Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.
If there’s anything I know will get a lot of engagement on social media it’s the simple relationship between education and religious attendance. I think that the assumption that most people have is that educated people tend to be less religious. Which is a viewpoint that I have thought about a lot over the last couple of years. I’m really fascinated by where that whole understanding came from. I think it may be the ghost of Karl Marx haunting us. That famous quote from the Communist Manifesto about how religion is “the opiate of the masses” has seemed to soak into the groundwater of the United States. I also think it was accelerated by the emergence of the New Atheist movement which energized a whole generation of young very online white males to refer to God as “skydaddy” and say that they “don’t need to believe in fairytales to get through life.”
Well, the understanding that American churches, synagogues, and mosques are filled with people who barely managed to finish high school is just empirically, demonstrably false. There’s no simpler way to say it than that. I have looked at almost every survey that contains a component about religion and analyzed the relationship between educational attainment and religious attendance and it’s never a negative relationship. Sometimes the slope of the line is basically flat, but more often than not - the trend line points upward.
For example, this is data from the 2022 and 2023 Cooperative Election Study, which represents a sample of almost 85,000 people.
As you can plainly see, the relationship between weekly church attendance and education is a positive one. Among those with a high school diploma, only 23% indicate they attend church regularly. For those who have an associate’s degree, it’s 26%. It’s two points higher for people who completed a four year program and among those who went beyond an undergraduate education, 30% are weekly attenders.
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But here’s a question that I wanted to answer in this post - does that same relationship exist in Europe? I’ve never tested it, but data from the European Social Survey makes it possible to do this type of analysis pretty easily. Their sample is from 24 European countries and the total number of respondents is about 40,000. I am looking at Wave 11, which is data collected in 2023 and 2024.
Obviously, the educational system in Denmark is not the same as Croatia, but the ESS offers a ‘unified’ education variable that seems to create a fairly standardized way to put people into consistent educational attainment categories.
Okay, well, this is different. Actually it’s almost the mirrored opposite of what we saw in the first graph from the United States. In this analysis the group of folks who were the most likely to be weekly religious attenders were people who had no formal education or stopped at primary school. Then the next most likely group to attend regularly were those who went to lower secondary school at 17%. And for those who stopped with upper secondary school it was three points lower than that.
