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Back in the 1920s, American humorist and circus wrangler Will Rogers quipped that “you just can’t eddicate a Baptist…cause when he’s eddicated he ain’t a Baptist any more.”
While Rogers’ observation is clearly contradicted by the existence of many well-educated Baptists out there, he was still hitting on an obvious truth: education tends to corrode religious faith.
Naci Mocan and Luiza Pogorelova (National Bureau of Economic Research) recently found that the longer a person attends school, the less likely will she be religious. A recent study from Turkey, and another from Canada, also found a strong correlation between increased education and decreased religiosity (The Economist Oct.11-17, 2014, for details). Sociologist Ryan Cragun, et. al. recently reported in the Oxford Handbook of Atheism that in Mexico, atheists exhibit twice the level of higher educational attainment as believers in God. The American Religious Identification Survey shows that while 11% of the U.S. population has some form of post-graduate education, 21% of atheists and 20% of agnostics do. Internationally, countries with the highest levels of average adult educational attainment are among the most secular societies on earth, while those with the lowest levels are among the most religious.
The correlation between educational attainment and secularity is clearly robust. Of course, it is just a correlation. A matter of averages. Many religious people are highly educated; many secular people not. But as a whole, you’re much more likely to find the highly educated being more secular and the less educated more religious, even when you control for important variables like class, race, age, gender, nationality, etc.
Why is education such a threat to religious faith?
What is it about education that corrodes belief?
The threat from history. When you learn about the birth of various religions, what previous religions they grew out of, how religions have been shaped over time by politics, nationalism, and warfare, and when you begin to understand how historical claims are actually substantiated and the kinds of evidence available -- or as is more likely the case, not available – all this makes certainty in the original claims of one’s own religion harder to maintain. For one quick example: did you know that the story of Adam, Eve, the tree, and the serpent is actually plagiarized from the much earlier Sumerian myth of Inanna, Enki, the Huluppu tree, and the serpent?
The threat from psychology. When you learn about the unparalleled significance of early childhood experiences, family dynamics, emotional development, personality traits, and neurological wiring, the more likely you are to see the ways in which religion actually grows out of these things and is in turn often shaped by them. For example, why do most religions conceived of God as a father and we his children? Why do so many religions link sex with shame? The many psychological needs that religion feeds upon – or rather, quenches -- are hard to ignore.
The threat from anthropology/sociology. When you learn about socialization and enculturation, and the ways in which we are so heavily shaped by our society/culture, when you come to understand that had you been raised by different people and at a different time and in a different society your values, beliefs, goals, and aspirations would be quite different, it makes surety in one’s religious beliefs harder to sustain. Our very ideologies and worldviews are largely the product of the culture within which we live. The implications for religion on this front are truly dire.
The threat from science. Most religions offer explanations for how the world began and how humans arrived on the scene. But these claims are not supported by evidence. And many counter claims – such as the Big Bang and evolution – are supported by heaps of evidence. When you learn about physics, geology, primatology, genetics, etc. – and what counts for evidence in these disciplines -- it makes the miraculous claims of religion much harder to stomach. Science is about data and adjusting one’s beliefs based on new data. Religion is about faith: believing in something without evidence, or even in spite of evidence to the contrary. Plus, science produces results where religion doesn't: for thousands of years, religious people have tried to cure deafness through prayer. That doesn’t work. Cochlear implants, however, do.
The threat from philosophy. What is truth? How is it established? What is morality? How can you know? By cutting to the heart of how we know things, and by exploring just what we can and cannot claim to know, and by exploring the history of ideas and how they change and develop, and by establishing criteria for logic and rational argumentation, and by debating the more profound/universal issues of human existence, philosophy has the potential to render religious claims to truth suspect, at best. From Lucretius to Spinoza, from Hume to Sartre, and from Mills to Shelley, philosophical inquiry has always problematized the more rigid and fervent forms of religious faith.
The threat from the humanities. Literature, art, theater, film, dance, sculpture – these things broaden the mind and the heart like nothing else. They tell us what we are and what we might be. They simultaneously express and shape humanity’s deepest fears, strongest loves, and most poweful potentials. The more one explores such expressions, the richer becomes one’s imagination as well as sense of reality. When it comes to articulating the human experience, the Bible doesn’t hold a candle to Shakespeare. I’ll take Goethe, Dylan, Ibsen, Munch, Picasso, Bergman, or Martha Graham over the Qu’ran or Diaretics any day.
The threat from religious studies. In my own research on apostates – people who were once religious, but are no longer – this account came up again and again: people learned about other religions, and it made them question their own. The bottom line is that the more you learn about the details and dynamics of various religions – past and present -- the harder it is to be sure that yours is the only correct one. Or if there actually is a correct one at all.
Education is mind expanding, in countless ways. Critical thinking, doubt, skepticism, independence of thought, and even existential insecurity, are common results. None of which make for healthy, durable piety.
