It Turns Out Colleges Aren't Actually Atheist Factories

[rug]

For people born after 1960, having a college degree doesn't cause religious disaffiliation—young, highly educated people are more likely to identify with a faith, according to a new study.

Emma GreenAug 14 2014, 11:59 AM ET

It's a classic scene from Philosophy 101: A group of scared teenagers arrive for the first lecture, all carrying their used copies of Nietzsche. An inevitably male, white professor, obviously hoping to beat his students into intellectual submission on day one, begins the class with a bold declaration: "There is no God." The students who aren't on Facebook dutifully type this into their notes. They don't know it now, but this is the beginning of the end for them and God; after all, the raison d'être of the university is churning out militant secularists.

Or at least, that's the caricature that some people, particularly conservative Christians, tend to toss around. The movie God's Not Dead, which was released last spring, includes a scene that's almost identical to this one—except in the movie, the professor is challenged to a rhetorical battle by an earnest Christian student, who eventually "proves" this whole God's-dead schtick is really just about the professor's grief over the loss of his mother. The film, which was created by the Christian production studio Pure Flix Entertainment, grossed nearly $61 million in ticket sales.

But a new study suggests this stereotype isn't true—in fact, college might make people more likely to be religious.

"The core finding is that the association between graduating from college and religious disaffiliation has changed drastically across generations," said Philip Schwadel, the study's author and a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For people who were born in the 1920s and '30s, the godless-college-grad stereotype is somewhat true: They were twice as likely as their uneducated peers to be religionless, not identifying with a particular church or synagogue or other religious institution.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/the-myth-of-the-godless-university/375950/

http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/01/sf.sou080.extract

[Ed Suspicious]

1. I just signed up for The Bible as Literature. I had a semester on C.S. Lewis. I took a world

religions course, and we have a religious studies major and minor at my state University. My philosophy classed talked about religion. It's not exactly all about the atheists. Religion gets a pretty fair shake at public uni.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Where has modern education gone wrong?

I know my generation (graduated in mid-60's) were pretty agnostic.

[cbayer]

4. Interesting article.

I think higher education when done right offers the opportunity to think more carefully about what one does or does not believe. Except for those schools that clearly have a religious agenda, I never saw liberal arts colleges as having the aim of creating believers or non-believers.

Interesting data point that recent surveys show a rise in atheism among those that don't go to college and not among those that do.

For people born during the 1970s, not going to college makes you more likely to say that you're not religious.

The reason for this may be that atheism, agnosticism, and general religious indifference has become more normal across social classes, Schwadel said. "For those people who were born earlier than the 1900s, it might have been something that wasn’t acceptable among a lot of Americans, except those who were among the upper classes—those select few who were going to college and graduating in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s. But as college education has grown, having no religious affiliation has become less ostracizing."