The Atlantic: Why Educated Christians Are Sticking With Church

New data from the Pew Research Center doesn’t disprove these claims, but it does challenge them. While Americans with college experience are overall less likely to attend services, pray on a regular basis, and say religion is very important to them, that’s not true within many faith groups. In fact, Catholic, Mormon, and Protestant college grads are all more likely to attend church on a weekly basis than their less educated peers. This was not the trend among religious minorities like Muslims and Jews, or among people who don’t affiliate with any religion at all, suggesting that education has a distinctive effect on religiosity within the world of Christianity.  [...]

Educational differences had a much bigger effect on religious practice. Sixty-eight percent of college-educated evangelical Protestants go to church every week, compared to 55 percent of those who only went to high school. In fact, college grads show up in the church pews more often in nearly every kind of Christian tradition: Among mainline Protestants, weekly attendance was 36 to 31 percent, more educated to less; among black Protestants, 59 to 52 percent; and among Catholics, 45 to 39 percent. The effect was perhaps greatest among Mormons: 85 percent of Mormon college graduates go to church at least once a week, compared to 66 percent of their peers with a high-school education or less. [...]

One other data point in the Pew study that supports this theory. Among people who don’t identify with any religion in particular, very few attend religious services every week, regardless of whether they’re educated or not. But 47 percent of high-school-educated people in this group still say religion is “very” or “somewhat” important to them, and 71 percent say they believe in God. Compare that to less than a quarter of their college-educated peers who say religion matters to then, and less than half who say they believe in God. This suggests that at least some of the less educated people identify as religious but don’t have a religious community, while a majority of the more educated people simply aren’t interested in religion at all.

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