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Why aren't professors religious?
Robin Hanson poses the question, and Jane Galt picks it up, but no one dares an answer. Over lunch I suggested to Robin that professors are supposed to project an image of calm and reasonableness, whether justified or not. This means they will be especially allergic to charismatic religions, such as the so-called religious right. Most professors who do believe in god will be calm about it.
One prediction is that when the only major religions available are calm ones (Sweden?), professors will be less anti-religious than otherwise. Furthermore professors in the hard sciences, where answers can be proven right or wrong, may face the pressure to signal calmness to lesser degree.
Of course it is not obvious that professors are in reality calmer or more reasonable than the general population, especially once we adjust for IQ. So their rage has to come out somewhere. The further prediction is that professors are especially unreasonable toward their colleagues and competitors, and perhaps they are more likely to lose their tempers toward their children and spouses, or to behave more badly, once their tempers are lost.
I really am calm, however.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 19, 2007 at 01:09 PM in Religion | Permalink
Comments
Could it be a problem of diversity? In many departments there is a decent amount of intolerance towards evangelicals. I'm not sure an evangelical would feel very "comfortable" even applying to many of those departments. Somehow I doubt schools are too concerned about this.
Posted by: Adam C at Jan 19, 2007 1:16:41 PM
One thing I've noticed is that professors who are evangelical Christians usually keep very quiet about it, and I expect people think I myself am a bit foolhardy. As I've discovered myself, if you hold certain Christian views, some vocal people think you are automatically disqualified from being a professor. Hence, the surveys might be a little like anonymously surveying Soviet econ profs in 1960 about whether they believed in Marxism.
Posted by: Eric Rasmusen at Jan 19, 2007 1:26:55 PM
This raises an interesting question about detecting discrimination in general. Is there any measurement one could make to distinguish self-selection from other-selection?
Posted by: Cyrus at Jan 19, 2007 1:33:32 PM
To phrase the question by making a comparison of beliefs between "Professors" and "the rest of the population" assumes that there is a significant thing about being a professor that will incline you to or away from atheism. Why not garbage collectors and the rest of the population, or proctologists? (two professions that might incline you away from believing in a benevolent god at least).
I'm afraid the study - carried out by university professors of course - demonstrates only one thing. As a group, university professors believe they are special and a subject of interest to the rest of us. I'd say they are mistaken, but here I am reading this blog, so what do I know?
- an atheist non-professor
Posted by: tom s. at Jan 19, 2007 1:37:23 PM
You mean they're not?
I think that they are religious, just a different religion. What else is communism-socialism, but a religion -- and one far more dangerous than all but Islam?
They believe in creating heaven on earth, have an end of days (the dictatorship of the proletariat), believe in forcible conversion, killing of enemies, and completely ignore science and reality in formulating their goals.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, socialism is the religion of the academic elites.
Posted by: GMUSL 3L at Jan 19, 2007 1:38:02 PM
Why couldn't it be simply that in the hard sciences, professors have learned to reject any hypothesis that isn't falsifiable or isn't supported by evidence? Is that just too simple?
Posted by: Phil at Jan 19, 2007 1:55:33 PM
Anecdotal evidence isn't really evidence, but I've never found the professors I've known to be more or less religious than the general population. I think that there are some self-segregation effects, particularly with evangelicals (you won't find any non-religious professors at, say, Wheaton College), but when I was involved with campus ministry, it seemed like I saw a higher than expected* fraction of faculty at the on-campus mass at my secular college (* it was close to the fraction of students, which given that students almost all lived on campus while faculty had a wider range of residences, was a bit surprising).
Posted by: don Hosek at Jan 19, 2007 2:00:28 PM
Um, why does this have to be about signaling? Is it that politically incorrect to say that due to the very nature of religion, it is something that takes hold more easily in those who are not as smart and well-educated, and hence, as one moves up the intellectual ladder, people do not believe because they realize that such belief is irrational? And that there is also a correlation between the amount of rational thought that a field needs (say, the sciences vs. the arts) and the amount of atheism.
This answer may be painfully politically incorrect, but I think that it is perhaps the best answer.
Posted by: Anonymous at Jan 19, 2007 2:08:49 PM
There are hundreds of small religious colleges across the country. Maybe religious professors prefer to teach at religious colleges.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at Jan 19, 2007 2:12:43 PM
Socialism is not a religeon. It is a theory that causes efficiency problems in places.
I would offer this story as a reason: People that dedicate themselves to a deep curiousity are less likely to accept a central view of life that claims to be complete already. Put another way; those that want to figure things out for a living don't cotton to being told that it all has been figured out for them before they even get started.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Jan 19, 2007 2:21:02 PM
The question is overly general with respect to religions and overly specific with respect to professors. I'm an Episcopalian, and the Episcopal churches where I've been a member have often had a lot of not just professors but big-name prominent professors as members. Especially the campus ministry I attended at Princeton. I am confident that Episcopalians are more, not less represented on college and elite college faculties than in the general population. Ditto for Unitarians and Buddhists and perhaps Jews. Possibly also for Hindus and Muslims due to recent immigration trends, especially in science, medicine, and engineering.
The conclusion one should draw is that college professors disproportionately show the demographic characteristics of elites in American society, i.e. like Presidents they are disproportionately white, male, anglo-saxon, and (mainline) Protestant, with notable concentrations from those immigrant groups whose median income exceeds the national median income. And if you claim that professors aren't religious or choose particular religions due to their IQ or scientific principles or even peer pressure, IMHO your claim is probably as silly as claiming that most professors choose to be white males.
OTH, some would argue that Episcopalian doesn't count as religious. I'm not going to get into that.
Posted by: DK at Jan 19, 2007 2:35:08 PM
Tom S. seems on the right track to me. I wonder if it goes a bit too far to claim that professors tend not to be religious from the very limited data referenced by the post. If I read the Hanson post correctly, professors responded "none" when asked what their religion was, but this might mean many things.
As Tom S. points out, professors are (or at least like to think of themselves) as special individuals. One might expect that someone willing to complete the education required to become a professor might find most organized religions offered a version of religios experience that was not specific, thoughtful, or unique enough.
So, many professors may in fact be religious even if they do not practice a particular religion. A "none" response might reflect this sort of situation. After all, the question did not ask if the professor was an atheist or agnostic; although, maybe it should have.
Moreover, the article that the Hanson post is based on offers more data for the religious-without-religion-claim: Half of professors at non-elite schools reported belief in God. That's a lot of academic believers. Also, the article reports results of a UCLA study that found that 80% are spiritual. Likewise, the summary at the end points out that only 10% of professors in the first study report not believing in God. In fact, the study suggests that professors are pretty religious. 90% is a lot, right?
Other posts suggest a slightly different question: Why don't as many professors believe in God as the rest of us? But, neither reported study nor the posts offer any evidence about a comparison group. Moreover, such comparisons would be difficult, because an accurate sample of professors would be a great deal more difficult to generate than an accurate sample of the general public, which includes professors. Still, I would bet that the actual proportion of believers among professors and the general public once you have accounted for measurement error is not that different.
Another, perhaps more enlightening question might be, why do we tend to make claims that stretch the evidence in hand?
- Josh B., PhD
Research Scientist
Posted by: Josh B. at Jan 19, 2007 2:35:10 PM
TC's assertation is laughable, and GMUSL 3L's observation is spot-on.
Professors are, by and large, very religious --- they usually worship ferverently at the Church of Environmentalism.
As John Kay notes:
Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.
Posted by: Varangy at Jan 19, 2007 2:42:24 PM
All academic disciplines involve, in one way or another, limiting one's beliefs to ones that are supported by evidence. Evidence for religious beliefs is, well ... what would "evidence" even mean here? People don't believe in gods and souls because of the evidence that there are such things.
Posted by: Lester Hunt at Jan 19, 2007 2:43:58 PM
Professors are educated. Educated people, people who have been trained at the art of thinking and analyzation are less susceptible to logical fallacies. Religion, by definition, is a logical fallacy. (The whole point of 'faith' is that you are believing in something for no reason whatsoever)
Posted by: SPSer at Jan 19, 2007 3:40:44 PM
In the hard sciences it is more likely they have little time and less interest to consider much beyond their work.
Posted by: Lord at Jan 19, 2007 3:44:45 PM
I actually just wrote a paper on this very topic. The 1975 Carnegie Foundation National Survey of Higher Education revealed the same basic facts, especially that academics are twice as likely to be atheists. It also revealed that atheism is highest among social scientists, whereas "hard" scientists to not exhibit higher than average levels of atheism. I figure there are four ways to explain this:
1) Academics lack exposure to the business world, and are less moral because of it. Sounds harsh, but this is Adam Smith's idea.
2) Also from Adam Smith, academics are prone to group-think, and produce sciences which are "a mere useless and pedantick heap of sophistry and nonsense." Here, the bad science is the secularization thesis, which has dominated the study of religion for 100 years.
3) Academics seek fame more than fortune, and this is at odds with Christian theology.
4) Academics seek to persuade and influence society, partly because their minority views put them at a disadvantage. This applies to atheism as well as extreme political views.
See my blog for more.
Posted by: will mcbride at Jan 19, 2007 3:51:26 PM
There is a documented correlation between educational level and atheism. The strength of this association has increased over the last century as all the major areas of nature (inside atoms, inside cells, etc) where God could possibly hide have been investigated and found to be, well, godless.
I am away from my blogging stuff right now, but I wrote a brief blog on this that I believe is due to be out of the box in about 9 hours from now, so maybe check tomorrow morning. Or, find the Nature piece (a letter) with the data from a major survey.
Posted by: Greg Laden at Jan 19, 2007 4:12:53 PM
Intelligence directly correlates with hubris. Find the wise professors, and see what they believe.
Posted by: Matt at Jan 19, 2007 4:25:56 PM
hey, i was wondering about this:
"One prediction is that when the only major religions available are calm ones (Sweden?), professors will be less anti-religious than otherwise."
what does sweden have to do with this? are you saying they all buddhists or something?
Posted by: jakob at Jan 19, 2007 4:34:35 PM
On keeping quiet about it--you know, not everybody thinks that talking about their religion is a good thing. For the Druze, not talking about it is almost a point of doctrine. For Abraham Lincoln, it seemed at least a matter of personal taste; perhaps a matter of conviction. But I concede that the lobby of the quiet ones is not likely to be very noisy.
Posted by: Buce at Jan 19, 2007 4:38:38 PM
Another question is why economists have an incurable tendency to assume that all social phenomena are best explained in the terms of economic theory. Why would we assume that it's a signaling phenomenon? Here are some possible explanations:
1) Academia is, in fact, hostile to openly religious people, which discourages people who want to be openly religious.
2) The family backgrounds that produce the kind of person who wants to be an academic tend to be less religious for completely unrelated cultural reasons.
Posted by: Elliot Reed at Jan 19, 2007 5:31:45 PM
This string of comments reveals a lot about the readership of this blog compared to, say, Edge.org.
Posted by: DW at Jan 19, 2007 5:39:56 PM
Professors aren't religious because they have active and probing brains. And their brains aren't afraid of not knowing everything. That is, they're not afraid of not having explanations for everything, and indeed they enjoy discovering new explanations.
God is simply a figment of human ignorance, and religion is simply a way of controlling people through a feared God.
The very definition of being a professor is to posess less ignorance than the average person.
Posted by: Manuel at Jan 19, 2007 5:46:23 PM
Or, a competing view, professors tend to have been convinced by their own gigantic brains that everything is empirically knowable, therefore they tend away from religion, which creates mysteries rather than certainties, as Manuel alleges, apparently without any experience with real faith.
Religion is about faith at its core. Faith is inherently irrational, that is, it can by definition not be the result of proof. My exposure to professors at an explicitly religious school for some 8 years convinces me that the higher one rises on the university scale, the less one is disposed to believe that some things just aren't reasonable. There was little faith there; there was even less humility. They knew everything.
I am a person of faith, and I know next to nothing. My life is filled with ignorance, and it doesn't scare me one bit. The professor next door, now, he's terrified of everything, especially not being the smartest man in the room. He therefore misses church. A lot. I think he's afraid that there is actually Someone there that is smarter than he is.
But, as indicated, I'm not very sure I have the answer to any of this. The debate's fun, though.
Posted by: Chris Jones at Jan 19, 2007 6:02:12 PM
The usual past answer to the question "Why aren't professors religious" was often based on the myth the religious belief is irrational and borne out of ignorance. As the world becomes more rooted in the scientific, the theory goes, people will become less religious. Asking about professors isn't necessarily problematic...after all, professors of all disciplines had to take science classes at some point.
Larry Iannaccone blew this theory out of the water, however, in his AER article in 1996 "Religion,Science and Rationality".
Will McBride's comment above is also consistent with other literature. Particularly interesting is Lehmans's 1974 article in the JSSR, "Academic Discipline and Faculty Religiosity in Secular and Church-Related Colleges". In secular colleges, the non-scientific faculty are less religious than the scientific faculty...but the opposite is true in Church-related colleges.
Posted by: Colleen at Jan 19, 2007 6:04:38 PM
I don't think professors are especially irreligious. I think that they are professionally allergic to priests and ministers. Being a professor is, after all, about thinking for yourself, rather than having somebody else tell you what to think.
Posted by: Brad DeLong at Jan 19, 2007 6:31:13 PM
GMUSL 3L is right,Raymond Aron and Ceslav Mislow( Nobel Prize 1980) have said the same.And professors are the priests of the marxist religion.Marxism is a faith proven wrong once and again
Posted by: jcm at Jan 19, 2007 8:19:21 PM
I don't think professors are especially irreligious. I think that they are professionally allergic to priests and ministers. Being a professor is, after all, thinking you know everything, rather than having somebody else remind you that you don't.
Posted by: Taimyoboi at Jan 19, 2007 8:29:47 PM
Hard scientists have very high rates of atheism:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/sci_relig.htm
And the data show that the more accomplished the scientist, the more likely that's she's an atheist.
I have not seen any data for non-scientists, however.
Posted by: Anony at Jan 19, 2007 8:43:04 PM
Being a professor is, after all, about thinking for yourself, rather than having somebody else tell you what to think.
Posted by: Brad DeLong at Jan 19, 2007 6:31:13 PM
LOL.
Ironic and funny how academia perceives its own group-think.
Posted by: Varangy at Jan 19, 2007 9:23:02 PM
To follow up Varangy, I was just going to say:
"Being a professor is, after all, about thinking for yourself, rather than having somebody else tell you what to think" - well, if you say so, Dr. DL, I guess we have to agree.
Posted by: tom s. at Jan 19, 2007 9:41:09 PM
Varangy:
You think that I and Tyler Cowen suffer from group-think? You are the first, and probably the only.
Posted by: Brad DeLong at Jan 19, 2007 10:06:39 PM
"You think that I and Tyler Cowen suffer from group-think? You are the first, and probably the only."
There goes Professor Cowen's observation about academics being calm...
Posted by: Taimyoboi at Jan 19, 2007 10:17:53 PM
1) Religious people like their family and stuff, they can't spend their whole life at work trying to get tenure.
2) If you decouple IQ, how much of this effect is left anyway?
Posted by: Paul N at Jan 19, 2007 10:58:54 PM
1) Academics lack exposure to the business world, and are less moral because of it. Sounds harsh, but this is Adam Smith's idea.
Interestingly enough, atheists are extremely rare in prisons, implying that they're either a) less likely to commit crimes, or b) less likely to get caught. Adam Smith couldn't do a quick Google search to find out if atheists are actually more or less moral than the rest of the population. We don't have that excuse.
Posted by: Byrne Hobart at Jan 19, 2007 11:05:59 PM
Brad, everyone thinks you and Tyler suffer from group think.
Posted by: Kieran at Jan 19, 2007 11:09:10 PM
Taimyoboi said
"Being a professor is, after all, thinking you know everything, rather than having somebody else remind you that you don't."
Got it backwards there, sarcastic boy.
I'm a university professor and I know I know very little about very little.
Edison said, "we don’t know one millionth of one percent of anything."
My funadamentalist Christian friends (and our America-destroying president) on the other hand think they pretty much have it all figured out.
Posted by: Arthur at Jan 19, 2007 11:27:06 PM
Faith is a ridiculous reason to claim something exists.
If I have faith breakfast is on the bare table, my wife will think I'm nuts.
If I have faith that the church organ is a kazoo, my priest will tell me I'm nuts.
If I have faith that the Vatican is located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the pope himself will tell me I'm nuts.
But if I have faith that some magic dude in the sky makes everything happen, that's perfectly ok and some how makes it true.
Fundamentalists think they practice the one true faith. Pentecostals think they practice the one true faith. Muslims think they practice the one true faith. But within that, Shi'a think they are the true followers of Mohammed, but the Sunni are sure they are. Jews know they're actually the real followers of the one true faith. And Hindus are just damn sure it's them.
My two Christian neighbors can't stand each other because one is Church of Christ and the other is Unitarian and they disagree over how God thinks they should treat women.
Of all these people, who's right?
There are only two choices:
1) Either one person out there happens by tremendous luck to be the one in 6 billion who's actually right thing religiously, or
2) They're all wrong.
Either way, 99.9999% of people are wrong.
Religion is a crock, and it's destroying the world.
Posted by: Manuel at Jan 19, 2007 11:43:13 PM
"It also revealed that atheism is highest among social scientists.... I figure there are four ways to explain this: 1) Academics lack exposure to the business world, and are less moral because of it."
So morality requires me to believe in God? What century is this, anyway?
Posted by: Lester Hunt at Jan 20, 2007 12:05:00 AM
I would contend that religion is what CREATED the world. The world as it currently stands has had religion in it, well, forever. Wouldn't it have been easier, if religion really is a crock, for it to have destroyed the world back when there were a lot fewer people? What happened to the natural selection against ignorant people? Or maybe, since the world grew up with religion, and the only thing that has really changed since then is the number of people, that it's the PEOPLE that are destroying the world? Assuming for a moment that it IS being destroyed, which makes me wonder where it is you live, but let that pass.
You don't have much of an understanding of faith, do you? It's not faith that makes a thing exist. You don't have to believe me when I tell you there is a God. But just so you understand, some things are true whether you believe them or not.
For me, you're welcome to believe that the organ is a kazoo all you like. I fail to see how that is any harm to anyone but yourself. I think your Church of Christ and Unitarian friends are silly, but I understand that people who are less than certain about their own position need someone to hate to make them feel better. I can't judge them.
Or you. You don't sound very happy, and it seems to me that whatever it is you believe is not working out that well for you, but hey, do as you like.
But the actual discussion is about university professors, and I think your contention that they are less likely to be religious because they are less ignorant is almost comical. You don't seem to think much of my contention that the reason they are irreligious is arrogance, instead. Seems we're unlikely to agree about this.
Posted by: Chris Jones at Jan 20, 2007 12:29:12 AM
I would contend that religion is what CREATED the world. The world as it currently stands has had religion in it, well, forever. Wouldn't it have been easier, if religion really is a crock, for it to have destroyed the world back when there were a lot fewer people? What happened to the natural selection against ignorant people? Or maybe, since the world grew up with religion, and the only thing that has really changed since then is the number of people, that it's the PEOPLE that are destroying the world? Assuming for a moment that it IS being destroyed, which makes me wonder where it is you live, but let that pass.
You don't have much of an understanding of faith, do you? It's not faith that makes a thing exist. You don't have to believe me when I tell you there is a God. But just so you understand, some things are true whether you believe them or not.
For me, you're welcome to believe that the organ is a kazoo all you like. I fail to see how that is any harm to anyone but yourself. I think your Church of Christ and Unitarian friends are silly, but I understand that people who are less than certain about their own position need someone to hate to make them feel better. I can't judge them.
Or you. You don't sound very happy, and it seems to me that whatever it is you believe is not working out that well for you, but hey, do as you like.
But the actual discussion is about university professors, and I think your contention that they are less likely to be religious because they are less ignorant is almost comical. You don't seem to think much of my contention that the reason they are irreligious is arrogance, instead. Seems we're unlikely to agree about this.
Posted by: Chris Jones at Jan 20, 2007 12:29:28 AM
"A casual stroll through a madhouse shows that faith proves nothing."
-- Nietzsche
Posted by: Lester Hunt at Jan 20, 2007 12:50:02 AM
"I don't think professors are especially irreligious. I think that they are professionally allergic to priests and ministers. Being a professor is, after all, about thinking for yourself, rather than having somebody else tell you what to think."
Except I don't think many ministers tell people "how to think." They'll offer examples and exhortations from scripture, but in my experience church is not the place where zombies are given their marching orders, like you seem to be suggesting.
The other issue is that more than a few professors will tell students how they think about various issues, or otherwise try to mold the minds of still learning students. I'm not sure why that is any different, and it actually strikes me as somewhat more pernicious.
Posted by: SP at Jan 20, 2007 2:46:32 AM
Chris j-- natural selection doesn't select for intelligence or against ignorance, it selects for passing on one's genes. If intelligence makes that happen, then intelligence is passed on. If an inclination towards faith promotes survival and fecundity or either, then an inclination towards faith is passed on.
If people are more likely to survive to point where they can breed and pass on genes because they have faith in their people's collective wisdom, for example, and that followed wisdom' benefits outweighs whatever negative effects on survival faith might have, than an inclination to faith is passed on.
Let's pretend we know know nothing of bacteria, parasites, virii. Let's say that I routinely eat beef, and that I know from experience beef requires very little heat, very little cooking, to be totally edible. If the outside is charred, the inside can be more or less raw. Let's say, also, I've just butchered my first hog. Meat is meat, might as well prepare it the same way, except some old fucker in the tribe tells me I'll get sick. No reason why, just I'll get sick. Why the should I believe him? Doesn't give a reason--hell, he hasn't ever even seen anyone eat undercooked pork, he just was told about by some guy older than him and now six feet under to boot. But if I believe him, if I take his word on faith, then maybe I avoid a nasty case of trichinosis. Who knows, maybe tradition even came about to ban eating pork at all, maybe faith that man shouldn't eat pork saved a couple lives.
But even if an inclination to faith has been or even still is a genetic characteristic that benefits the species, that doesn't mean that belief in god/gods/witches/devils/demons/fairies/dragons or any of the multitude of beings that have been or are claimed to exist despite the absence of the tiniest measure of evidence is, in fact, correct.
Posted by: van at Jan 20, 2007 2:57:19 AM
ack, forgot to switch off italics
Posted by: van at Jan 20, 2007 2:58:12 AM
I'd certainly agree academics tend to be better informed regarding their own area of expertise, but how many are actually experts in religion? Why would people trust that academics are better informed than others about religion? Is it possible that since most religions are based on faith and not on reason, academics lose their comparative advantage and are therefore turned off or feel threatened by it?
There may be a selection bias and path dependency story here as well. It is true that most academics tend to lean left politically. It is also true that those on the left tend to have lower levels of religiosity than the general population. With this being so, could most of the lack of religiosity be explained by the effects of left-leaning political beliefs? (Or maybe vice-versa?) According to the Seattle Times:
The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.
Does this also mean that the rest of us should favor the political views of the elite as well? That doesn't seem to follow. A more plausible story is that Democrats tend to favor the elite being in control of society which empowers those in academia, particularly those in elite institutions. It would make sense from a self-interest perspective for those academics to have a greater incentive to lean left. The more elite the institution, the greater the incentive. Because of the strong correlation between political perspectives and religious beliefs, this would probably result in fewer religious people in academia. (Interestingly, there is little effect of education level or IQ on religious belief, but a big effect from being involved in academia. The implication is that highly educated religious people tend to find jobs outside of academia.)
Read more of my thoughts in this post on my blog, including links to many of my posts on the economics of religion.
Posted by: Brian Hollar at Jan 20, 2007 3:27:26 AM
trying to switch off the italics!
BTW, I have never met a mainline Protestant minister who tried to tell people how to think. Have you, or are those who say that just repeating a myth that they believe on faith? I have met one Catholic priest who told people what to think, but he was actually forced out of his job for doing so and was generally considered an embarrassment.
Posted by: DK at Jan 20, 2007 7:02:16 AM
DK,
I'm not trying to be flippant but when has a Catholic priest or official told his followers to come to their own conclusions about birth control or abortion? The Church still adheres to the doctrine of Papal Infallibility -- which means what is says. Now there are many Catholics who do not appreciate these hard-line stances but they are certainly not encouraged by the Church to publicly register their disapproval and they are not represented in the Church hierarchy.
Mainstream Protestant congregations tend to be much more flexible and accommodating of differences of opinion but these are not the congregations that are growing fastest within the U.S. Incidentally, those congregations that are most broad-minded seem to attract those professors who are religious.
Posted by: Ricardo at Jan 20, 2007 2:20:26 PM
There is a particular teenage mindset that I frequently like to point out in academia -- an emphasis on purity of motive, vocal freedom from "hypocrisy", the importance of individual egos, and the notion that the proper way to get money for a worthwhile thing is to persuade an authority to give it to you. Is it any surprise that this coincides with a similarly teenage distrust of organized religion?
Posted by: Dolohov at Jan 20, 2007 4:26:35 PM
Why can't you live religion where it belongs, in church or with the priests and at the time to practice it. Education is one thing and religion is something else. Everybody has the right to his own religion but this is private and has nothing to do with education and should never have any impact on anything else but what people believe for themselves privately.
It is nobody's business and certainly not the school system or the University this becomes worse when you start talking about religion in politics!!!! What kind of hypocrits have you become!!! Don't mix everything and don't generalize.
Posted by: Martine Maurel Meyer at Jan 20, 2007 10:44:10 PM
How can a study on religion at all conclude that professors express their tempers on their families or colleagues? Potentially, all it can express is that because professors are figures of authority on a college campus, they must act the part. Professors have to be indifferent towards everything but what they're instructing. If professors act irrationally or partial towards anything they risk not being able to connect with the student at hand. They are doing their jobs by strictly teaching the subject matter at hand in a calm manner. Even in religion courses, the professor’s job is to not be biased. Academia has everything to do with learning the subject matter, and nothing to do with religion.
Posted by: Katie at Jan 21, 2007 8:33:03 PM
I reject the whole calmness idea. In my experience, the Profs are no more calm in the classroom than students who adhere to the charismatic religions...and the profs are often a good deal less calm outside the classroom. We also are no more rational on subjects outside our expertise, and if anything are more likely to believe our own ability to pontificate outside that area. I say "our" as an atheist prof who rants and flames on occassion myself. OK, maybe more than "on occassion", if you ask my wife. For example, everything that follows in this comment qualifies as making stuff up on the basis of no data or expertise:
I suspect that the stats on the lack of religiousness among college profs may be strongly influenced by:
a) recent history. I suspect it was not always so, back in the days when universities trained the ministry, for example. The historical artefact aspect is related to extant profs being more likely than the general population to be exposed not only to Darwin, but also Nietzche, Marx, existentialism etc, as undergrads.
b) higher probability of being exposed to others who are not religious by virtue of culture or who were brought up in different religions, due to the international/cosmopolitan nature of scholarship.
c) the correlation between education and atheism others have noted may not be that smarter people reject religion on rational grounds (even if that's what they tell themselves) so much as self-selection and opportunity costs. Who has time to study scripture when you have grants and papers to write (or whatever workaholics in other professions do)?
Posted by: Jim Hu at Jan 22, 2007 2:34:10 AM
Religion and politics (as zero sum propositions) have been steadily loosing ground to freedom and knowledge (non zero-sum propositions). With greater access to the myth busting works of science and skepticism, it is not very surpriseing (to me) that professors and academics are less religious (in the classic sense) than the population at large.
The question I have is why is it the masses are so quick to adopt religion and political points of view that in the end restrict their own freedom and knowledge?
-A
Posted by: Alex Horovitz at Jan 30, 2007 7:15:32 PM
I beg to disagree.
I am not religious myself, but I have spent the better part of my career in institutions in which many professors were religious.
I think there is a lot of self-selection going on here. Religious professors don't feel accepted in many places.
Currently, I am at Southern Utah University. Not all departments here are religious, but the School of Business is heavily LDS. No one is shy about that fact. Being in Utah helps, of course. Having said that, almost every one of those professors has held positions at universities outside of Utah, where religion, and particularly Mormonism are not likely to be seriously advertised. In sum, I think they congregate here out of comfort.
There are two other interesting observations about being a non-Mormon professor in Utah. First, the non-Mormons in the School of Business are also likely to be religious. It's a small group (5 who are lifetime non-Mormons), but that includes a serious Catholic, a serious Protestant, and a not-so-serious Protestant. My guess is that is a higher proportion than most schools.
I grew up in a secular environment in the northeast. I was shocked when I got my first job at the University of Alabama that there were serious professors there who took their faith seriously as well. Then I went to the economics department at the University of Utah, which has few Mormons but many who act as if Marxism is their faith. Then I went to the University of New Orleans, where the business school was largely secular, but where I met a very good economist with a literal interpretation of scripture. I also worked at Tulane a bit, and found that to be mostly secular as well.
In sum, I think what we are observing is self-selection. Having said that, there also could be a good deal of self-selection at the graduate school level: if your professors aren't religious, and you are, how likely is it that you'll complete a Ph.D.?
Posted by: Dave Tufte at Jan 31, 2007 12:16:56 PM
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