Religion, Economics, and Education

If there is anything that could get me writing again, it’s the combination of two of my favorite topics: economics and religion. Now, I am not quite sure about the validity or usefulness of applying economic methods to the study of religion, but I am interested in the possibility.

The meat: Professor Hungerman at Notre Dame looked at the correlation between years of education and religious participation. In the study, he finds that “an additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition.” For example, a person with a Ph.D. would be around 36 percent less likely to have a religious affiliation than someone who stops after high school. That is a significant gap.

For some this may not be surprising. Maybe not so secretly, I have held this belief for a while (based on no evidence whatsoever). More than the finding though, what makes me curious is why this correlation exists (As an aside, I think this is the weakness of applying economic methods to religion: a regression model can’t tell you much about how or why the negative relationship between education and religion exists). I think there are a couple possibilities. The first possibility is that education, and the critical thinking skills it engenders, lead people to question and eventually reject religion. This is similar to the “religion is the opiate of the masses” argument in that through education people overcome the childish thinking upon which religion relies. As the study points out, this is the argument of Karl Marx and Max Weber. I have no evidence for this. None.

The second possibility that I can think of is that this may be a recent generational phenomenon. While learning may not be inherently anti-religious, I think a progressive education is. For instance, any progressive historical account of America would highlight the Church’s participatory role in slavery, withholding women’s right to vote, and segregation. Another example is the religious right’s anti-abortion stance. In general, organized religion has fought most progressive achievements for the past 150 years. Thus, as education has become more progressive, encouraging creativity and the possibility of a better future, religion has become the scapegoat. It is portrayed as the brick wall confronting future reforms. More than that, religion is often a poorly presented straw man. Consequently, when students subsequently reject religion, it is not out of newly learned critical thinking skills, but rather because it's what their teacher told them. Thus, it may be that students are just being taught something different, not that education is inherently anti-religious.