I have taught Christians in Scandinavia since 1986. Attendance in the State Churches is almost zero. I preached once at a chapel next to the famous ski center, packed with men and women from the slopes. The churches operated as 'Prayer Houses' are usually better attended. Most citizens have at least a BS, but the educational setup is so different from ours that any comparison is difficult. Most of my friends have a graduate-level education. I helped one seminary make changes to fit the American model.
Your background is really interesting. I think every sentence in your comment is something you could expand upon to offer some interesting insights here.
I do want to point out, though, that the data here seem to show correlation, not causation. So it seems that the post title, which refers to education’s “impact on church attendance,” overstates the post/is not reflective of the data presented. (Let me know if there was causal evidence and I just missed it!)
It would be cool to see these trends for other regions as well, e.g. Latin America!
I'm wondering similarly. For some reason I've had questions about religiosity's relationship to a society's sophistication on my mind over the last few years. Especially given the growing significance of Christian Nationalism here.
I'd be very interested in seeing this data in comparison of rural and metro populations too.
Regarding the false perception of the relationship between religiosity and educational attainment in America, I suspect there’s some sort of availability bias driving the perception. There’s simply many more non-college grads (and many, many more non-postgrads) that you’re simply unlikely gto run into many PhDs to inquire about their religious beliefs, unless you’re a demographer.
I’d also note that in absolute terms it’s pretty shallow slope. It’s not no-relationship, but nor is it exponential or even a steep linear. Depending on the uncertainty bounds, I could reasonably interpret this as “a bit under a third of people are weekly churchgoers, irrespective of their educational level” and I don’t think you can untangle that without getting into causal analysis, which you are (fairly reasonably) unwilling to do.
That said, it’s fascinating that the trend is flipped in Europe. Definitely more to explore in this area
Great points. I noted my interest in looking elsewhere in the equation. Many European countries went through the Industrial Revolution before America. Now were embarking in the Fourth Industrial Age...
When you stop and think about who in Europe has no formal education -- it's immigrants, right? So my first thought is that Muslim/African immigration is driving this effect.
Couple this with observations that in much of Europe, there are more people going to a mosque each week than going to a Christian church service, and I think that's your answer. Though some of the immigrants (primarily those from Africa) could be going to Christian services also.
Native Euro church attendance is so low that it's possible for immigrants to show up in the numbers to a much greater degree than in the US.
As a Catholic….is it poor/less educated Catholics driving this? The downward trend lines in Europe are from predominantly Catholic countries. In America, the flattest trend lines are from the more heavily Catholic Northeast, and the upward trend lines are from notably protestant Kansas and Utah. I feel like Catholicism is probably more equally income distributed than, say, Anglicanism or being Dutch Reform. Idk about Evangelicals; there’s a poor hick stereotype there but 🤷🏻♀️
Yeah, I would be really interested in exploring this relationship further, to the extent that it exists.
I kind of wonder if Catholic theology and worship are more compatible with the worldviews of the lower class on some qualitative level, and if the converse holds for Protestantism. Impossible to say for sure, it's probably multi-causal, the trend may not even really hold when you look more closely at the numbers, and boiling things down to "The Reformation's notion of priesthood of all believers and its concommitant (moderate) de-insitututionalization of religion forced a realignment of religiosity along class lines of the secular world" feels a bit simplistic, but I can't help but to feel that's that's a strong possibility.
It's also amusing because you could definitely characterize the same causal dynamic in a way that's more or less flattering to either Protestants or Catholics, but I digress.
Charles Taylor talks about religion at different “speeds” and I think Catholicism is for sure more multi-speed compared to Protestantism. In particular, much of Protestantism is very reading-the-Bible-focused, which I think is a barrier for some people.
As a side note - a friend who’s in-the-know about the Episcopal Church in the USA, said that new rectors would prefer not to be assigned to the NorthEast as these areas have a lackluster interest in religion & community; the would prefer southern assignments.
“Among Christians, the pattern of educated people being more involved in their religious communities makes sense. As I’ve written before, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/religiously-unaffiliated-white-americans/518340/ communal involvement of all kinds is increasingly becoming a luxury good of sorts, with higher levels of income and education making people more likely to participate in activities like church, book club, parent-teacher association, and more. It could be that high-school-educated Christians feel less able to find and connect with a religious community in a broader context of financial strain, family stress, and geographic isolation. Or it could be that college-educated Christians put more of a premium on connecting with their brothers and sisters in the church.”
In almost all European countries, there is more support than in the US for those less well-off (and the cost of health care is part of that). The effect of lower income would thus be moderated in Europe. Is that at least a correct, partial explanation for the differences between US and European religious attendance and levels of education? (If Medicaid is gutted, then there may be some relevant data to be collected.)
In European countries, there is no legal “wall of separation” between church and state affecting public education. Though the current SCOTUS is lowering the height of that wall, that wall has been fairly high during the last 50 years or so in the US. That seems to me to be less likely to be a factor than financial strain and its effects on perceived available time, however.
Thought here: Non-EU immigrants tend to be overrepresented in both the “no formal education” and the “postgrad” buckets. Of course this doesn’t explain why the European church is wildly unsuccessful at keeping most of their educated native population engaged.
The more you write about this, the more I wonder how much sabbath has to do with all this…do people with better access to the weekend use it for church?
Empirically I'm not seeing any evidence of this, even if a part of me really thinks we should have extensive Blue Laws.
The actual mechanism seems to be kind of the opposite: America's freewheeling entrepreneurial culture leads to lots of people working on the weekend but also lots of options for churches that are adapted to a variety of preferences and hence higher church attendance than other rich countries.
Thomas, I live in a Caribbean territory of the Netherlands, and have spent a lot of time in the European part of the Netherlands, also. Weekends are a real thing, like you note. On my island, hotels and a couple of restaurants are open on Sunday--but nothing else. Devout atheist? Devout Catholic? Doesn't matter, no one's going to insult you by asking you to come in to work on Sunday.
Thanks, I read your piece, I enjoy the perspective.
I (and my family) abide by a personal sabbath on Sundays, in which we abstain from commerce (among other things), aside from occasional emergencies (e.g. we messed up and the baby is out of diapers). I try to preach Sabbath-keeping to people around me, so I don't want to downplay the Sabbath. It's important for human flourishing, I believe, and even more important for family flourishing.
It's frustrating that I actually live in one of the more religious parts of America and yet more and more stuff seems to get scheduled on Sundays. Travel sports, in particular, are now a major topic that every family has to come down on, and they threaten to consume our Sundays.
I'm mainly just skeptical of the claim that there is a large class of people that don't go to church because they might, at least sometimes, have to work on Sundays. Maybe there are a few people on the margin like this, but I don't think it explains much at the macro level. For one, America's diversity of choice means that there are plenty of Sunday evening services around for this exact reason.
But for another, in a culture without a social expectation of attending church (as in the case of every culture in the West these days), it's a self-motivated decision. People who want to go to church find a way to go to church. People who don't want to go to church just don't go to church. Blue laws as a church attendance booster make more sense in the context of a society with at least some social expectation of attending church.
Totally agree. If weekly church attendance were important to one, one would find a way to make that happen, regardless of work schedule. Even on my island where everyone has Sunday off, there are weeknight church services. This is even more so in the United States. I'm totally willing to buy the idea that there are people who *say* "oh I can't go to church because I have to work weekends," but I think that almost all of these people would still not go to church in an America with blue laws.
And thanks for reading and trying to hold on to a Sabbath. It's so hard when the culture is all-hustle all the time.
In Australia, more educated people are more likely to attend church and more likely to be No Religion in the census. The less educated are more likely to be nominal Christians.
If you break down by age, the difference is starker because the older ages have more church attenders and the younger ones have more educated people.
I suspect that in an educational lens, perhaps not all churches are created equal. The EU+UK countries that are predominantly Lutheran and Anglican appear to not have the drop-off that many (traditionally) Catholic countries do.
That correlation is more difficult to see in the U.S., where other faith traditions have a larger market share.
The first thing that came to mind for me is does your analysis control for age? Because your regression analysis includes age, income, and gender, it doesn't directly provide an answer for each separately. The other problem which cannot easily be solved is that the categories themselves are heterogeneous. For example are business majors, majors in science and technology, and the liberal arts similar in religious beliefs? The same could be asked about postgrads? Of course, it would take larger samples, and perhaps some theory to address these issues.
Do you think this is a significant reason for the difference in income inequality between Europe and the US? Church attendance is one of the best avenues for developing social capital (including economic connectedness) that the less educated can access. The educated have much more avenues. Do you think the boon of social capital building church attendance primarily of the less educated in Europe is what is driving the more reduced gaps in Europe in comparison to the US?
" I’m really fascinated by where that whole understanding came from."
I theorize that there are two differences that affect the trend lines. One is the European Churches might tend to more formal, throughout the denominational structure. And formalism tends to be more relevant to the more highly educated. The other is that, in America, the educated people learn very quickly to hide their true beliefs from the aggressive hostility of the more solid wall of atheism among both faculty and students. That may reflect my ignorance of Europeans, but at least it seems obvious that the American elite are aggressive and intolerant of disagreement.
I also don't trust the ruling class in academia to approach study of this trend that I see objectively, for the same reasons that it exists.
I have taught Christians in Scandinavia since 1986. Attendance in the State Churches is almost zero. I preached once at a chapel next to the famous ski center, packed with men and women from the slopes. The churches operated as 'Prayer Houses' are usually better attended. Most citizens have at least a BS, but the educational setup is so different from ours that any comparison is difficult. Most of my friends have a graduate-level education. I helped one seminary make changes to fit the American model.
Stay in touch and I will attempt to share my experiences. Unless we travel and teach internationally we can’t understand.
Your background is really interesting. I think every sentence in your comment is something you could expand upon to offer some interesting insights here.
Thanks for this post—interesting data!
I do want to point out, though, that the data here seem to show correlation, not causation. So it seems that the post title, which refers to education’s “impact on church attendance,” overstates the post/is not reflective of the data presented. (Let me know if there was causal evidence and I just missed it!)
It would be cool to see these trends for other regions as well, e.g. Latin America!
I'm wondering similarly. For some reason I've had questions about religiosity's relationship to a society's sophistication on my mind over the last few years. Especially given the growing significance of Christian Nationalism here.
I'd be very interested in seeing this data in comparison of rural and metro populations too.
Regarding the false perception of the relationship between religiosity and educational attainment in America, I suspect there’s some sort of availability bias driving the perception. There’s simply many more non-college grads (and many, many more non-postgrads) that you’re simply unlikely gto run into many PhDs to inquire about their religious beliefs, unless you’re a demographer.
I’d also note that in absolute terms it’s pretty shallow slope. It’s not no-relationship, but nor is it exponential or even a steep linear. Depending on the uncertainty bounds, I could reasonably interpret this as “a bit under a third of people are weekly churchgoers, irrespective of their educational level” and I don’t think you can untangle that without getting into causal analysis, which you are (fairly reasonably) unwilling to do.
That said, it’s fascinating that the trend is flipped in Europe. Definitely more to explore in this area
Great points. I noted my interest in looking elsewhere in the equation. Many European countries went through the Industrial Revolution before America. Now were embarking in the Fourth Industrial Age...
When you stop and think about who in Europe has no formal education -- it's immigrants, right? So my first thought is that Muslim/African immigration is driving this effect.
Couple this with observations that in much of Europe, there are more people going to a mosque each week than going to a Christian church service, and I think that's your answer. Though some of the immigrants (primarily those from Africa) could be going to Christian services also.
Native Euro church attendance is so low that it's possible for immigrants to show up in the numbers to a much greater degree than in the US.
As a Catholic….is it poor/less educated Catholics driving this? The downward trend lines in Europe are from predominantly Catholic countries. In America, the flattest trend lines are from the more heavily Catholic Northeast, and the upward trend lines are from notably protestant Kansas and Utah. I feel like Catholicism is probably more equally income distributed than, say, Anglicanism or being Dutch Reform. Idk about Evangelicals; there’s a poor hick stereotype there but 🤷🏻♀️
Yeah, I would be really interested in exploring this relationship further, to the extent that it exists.
I kind of wonder if Catholic theology and worship are more compatible with the worldviews of the lower class on some qualitative level, and if the converse holds for Protestantism. Impossible to say for sure, it's probably multi-causal, the trend may not even really hold when you look more closely at the numbers, and boiling things down to "The Reformation's notion of priesthood of all believers and its concommitant (moderate) de-insitututionalization of religion forced a realignment of religiosity along class lines of the secular world" feels a bit simplistic, but I can't help but to feel that's that's a strong possibility.
It's also amusing because you could definitely characterize the same causal dynamic in a way that's more or less flattering to either Protestants or Catholics, but I digress.
Charles Taylor talks about religion at different “speeds” and I think Catholicism is for sure more multi-speed compared to Protestantism. In particular, much of Protestantism is very reading-the-Bible-focused, which I think is a barrier for some people.
As a side note - a friend who’s in-the-know about the Episcopal Church in the USA, said that new rectors would prefer not to be assigned to the NorthEast as these areas have a lackluster interest in religion & community; the would prefer southern assignments.
"... model with controls like age, income, and gender." What was the effect of the control for income?
Emma Green, “Why Educated Christians are Sticking with Church,” Atlantic Monthly, 4/26/2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/ wrote:
“Among Christians, the pattern of educated people being more involved in their religious communities makes sense. As I’ve written before, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/religiously-unaffiliated-white-americans/518340/ communal involvement of all kinds is increasingly becoming a luxury good of sorts, with higher levels of income and education making people more likely to participate in activities like church, book club, parent-teacher association, and more. It could be that high-school-educated Christians feel less able to find and connect with a religious community in a broader context of financial strain, family stress, and geographic isolation. Or it could be that college-educated Christians put more of a premium on connecting with their brothers and sisters in the church.”
In almost all European countries, there is more support than in the US for those less well-off (and the cost of health care is part of that). The effect of lower income would thus be moderated in Europe. Is that at least a correct, partial explanation for the differences between US and European religious attendance and levels of education? (If Medicaid is gutted, then there may be some relevant data to be collected.)
In European countries, there is no legal “wall of separation” between church and state affecting public education. Though the current SCOTUS is lowering the height of that wall, that wall has been fairly high during the last 50 years or so in the US. That seems to me to be less likely to be a factor than financial strain and its effects on perceived available time, however.
Thought here: Non-EU immigrants tend to be overrepresented in both the “no formal education” and the “postgrad” buckets. Of course this doesn’t explain why the European church is wildly unsuccessful at keeping most of their educated native population engaged.
Forced, state-run education is not seen as a source of dynamic change or eternal message. It is religious algebra not rebirth.
We need to get you to Europe! Surprised you have never been. No curiosity to see where your ancestors are from?
The more you write about this, the more I wonder how much sabbath has to do with all this…do people with better access to the weekend use it for church?
Empirically I'm not seeing any evidence of this, even if a part of me really thinks we should have extensive Blue Laws.
The actual mechanism seems to be kind of the opposite: America's freewheeling entrepreneurial culture leads to lots of people working on the weekend but also lots of options for churches that are adapted to a variety of preferences and hence higher church attendance than other rich countries.
Thomas, I live in a Caribbean territory of the Netherlands, and have spent a lot of time in the European part of the Netherlands, also. Weekends are a real thing, like you note. On my island, hotels and a couple of restaurants are open on Sunday--but nothing else. Devout atheist? Devout Catholic? Doesn't matter, no one's going to insult you by asking you to come in to work on Sunday.
If you'll indulge me, I wrote about Sundays and my shared opinion with you that blue laws (or at least a culture that takes codified time off seriously) are good things: https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/and-keep-it-holy
Thanks, I read your piece, I enjoy the perspective.
I (and my family) abide by a personal sabbath on Sundays, in which we abstain from commerce (among other things), aside from occasional emergencies (e.g. we messed up and the baby is out of diapers). I try to preach Sabbath-keeping to people around me, so I don't want to downplay the Sabbath. It's important for human flourishing, I believe, and even more important for family flourishing.
It's frustrating that I actually live in one of the more religious parts of America and yet more and more stuff seems to get scheduled on Sundays. Travel sports, in particular, are now a major topic that every family has to come down on, and they threaten to consume our Sundays.
I'm mainly just skeptical of the claim that there is a large class of people that don't go to church because they might, at least sometimes, have to work on Sundays. Maybe there are a few people on the margin like this, but I don't think it explains much at the macro level. For one, America's diversity of choice means that there are plenty of Sunday evening services around for this exact reason.
But for another, in a culture without a social expectation of attending church (as in the case of every culture in the West these days), it's a self-motivated decision. People who want to go to church find a way to go to church. People who don't want to go to church just don't go to church. Blue laws as a church attendance booster make more sense in the context of a society with at least some social expectation of attending church.
Totally agree. If weekly church attendance were important to one, one would find a way to make that happen, regardless of work schedule. Even on my island where everyone has Sunday off, there are weeknight church services. This is even more so in the United States. I'm totally willing to buy the idea that there are people who *say* "oh I can't go to church because I have to work weekends," but I think that almost all of these people would still not go to church in an America with blue laws.
And thanks for reading and trying to hold on to a Sabbath. It's so hard when the culture is all-hustle all the time.
In Australia, more educated people are more likely to attend church and more likely to be No Religion in the census. The less educated are more likely to be nominal Christians.
If you break down by age, the difference is starker because the older ages have more church attenders and the younger ones have more educated people.
I suspect that in an educational lens, perhaps not all churches are created equal. The EU+UK countries that are predominantly Lutheran and Anglican appear to not have the drop-off that many (traditionally) Catholic countries do.
That correlation is more difficult to see in the U.S., where other faith traditions have a larger market share.
The first thing that came to mind for me is does your analysis control for age? Because your regression analysis includes age, income, and gender, it doesn't directly provide an answer for each separately. The other problem which cannot easily be solved is that the categories themselves are heterogeneous. For example are business majors, majors in science and technology, and the liberal arts similar in religious beliefs? The same could be asked about postgrads? Of course, it would take larger samples, and perhaps some theory to address these issues.
Do you think this is a significant reason for the difference in income inequality between Europe and the US? Church attendance is one of the best avenues for developing social capital (including economic connectedness) that the less educated can access. The educated have much more avenues. Do you think the boon of social capital building church attendance primarily of the less educated in Europe is what is driving the more reduced gaps in Europe in comparison to the US?
I'll offer a tongue in cheek explanation. In the US, low education workers are less likely to get Sunday off.
" I’m really fascinated by where that whole understanding came from."
I theorize that there are two differences that affect the trend lines. One is the European Churches might tend to more formal, throughout the denominational structure. And formalism tends to be more relevant to the more highly educated. The other is that, in America, the educated people learn very quickly to hide their true beliefs from the aggressive hostility of the more solid wall of atheism among both faculty and students. That may reflect my ignorance of Europeans, but at least it seems obvious that the American elite are aggressive and intolerant of disagreement.
I also don't trust the ruling class in academia to approach study of this trend that I see objectively, for the same reasons that it exists.
When leaders obey EPH 4 it is much easier to flex and makes changes as a church grows, or wants to try a new focus.
No equipping, no flexibility.