The Religion of the Educated Classes Revisited: New Religions, the Nonreligious, and Educational Levels (original) (raw)
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For over a century, social scientists have debated how educational attainment impacts religious belief. In this paper, I use Canadian compulsory schooling laws to identify the relationship between completed schooling and later religiosity. I find that higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious affiliation later in life. An additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition. This is a reasonably large effect: extrapolating the results to the broader population would suggest that increases in schooling could explain most of the large rise in non-affiliation in Canada in recent decades. * I thank Phil Oreopoulos for providing me with data and for comments from audiences at Bocconi, the NBER, Stockholm University, the Stockholm School of Economics (SITE), Texas A&M and the ASREC association. Thanks also to William Neilson, Daniel Chen, and an anonymous referee.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2020
The nature of secularization is of enduring interest in the social science of religion. Numerous recent papers have established downward cohort trends as characterizing religious change. We examine potential mechanisms by assessing cultural participation and secular engagement during the formative period of one cohort. We provide estimates of active and nominal religiosity, nonreligion and religious belief for those born between 1933 and 1942, using multiple surveys fielded between 1957 and 2018. We model the association between religiosity and secular cultural and social participation for this cohort in 1957, then examine how cultural socialization in childhood relates to religiosity in their later adulthood using surveys fielded between 2005 and 2007. Increased secular competition is found to be associated with less active religiosity. These trends were underpinned by an ethic of increasing autonomy for the young. We conclude by affirming the link between increasing secular competition, long-run modernization, and changing cultural socialization.
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Non-religious people tend to be male rather than female, to be better educated than average, and to live in particular areas. Each of these findings contains a puzzle that we address using data from Great Britain. Male infants are slightly more likely than female infants to be described by their parents as having no religion. To explain this phenomenon, we show that there is an association between the religious labels attached to girls and boys and the characteristics of their mothers and fathers, respectively. A positive correlation between education and non-religion is often taken for granted. Among young adults in Britain, however, the relationship is reversed. The reason lies in the former religious polarisation of the graduate population. The final puzzle is why so much local variation in secularity is evident. We examine the extent to which these contrasts are the result of demographic and socioeconomic differences.
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Theory and Society, 2019
A persistent sociological thesis posits that the spread of formal education causes an inevitable decline in religion as a social institution and diminishes adherence to religious beliefs in postindustrial society. Now that worldwide advanced education is a central agent in developing and disseminating Western rationality emphasizing science as the ultimate truth claim about a humanly constructed society and the natural world this seems an ever more relevant thesis. Yet in the face of a robust Beducation revolution,^religion and spirituality endure, and in certain respects thrive, thus creating a sociological paradox: How can both expanding education and mass religion coexist? The solution proposed here is that instead of educational development setting the conditions for the decline and eventual death of religion, the two institutions have been, and continue to be, more compatible and even surprisingly symbiotic than is often assumed. This contributes to a culture of mass education and mass religion that is unique in the history of human society, exemplified by the heavily educated and churched United States. After a brief review of the empirical trends behind the paradox, a new confluence of streams of research on compatible worldviews, overlapping ideologies, and their enactments in educational and religious social movements illustrates the plausibility of an affinity argument and its impact on theory about postsecular society.
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Sociology of Religion, 2000
As of yet, re/at/vdy//tt/e informar/on ex/sts w/thin Westem industrialized nations regarding reli~ous inclependents, of individuals who claim no re//gª af/i//aa'on. Th/s is part/cu/ar/~ the case cohen countries besides the United States and C~ ate considere& Mindful of this omission, this study uses recent nationaUy relyresentative survey data to compare the reli~~us convictions and socio.
The Effects of Education on Americans’ Religious Practices, Beliefs, and Affiliations
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I challenge the scholarly contention that increases in education uniformly lead to declines in religious participation, belief, and affiliation. I argue that education influences strategies of action, and these strategies of action are relevant to some religious beliefs and activities but not others. Analysis of survey data shows that (1) education negatively affects exclusivist religious viewpoints and biblical literalism but not belief in God or the afterlife; (2) education positively affects religious participation, devotional activities, and emphasizing the importance of religion in daily life; (3) education positively affects switching religious affiliations, particularly to a mainline Protestant denomination, but not disaffiliation; (4) education is positively associated with questioning the role of religion in secular society but not with support for curbing the public opinions of religious leaders; and (5) the effects of education on religious beliefs and participation vary across religious traditions. Education does influence Americans’ religious beliefs and activities, but the effects of education on religion are complex.
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