Will More Education 'Liberalize' Your Views on Faith & Heaven?

Education is a wonderful thing. As the saying goes, "a little knowledge never hurt anybody," right? But, when it comes to beliefs on personal matters of faith, what impact does an increase in education have?

According to a new study, the more educated you are, the more liberal you're going to be when it comes to your thoughts on who's going to heaven (and who's not).

The conflict between science and religion has been well-documented for years. Many have lamented the pro-evolutionary views that scientists embrace as a result of their training and understanding of the universe. While the commonly-held view is that education leads one to be less religious, an article written by University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Philip Schwadel and published in the Review of Religious Research, comes to a somewhat different conclusion.

Rather than simply not having any religious views as a result of increased education, USA Today's Cathy Lynn Grossman writes that Schwadel has found that, "Each year of education ups the odds by 15% that people will say there's 'truth in more than one religion.'" What does this mean, you ask?

It seems that as people become more educated, their views on religion -- at least some aspects of it -- liberalize. In addressing these important issues, Schwadel looked at 1,800 American adults' religious beliefs and education. The results are intriguing.

Apparently, the assessment shows that, as people move through high school and college, their friendship circles naturally widen. This means that people will likely befriend individuals with whom they have major disagreements on matters of politics, faith and the like.

As Schwadel says, when it comes to thinking about the afterlife, "People don't want to say their friends are going to hell." Thus, ideals about who God will accept and who he won't purportedly begin to evolve. According to Grossman, for each year of education above and beyond the seventh grade, Americans are:

•15% more likely to have attended religious services in the past week.

•14% more likely to say they believe in a "higher power" than in a personal God. "More than 90% believe in some sort of divinity," Schwadel says.

•13% more likely to switch to a mainline Protestant denomination that is "less strict, less likely to impose rules of behavior on your daily life" than their childhood religion.

•13% less likely to say the Bible is the "actual word of God." The educated, like most folks in general, tend to say the Bible is the "inspired word" of God, Schwadel says.

So, rather than declining in their beliefs, people actually increase religiosity as they become more educated. While some may find this information hard to digest, believing that allegiance to religion does, indeed, decline as education increases, Schwadel isn't the first research to come to this conclusion. In a paper for the American Religious Identification Survey, Barry A. Kosmin of Trinity College wrote the following, referring to people with advanced (post-graduate) degrees:

People with advanced education are disproportionately represented among both non-believers and churchgoers...The previously positive relationship between education and high school drop-outs has been reversed.  It would be a mistake to infer, however, that a continued expansion of advanced education will produce a religious revival: both the post-graduate and the total populations are becoming slowly less religious over time.

People, then, as a whole are becoming more secular. This, too, is an interesting theory to note. Not everyone, though, would agree with these assessments. According to Daniel M. Hungerman, a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, higher levels of education do, indeed, lead to a decline in religious participation later in one's life. He writes:

An additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition; the estimates suggest that increases in schooling can explain most of the large rise in non-affiliation in Canada in recent decades.

Grossman makes this point as well, also quoting Kosmin: "the educated elite look a lot like the rest of America." Essentially, this means that the educated are just as likely as the uneducated to embrace the belief in a higher power.

What do you think? Does more education make one less likely to embrace religion? Take our poll:

(h/t USA Today)