Less Educated Attend Church Less

The belief that most people find refuge in religion in
tough times is being contested by a study released
Sunday showing that less-educated Americans are staying
away from the church in large numbers.

The paper says while religious service attendance has
decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s,
the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for
those without college degrees compared to college
graduates.

The study focuses on whites because attendance rates at
religious services among minority groups such as blacks
and Latinos is less likely to be linked to education and
income.

"Our study suggests that the less educated are dropping
out of the American religious sector, similarly to the
way in which they have dropped out of the American
labour market," said lead researcher W. Bradford Wilcox,
a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Using decades of data from the General Social Survey and
the National Survey of Family Growth, the study found
that whites who have a high school degree but who did
not graduate from a four-year college attended religious
services in the 1970s at about the same rate as those
who graduated from college.

"The least educated have been consistently less
religiously engaged than even the moderately educated,
meaning the gap between the least educated and most
educated is even larger than the one between the
moderately educated and most educated," Wilcox said.

Wilcox views this trend as troubling because religious
institutions typically provide their members with
benefits such as improved physical and psychological
health, social networks, and civic skills that may be
particularly important for the less educated.

"While we recognize that not everyone wishes to worship,
and that religious diversity can be valuable, we also
think that the existence of a large group of less
educated Americans that is increasingly disconnected
from religious institutions is troubling for our
society," said Andrew Cherlin, co-author of the study
and a professor of sociology and public policy at the
Johns Hopkins University. "It reinforces the social
marginalization of less educated Americans who are also
increasingly disconnected from the institutions of
marriage and work."

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