In the United States, church attendance rises with education.2 Fifty percent of college
graduates born after 1945 attend church more than several times per year.3 Only thirty
six percent of high school dropouts, born during the same period, attend church that
often. Figure 1 shows the mean attendance level by level of education. In a univariate
regression, which does not control for denomination, a one-standard deviation increase in
schooling raises church attendance by .12 standard deviations (see Table 1). When we
control for other factors, the relationship between education and religious attendance gets
stronger. In many multivariate regressions, education is the most statistically important
factor explaining church attendance.
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