Does Education Have the Same Impact on Church Attendance in Europe and the U.S.?

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.

For high school graduates, 23% are weekly attenders. For those with graduate degrees, it’s 30%. A seven percentage point difference. Or said another way, someone with a masters degree is 30% more likely to be a weekly attender than an individual who has a high school diploma. If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you’ve seen this finding before.

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.

Once you get to the “post-secondary” and above group of respondents things basically level off at 10-12% weekly attendance rates. I do want to point out that there is a small but statistically significant increase in religious activity among those with graduate degrees, though. It’s just two points, but the trend line doesn’t keep moving down.

However, this is incredibly clear evidence that while the relationship between education and religious attendance in the United States is undoubtedly positive, it’s clearly a negative correlation on the continent of Europe. I do think it’s important to note a couple things, though. In this sample, just 7% of respondents were in that bottom education bucket and another 14% were in the ‘lower secondary’ category. Think of how the graph would look different if you just removed that very bottom category - now the drop in weekly attendance rate is pretty modest from top to bottom - just five points. Not the 14 points in the current graph.

Okay, so let me take this European analysis a step further and do the same calculation except aggregate it down to the individual country level. I also added a linear trend line for each so that it’s easy to see the relationship.

Very fair to say that there’s a lot of negative relationships in this latest wave of the European Social Survey. The line is particularly steep in countries like Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. But there are also examples where the relationship is negative but at a much more modest level - Austria, Belgium, Norway and Spain are examples of this. One reason is simple - even among the folks with very little education there isn’t that much religious attendance to speak of. It’s hard to make the line point downward when attendance is never higher than 10%.

Are there any countries where there is a positive relationship between education and religious attendance in Europe? Not really. I think that the one that comes the closest is Slovakia but even there, the slope doesn’t really meet statistical significance. Pretty compelling evidence that the most highly educated in Europe are the least likely to attend church services on a regular basis. (By the way, if you want to see the above graph in a different format where the plots are laid out like a map of Europe, here you go).

How about I replicate the same analysis using the United States now?

What is absolutely striking to me is that while you could clearly see a ton of countries that had a downward sloping line in Europe, it’s basically impossible to find the same thing in any state in the U.S. I think there are some parts of the country where the line is fairly flat, though. For instance, look at the northeast. States like New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have a line that is essentially flat. But none of these relationships are negative. You just can’t find a state where people with graduate degrees are less likely to be weekly attenders compared to those who only finished high school.

On the other hand, you can pretty easily pick up states with a line that is sloped in a positive direction. Look at Utah, for instance. Or Nebraska. That same pattern appears in Arizona, Tennessee, and all kinds of other places in the Bible Belt. Again, think about the contrast of this map versus the one of European countries. At best, in Europe, you may find a country or two where the trend line is flat. Most are absolutely pointed downward. In the United States, you can’t find a negative relationship anywhere. There are a few with a flat line, but the vast majority are pointing upward.

A couple of regression models would be a nice way to cap this off. It would go a long way in ensuring that there isn’t some kind of confounding variable that is really driving this relationship that we just can’t see in the bivariate. So I specified a model with controls like age, income, and gender.

You can see, without a doubt, that the relationship between education and weekly attendance is negative in Europe. For those who went no further than a primary level education, 17.2% were weekly attenders. But that’s the high water mark. For every step up the education ladder, attendance drops. For Europeans with a bachelor’s degree, just 7% were weekly attenders - a ten point drop when compared to those with the lowest level of education. Attendance among doctorate holders was the lowest of all - 5.8%.

How about a regression model for the United States?

This is about what you would expect based on the prior bit of analysis. For those in the sample who didn’t earn a high school diploma, only one in five went to a house of worship weekly. But for every step up the educational ladder, weekly attendance increases by two percentage points (and those differences are statistically significant). The folks who are the most likely to be attending every week? It’s people with graduate degrees. They are 50% more apt to be a regular church attender.

Of course, I haven’t even begun to wade into the waters of the “why” part of this question. And I don’t really plan to at this point. That would require theorizing in a way that does not play to my strengths. Couple that with the fact that I’ve never even been to the European continent and you can see why I am much happier showing you what the data says instead of trying to understand why the trend lines move in the absolute opposite direction in the United States compared to Europe.

That’s what the comments are for! So, fire away.

Code for this post can be found here.