in part because they have more time to devote to church attendance), than less educated people who are religious but not very diligent. As one comment to the post notes, free time to spend on anything but working, eating, sleeping, and the basic needs of your household is increasingly a luxury good.
There is solid evidence (for example from Pew) that more educated American are less religious in terms of belief and the importance of religion in their lives (although the magnitude of this difference isn't as big as one might intuitively expect), but this isn't necessarily inconsistent with higher religious attendance by more educated people, if more educated people who are religious attend church more regularly than less educated people who are religious.
Also, there is evidence that students and college graduates of more elite institutions are much more secular than college graduates of less elite institutions.
To the extent that Pew and the U.S. survey cited in the blog post are at odds, however, Pew is more credible and has a long track record of accurate data in this area.
Also, it is worth noting that a variety of measures have shown that reported church attendance in the U.S. is much higher than the levels of actual church attendance. See, e.g., here and here. So, survey data on church attendance may not be the most accurate measure of actual behavior.
I also don't give much credit to an anecdotal evidence based book pointing to a religious revival among Gen Z people in the U.K., which does more to capture the changing flavor of religiosity among the minority of young people there who are religious, than capture of growing rate of religious affiliation among British youth.
I also suspect that there is a generational factor. The trend towards more secularism in Europe is 30-40 years older than it is in the U.S. So, older educated Europeans are much more secular than older educated Americans, an effect which may swamp differences in rates of secularization among younger people by level of education. Further, education levels rose sooner in the U.S. than they did in Europe, so in Europe, education level is a better proxy for age than in the U.S.
It is also worth noting that the European data breaks out far more detail among non-college graduates and among non-high school graduates. In part, this reflects larger numbers of immigrants to Europe with very low levels of formal education, and immigrants, in general, tend to be more religious (because religion thrives when it defends a threatened culture). Apart from people who didn't graduate from high school, the European data is quite flat.
U.S. Data
2 comments:
But some religions are more evil than others. https://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2018/09/religious-affiliations-rated-from-good.html
If you're a staunch materialist, then yes. If on the other hand you think that materialism is sterile and possibly evil, then the answer is - it's the best we have.
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