Abstract
A persistent sociological thesis posits that the spread of formal education causes an inevitable decline in religion as a social institution and diminishes adherence to religious beliefs in postindustrial society. Now that worldwide advanced education is a central agent in developing and disseminating Western rationality emphasizing science as the ultimate truth claim about a humanly constructed society and the natural world this seems an ever more relevant thesis. Yet in the face of a robust “education revolution,” religion and spirituality endure, and in certain respects thrive, thus creating a sociological paradox: How can both expanding education and mass religion coexist? The solution proposed here is that instead of educational development setting the conditions for the decline and eventual death of religion, the two institutions have been, and continue to be, more compatible and even surprisingly symbiotic than is often assumed. This contributes to a culture of mass education and mass religion that is unique in the history of human society, exemplified by the heavily educated and churched United States. After a brief review of the empirical trends behind the paradox, a new confluence of streams of research on compatible worldviews, overlapping ideologies, and their enactments in educational and religious social movements illustrates the plausibility of an affinity argument and its impact on theory about post-secular society.
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Notes
As quoted in Bell 1977, p. 421.
Indeed, although there is some recent evidence to the contrary, American scientists are about as religious as their similarly educated counterparts; and while there are more atheists among social scientists, they too are not as a whole unreligious even though their intellectual enterprise squarely rests on the assumption of a humanly constructed society and reality (Ecklund et al. 2008; Stark and Finke 2000).
Even among the 5 to 10% of Americans who claim no religious connection, most are not truly without religion as they regularly pray and believe in a supernatural being (Stark and Finke 2000).
This argument likely applies more to western Trinitarian Christianity than to Orthodox Christianity.
This was a process dominated by Christianity and Western universities. Although the earlier Islamic universities had developed considerable advances in mathematics, astronomy, and science, they were never able to institutionalize either scholarship or themselves and hence did not take scholarship as far as their western counterparts (Huff 1993).
Also nations ruled by explicitly irreligious regimes (e.g., China) also report high rates of all religious persecution (Grim and Finke 2010).
Comparatively stronger national state bureaucracies in Western Europe, for example, were a drag on the unfolding of the education revolution and clung strongly to pre-modern forms of education, to the point that Germany still has not instituted some features of the schooled society evident in many other nations (Baker and Lenhardt 2008). Also, pre-WW II Asian nations’ non-democratic regimes resisted the education revolution and these societies have experienced significant mass educational expansion only in the past 60 years.
A similar education crusade fueled by a religious ideology was waged for the souls of newly freed African-American slaves in the immediate postbellum period, although not all of imported teachers were white Northerns (Butchart 1987).
Hatford Institute for Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/database.html
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The author thanks Gary Adler, Kevin Burke, Michael Evans, Roger Finke, Paul Froese, John Meyer, John Richardson, Philip Schwadel, Alan Sica, Raf Vanderstraeten, anonymous reviewers, and journal editors for comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Baker, D.P. The great antagonism that never was: unexpected affinities between religion and education in post-secular society. Theor Soc 48, 39–65 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09338-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09338-w