More Educated People Are More Likely to Go to Church

In the imaginations of a certain kind of well-credentialed resident of the coastal cities, churchgoing is something associated with the lower classes, with immigrants, and with ethnic minorities. There is also an older, but persistent idea that education frees people from religion’s benighted superstitions. But Ryan Burge has discovered something else: while among the oldest cohort of Americans, more education corresponds to less church attendance, the correlation is reversed for young cohorts.