The most important requirement for getting a graduate degree is turning up. The second-most important is thinking a lot. So, highly educated people who keep their religion (through thinking about it, or by treating it something for which thought is not apporpriate) are going to turn up. Those who reject it won't go for half-baked intellectual compromises like "somewhat important" I suspect the same is true of "spiritual but not religious".
This seems fairly straightforward. It makes intuitive sense that people who are highly educated are more likely to align their beliefs with their behavior. They aligned their value for eucation with their execution of advanced degrees. They are, in other words, successful people who act on their convictions. Therefore they are also the people who, if they believe religion is important, act on it by regularly attending church.
One of the best predictors of long term success is the gap between what you think you should do and what you actually do. This just further proces the point.
I also wonder if there might be a comfort element here for the less well educated. If the more educated are the most likely to be attending, then are also most likely designing the programing. Might not be comfortable for the those who are not at their level of education.
I honestly think it is a schedule issue. So many people who work in restaurants or stores or other service businesses have little control of their schedule. Thet iften can't count on having the same day off each week. It makes it difficult to take part in regular activities. Combine that with the sports expectations for children and wanting to rest after a hard week, it is not surprising people who may want to get involved don't. I really wish the Catholic Church would make more of an effort to reach out to retail workers. I know of one church that scheduled an 8:15 pm Sunday mass for medical workers who do 12 hour shifts, which is increasingly common.
This confirms my theory that those of us in ministry need to 'bring church to people.'
We need to prioritize how we are sharing the faith outside of traditional church, because there are a lot of people for whom relationship with God is important - but going to church is not!
This really points to a further analysis of the "Seldom" respondents. I know that there has been research (using cellular data) about people over-reporting how often they go to church. This would also assume that they are accurately reporting how important religious is to them, so maybe the two doubtful items philosophically cancel each other out.
Fully support locking down the comments for your posts. This kind of data really has people rolling out the conclusions mat and making causal judgments from correlational data.
Great analysis here! Have tried to do cluster analysis with data like this—a good way to let the data suggest to you cool intersections like you got to in your drill down here. With survey data, it can be interesting to treat response categories as multinomial and pre-process/quantize the data with correspondence analysis, then clustering on the low (10?) dimensional locations of the response categories on the principle axes.
Maybe this pattern appears because "educated" people more easily sit through classroom/auditorium-style lectures and understand the material, unlike lesser-educated people who are uncomfortable in that setting and don't learn well from that format of teaching.
As always, the comments are almost as illuminating as the analysis. = )
a.) Al's observation is one key - combine this finding with the educational distribution across denominations.
b.) The educational polarization at the top is absolutely no surprise. I see the same distribution across my own friends.
c.) If the data exists it would be interesting to learn why people don't attend with some level of consistency. I suspect that among the less-educated it's a combination of less-flexible work schedules and the implications of Al's point: clergy talking over their heads.
d.) David's question is pivotal. At risk of inciting a theological dustup, my conclusion is that "membership" is implied in the New Testament but nowhere described as it's practiced today. At some point organizations made belief about attendance, a connection that obscures as much as it reveals. (As to donations, I think LDS are the exception.)
Finally, Fr. Cathie's. point is far more biblically supported than d. above. "Invite your friends to church" is a very poor substitute for actually being the church.
I have a question about church membership. What does it take to be a member of a church? I understand how it works with synagogues --members are people who pay dues or who have worked out an arrangement to pay less than the full dues. Non members are welcome to attend services and other functions but for the big services you typically need to be a member or purchase a ticket available to non members. Synagogues typically do not collect money at shabbos services
It varies incredibly widely from one Protestant denomination to another.
In a lot of "low church" traditions like Baptists and non-denominationals, the answer is: not much. You come forward during the invitation, you say the sinner's prayer, and that's about it.
Other traditions want you to go through a longer process that requires some classes to learn about the church and its history and doctrine.
But the donation part is really not an important aspect of membership. You are encouraged to give, obviously. But it's certainly not a requirement to be a member.
Thanks for your answer. I have another question if you have time to respond it would be most appreciated but if not thats ok.
I am putting together a talk on Lincoln's 2nd inaugural address which is mostly based on Richard Carradines, Righteous Strife: How warring religious nationalists forged Lincoln’s Union. He talks about the theological underpinnings of the civil war. One of the things that struck me is that Northern religious leaders who opposed slavery emphasized God the father and the need to live in accord with God's plan while Southern counterparts emphasized Jesus, faith, and the corruption of humanity which will only be addressed in the 2nd coming. They also denounced Northern church leaders as intolerant Puritans who want to stick their nose into others private lives and often mentioned Cromwell by name.
Since I am not Christian and was not raised in this tradition I worry that I am missing something. Any thoughts you have about this would be most appreciated. It does strike me that lots of American Christians have lost interest in theological questions over which wars were once fought and perhaps this accounts for the rise of community churches which seem to emphasize a feeling of connection with the divine over belief. Though I certainly could be wrong about that.
Just want to put in a plug for engaging with the latter point made here. At one time there were massive wars fought over subtle points of theological difference, and now you see many Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostals, and others united in the conservative political project. Is that because modern Christians don't see theological differences as being important any more? Or just that the salience of secular politics is so much greater?
From my outsider perspective it seems that people are not all that engaged and fairly ignorant about theological questions. More than a half century ago I was a freshman at Knox College in Illinois. I remember a history professor who was raised in the Episcopalian church telling us his wife didnt like the minister and they were going to the local methodist church. He contacted the Methodist minister and asked about what he needed to know. The minister told him to stop by 15 minutes before services and they would chat. he responded that he didnt think you could make someone a Calvinist in 15 minutes. Around 2 decades ago when my wife and I started visiting her family in a small town around 60 miles west of Nashville. We would first head to a church that was Wesleyan but not Methodist (cant remember the name of the denomination). I was struck that the minister said anyone could take communion -- "all our welcome at the lord's table" is the way he put it.
I observe that in my youth politicians frequently included biblical quotations in their speeches. But this practice is gone I suspect because people are not connected to the bible in the same way. The theological questions over which wars were once fought to most people is just a boring piece of history. Nor are they much engaged with questions like -- can God make a stone so large that he would be unable to move it or if Jesus is God how could he have suffered on the cross. People dont condemn such questions they just dont care about them. But then this is an outsider perspective and I could just be in error.
I'm going to pile on to the idea that more educated people are more likely to do intellectually consistent things, like go to church if they think church is important and not go to church if they think it's not. But I'll also add that I think there's going to be a positive feedback loop effect that's especially influential for the sort of people who get graduate degrees, which is to say people who like reading and arguments and such.
If I start from "religion is important" as as such I go to church every week, then every week I also consider Bible readings, hymn lyrics, and sermons. Given where I started from, this will probably get me to be more invested in those beliefs. Being someone who already likes reading and arguments, this will lead me to seek out religious texts and apologetics, which in turn will give me more intellectual support for why church is important, and why I should attend regularly.
I think the same trend will apply to folks on team "religion isn't important, and so I don't go." It might not be as strong of an effect, since not attending doesn't mean one is being re-exposed to the message at minimum every week, but it does mean that I'm choosing to not be exposed to a message that would gainsay what I already think, which in this case is that religion is not important.
Super interesting! Living in a rather secular, but also fairly educated country, Norway- I wish someone could do this kind of research here! My anecdotal and un-scientific experience is that a higher level of education makes for more all-in members.
Our Rabbis probably figured this out decades ago, though with an important twist. On Saturday mornings most sanctuaries have a pittance of the paid membership in attendance. My town has one of each stripe: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform. My Orthodox has 25 weekly attenders of a membership of 140 people, but on the recent Holy Days, the 80 or so who came were largely all familiar faces from Saturday morning, even if not weekly. The congregations with less observant constituency, all larger than mine, will get 40 worshipers on Saturday but 500 on the Holy Days. They are non-attenders, much like gym memberships. Pretty much everyone works in a profession that requires a college degree or beyond. So highly educated people don't feel obligated to come to synagogue.
The question of importance of the religion has different elements, not as easily answered in the multiple choice GSS options. The secular among us may play golf, sleep late, see patients, or take a day trip on Saturday. The formality of Shabbos is not important to them. But those same people who rarely worship fund our advocacy and social safety net agencies with generosity. What is important and how you express it has a lot of variations.
We lack the control group of those without college degrees, once plentiful as European immigrants and their first generation, who put their own kids into professions, so the Jewish view might skew from the gist of Ryan's data.
These charts raise an interesting question. Many people it seems rarely go to church but still find religion important for themselves. How do they live their religious beliefs? If they, in some form or another, have an active religious life, what keeps them away from church ?
The most important requirement for getting a graduate degree is turning up. The second-most important is thinking a lot. So, highly educated people who keep their religion (through thinking about it, or by treating it something for which thought is not apporpriate) are going to turn up. Those who reject it won't go for half-baked intellectual compromises like "somewhat important" I suspect the same is true of "spiritual but not religious".
This seems fairly straightforward. It makes intuitive sense that people who are highly educated are more likely to align their beliefs with their behavior. They aligned their value for eucation with their execution of advanced degrees. They are, in other words, successful people who act on their convictions. Therefore they are also the people who, if they believe religion is important, act on it by regularly attending church.
One of the best predictors of long term success is the gap between what you think you should do and what you actually do. This just further proces the point.
Geez, my typing is really undermining my points!
"education" and "proves"!
I also wonder if there might be a comfort element here for the less well educated. If the more educated are the most likely to be attending, then are also most likely designing the programing. Might not be comfortable for the those who are not at their level of education.
That's an interesting idea. Maybe it varies based on high church vs low church traditions.
High church leaders tend to be more educated, less so in Baptist/Pentecostal spaces. Maybe something to poke around on.
I honestly think it is a schedule issue. So many people who work in restaurants or stores or other service businesses have little control of their schedule. Thet iften can't count on having the same day off each week. It makes it difficult to take part in regular activities. Combine that with the sports expectations for children and wanting to rest after a hard week, it is not surprising people who may want to get involved don't. I really wish the Catholic Church would make more of an effort to reach out to retail workers. I know of one church that scheduled an 8:15 pm Sunday mass for medical workers who do 12 hour shifts, which is increasingly common.
I totally agree...TIME to "devote" to something is getting scarcer and scarcer.
Even at my well resourced church, during service, I hear cells doing their ring-thing.
oh, thank you for this!!
This confirms my theory that those of us in ministry need to 'bring church to people.'
We need to prioritize how we are sharing the faith outside of traditional church, because there are a lot of people for whom relationship with God is important - but going to church is not!
This really points to a further analysis of the "Seldom" respondents. I know that there has been research (using cellular data) about people over-reporting how often they go to church. This would also assume that they are accurately reporting how important religious is to them, so maybe the two doubtful items philosophically cancel each other out.
Fully support locking down the comments for your posts. This kind of data really has people rolling out the conclusions mat and making causal judgments from correlational data.
I have a post in the queue about people who report attending multiple times per week. They are actually a distinct group from the "once a week" crowd.
I think that the seldom category is an interesting signal. "I go more than never."
Maybe I can explore that idea some more.
Great analysis here! Have tried to do cluster analysis with data like this—a good way to let the data suggest to you cool intersections like you got to in your drill down here. With survey data, it can be interesting to treat response categories as multinomial and pre-process/quantize the data with correspondence analysis, then clustering on the low (10?) dimensional locations of the response categories on the principle axes.
I did clustering for The Great Dechurching and for The Nones Project. Maybe I should try more of that out. It's fun to pull together.
Go for it!!! It could be useful for illuminating patterns in the spiritual versus religious/attending data space.
Maybe this pattern appears because "educated" people more easily sit through classroom/auditorium-style lectures and understand the material, unlike lesser-educated people who are uncomfortable in that setting and don't learn well from that format of teaching.
As always, the comments are almost as illuminating as the analysis. = )
a.) Al's observation is one key - combine this finding with the educational distribution across denominations.
b.) The educational polarization at the top is absolutely no surprise. I see the same distribution across my own friends.
c.) If the data exists it would be interesting to learn why people don't attend with some level of consistency. I suspect that among the less-educated it's a combination of less-flexible work schedules and the implications of Al's point: clergy talking over their heads.
d.) David's question is pivotal. At risk of inciting a theological dustup, my conclusion is that "membership" is implied in the New Testament but nowhere described as it's practiced today. At some point organizations made belief about attendance, a connection that obscures as much as it reveals. (As to donations, I think LDS are the exception.)
Finally, Fr. Cathie's. point is far more biblically supported than d. above. "Invite your friends to church" is a very poor substitute for actually being the church.
I have a question about church membership. What does it take to be a member of a church? I understand how it works with synagogues --members are people who pay dues or who have worked out an arrangement to pay less than the full dues. Non members are welcome to attend services and other functions but for the big services you typically need to be a member or purchase a ticket available to non members. Synagogues typically do not collect money at shabbos services
It's a great question that has a terrible answer:
It varies incredibly widely from one Protestant denomination to another.
In a lot of "low church" traditions like Baptists and non-denominationals, the answer is: not much. You come forward during the invitation, you say the sinner's prayer, and that's about it.
Other traditions want you to go through a longer process that requires some classes to learn about the church and its history and doctrine.
But the donation part is really not an important aspect of membership. You are encouraged to give, obviously. But it's certainly not a requirement to be a member.
Thanks for your answer. I have another question if you have time to respond it would be most appreciated but if not thats ok.
I am putting together a talk on Lincoln's 2nd inaugural address which is mostly based on Richard Carradines, Righteous Strife: How warring religious nationalists forged Lincoln’s Union. He talks about the theological underpinnings of the civil war. One of the things that struck me is that Northern religious leaders who opposed slavery emphasized God the father and the need to live in accord with God's plan while Southern counterparts emphasized Jesus, faith, and the corruption of humanity which will only be addressed in the 2nd coming. They also denounced Northern church leaders as intolerant Puritans who want to stick their nose into others private lives and often mentioned Cromwell by name.
Since I am not Christian and was not raised in this tradition I worry that I am missing something. Any thoughts you have about this would be most appreciated. It does strike me that lots of American Christians have lost interest in theological questions over which wars were once fought and perhaps this accounts for the rise of community churches which seem to emphasize a feeling of connection with the divine over belief. Though I certainly could be wrong about that.
Just want to put in a plug for engaging with the latter point made here. At one time there were massive wars fought over subtle points of theological difference, and now you see many Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostals, and others united in the conservative political project. Is that because modern Christians don't see theological differences as being important any more? Or just that the salience of secular politics is so much greater?
I actually (sort of) tackle that in my forthcoming book.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
It's easy to for Baptists to pick fights with Catholics when Christians are 90% of the population.
It's less palatable when they are 63% and falling.
Very cool! Looking forward to it.
From my outsider perspective it seems that people are not all that engaged and fairly ignorant about theological questions. More than a half century ago I was a freshman at Knox College in Illinois. I remember a history professor who was raised in the Episcopalian church telling us his wife didnt like the minister and they were going to the local methodist church. He contacted the Methodist minister and asked about what he needed to know. The minister told him to stop by 15 minutes before services and they would chat. he responded that he didnt think you could make someone a Calvinist in 15 minutes. Around 2 decades ago when my wife and I started visiting her family in a small town around 60 miles west of Nashville. We would first head to a church that was Wesleyan but not Methodist (cant remember the name of the denomination). I was struck that the minister said anyone could take communion -- "all our welcome at the lord's table" is the way he put it.
I observe that in my youth politicians frequently included biblical quotations in their speeches. But this practice is gone I suspect because people are not connected to the bible in the same way. The theological questions over which wars were once fought to most people is just a boring piece of history. Nor are they much engaged with questions like -- can God make a stone so large that he would be unable to move it or if Jesus is God how could he have suffered on the cross. People dont condemn such questions they just dont care about them. But then this is an outsider perspective and I could just be in error.
I'm going to pile on to the idea that more educated people are more likely to do intellectually consistent things, like go to church if they think church is important and not go to church if they think it's not. But I'll also add that I think there's going to be a positive feedback loop effect that's especially influential for the sort of people who get graduate degrees, which is to say people who like reading and arguments and such.
If I start from "religion is important" as as such I go to church every week, then every week I also consider Bible readings, hymn lyrics, and sermons. Given where I started from, this will probably get me to be more invested in those beliefs. Being someone who already likes reading and arguments, this will lead me to seek out religious texts and apologetics, which in turn will give me more intellectual support for why church is important, and why I should attend regularly.
I think the same trend will apply to folks on team "religion isn't important, and so I don't go." It might not be as strong of an effect, since not attending doesn't mean one is being re-exposed to the message at minimum every week, but it does mean that I'm choosing to not be exposed to a message that would gainsay what I already think, which in this case is that religion is not important.
Super interesting! Living in a rather secular, but also fairly educated country, Norway- I wish someone could do this kind of research here! My anecdotal and un-scientific experience is that a higher level of education makes for more all-in members.
Our Rabbis probably figured this out decades ago, though with an important twist. On Saturday mornings most sanctuaries have a pittance of the paid membership in attendance. My town has one of each stripe: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform. My Orthodox has 25 weekly attenders of a membership of 140 people, but on the recent Holy Days, the 80 or so who came were largely all familiar faces from Saturday morning, even if not weekly. The congregations with less observant constituency, all larger than mine, will get 40 worshipers on Saturday but 500 on the Holy Days. They are non-attenders, much like gym memberships. Pretty much everyone works in a profession that requires a college degree or beyond. So highly educated people don't feel obligated to come to synagogue.
The question of importance of the religion has different elements, not as easily answered in the multiple choice GSS options. The secular among us may play golf, sleep late, see patients, or take a day trip on Saturday. The formality of Shabbos is not important to them. But those same people who rarely worship fund our advocacy and social safety net agencies with generosity. What is important and how you express it has a lot of variations.
We lack the control group of those without college degrees, once plentiful as European immigrants and their first generation, who put their own kids into professions, so the Jewish view might skew from the gist of Ryan's data.
These charts raise an interesting question. Many people it seems rarely go to church but still find religion important for themselves. How do they live their religious beliefs? If they, in some form or another, have an active religious life, what keeps them away from church ?