Ryan Burge (Eastern Illinois University; Author, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (2d ed. 2023)), Do Educated People Believe in God More or Less?:
As a country becomes more educationally advanced and economically prosperous, it will become less religious. …
I’ve written a lot about the impact that education has on religiosity in a bunch of different pieces. When it comes to religious attendance in the United States, there’s basically no empirical evidence to point to the fact that education makes one less likely to attend. If anything, there’s a decent case to be made for the opposite: educated people are the most likely to report weekly religious attendance.
But that is, of course, only one facet of religiosity. One I haven’t really touched on a whole lot yet is religious belief. It’s probably the hardest one to poll on in surveys because it’s such an amorphous concept. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the minutiae of that methodology discussion, so let’s just cut to the chase. I am going to use the General Social Survey’s question about belief in God. They first asked about it in 1988, but only included in every survey since 2006. Here’s how it’s setup.
Please look at this card and tell me which statement comes closest to expressing what you believe about God.
- I don’t believe in God
- I don’t know if God exist and I don’t believe there is any way to find out
- I don’t believe in a personal God but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind
- I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others
- While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God
- I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it. …
I analyzed the relationship between belief and education.
The top row is just those with an atheistic view of God. As can be clearly seen, if there’s a relationship between those two variables, it’s an incredibly weak one. About 6% of those with graduate degrees say that God doesn’t exist compared to 4% of folks with no more than a high school diploma. Certainly not a substantively large difference.
However, the difference does become much larger when looking at the second graph which is folks with an atheist or agnostic view of God. It was 7% of folks with no more than a high school education. But as education increases, so does the percentage of folks with no belief in God. Among those with a graduate degree, it’s 16%. That’s a doubling in the share from the bottom of the education spectrum to the top. That’s certainly notable.
What about the share who express a certain belief in God? This is clear: those with lower levels of education are more likely to say that they believe in God without any doubt—it’s 64% of those with a high school education or less. Among those with a graduate degree, it drops to just 45%. That’s nearly a twenty-point decline from left to right. There’s no doubt about the takeaway here: educated folks tend to be less religious on this belief metric.
But let me point something out. Even among people who have graduate degrees, they are still three times more likely to say that they have no doubt of God’s existence than to express an atheist or agnostic view of God. Certain religious belief is still incredibly robust in the United States, even if it has declined somewhat over the last 35 years.
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