Religious life in schooled society? A global study of the relationship between schooling and religiosity in 76 countries

Abstract

The thesis that schooling inevitably leads to secularization continues to be debated. Indeed, while education has become a central and authoritative institution across the world, religiosity seems to persist. An alternative hypothesis proposes that recognizing the cultural aspects of the growth of “schooled societies” may reveal unexpected compatibilities between education and religiosity. However, research that both empirically integrates these aspects and examines their relationship with religiosity from a global perspective remains scarce. Against this background, this article first constructs a macro-level indicator that taps into cross-national variation in the different dimensions of “schooled societies.” Subsequently, we examine its relationship with the subjective importance of religion in people’s lives and individual-level educational differences in religiosity. Results based on data from 94,011 respondents across 76 countries show that in societies that are more “schooled,” people generally tend to be less religious. Moreover, the development of a schooled society moderates the relationship between educational attainment and religiosity. In societies that show more characteristics of a schooled society, especially less educated people are likely to remain religious. Finally, we found that our new indicator for the schooled society explained more variance than other, less fine-grained indicators of this concept. This illustrates the added value of a more comprehensive indicator for the role of schooling as an institution. In the conclusion, we use our findings to outline a research agenda.