Ryan Burge on Religion and Education

If you are a person who is even remotely interested in religion and culture, you should be following Ryan Burge's Substack.

Burge is a Baptist pastor who is a data geek. Week after week, he pushes out really interesting observations (in graphical data form) about religion.

This week's is sooooooo interesting: in America, people with advanced educational degrees are more likely to attend church than people with a less formal education. Soak that in for a minute. It goes against every cultural stereotype. We have been conditioned to think that religion is for rubes, that only the uneducated "cling to God and guns." The data shows the opposite.

I could have told you this. We did a survey in our church about ten years ago and found that almost 60% of respondents have advanced degrees. Sixty percent. But it's not just in liberal churches. Even conservative churches are full of folks who have plenty of school under their belts. 

What does this mean?

A couple of things, I think:

1) There may be some connection, deeper in the psyche, that links academic achievement with religious participation. Perhaps it's some proclivity toward order, or routinization. Academic achievement requires order, discipline. Maybe the same kinds of worldviews map onto academic and religion with respect to internal and external order.

OR...

2) Maybe people who have thought a bit more deeply about the world are open to mystery beyond what is knowable. The saying goes, "the only true wisdom is awareness of your own ignorance." Religion picks up where the limits of one's rational faculties falter. Perhaps people who have spent time learning become curious about these limits, and are drawn toward the wondering space of religion

OR...

3) Maybe religion in most communities is a class marker--a pillar of class establishment. Perhaps educated people are given a kind of status by going to--and participating in the leadership of--churches. Churches could be, wittingly or unwittingly, placeholders in class hierarchies.

I don't know the answer. But no one should be shocked by the kinship between learning and religion. Anyone who has familiarity with Judaism knows that there is nothing intrinsically incompatible with academic achievement and fidelity to God. In fact, I do think that Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" idea generally holds--that science (learning) and religion are two compatible and non-contradictory modes of inquiry into the nature of all things.

Deep learning and deep religiosity, in my own experience, are the best of friends.