So, Who's Really Educated?

One knock against Christians is that we are all stupid, uneducated id-juts led around by smooth-talking pastors out to make a buck. But what’s this? Evidence to the contrary? Yep.

According to American Evangelicalism, by sociologist Christian Smith (what a great name), evangelicals have more years of education than many other groups—fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, and . . . yes, nonreligious. Of all groups surveyed, it was the nonreligious who had the most people with only a high-school education or less. Guess who had the highest number with more than a high-school education. Right—the evangelicals. Then to top it off, a higher percent of evangelicals have studied at the graduate-school level than . . . (can you guess?) the nonreligious.

This book discovered that among highly educated people there is a high percentage of believers in God. It’s certainly true that some become more skeptical about God as they gain education, but the author has discovered that this is mostly due to socialization. They don’t discover something that destroys their faith.

So the idea that more education leads to less evangelical faith is a myth. That’s good to know, isn’t it? Our faith is credible and able to stand up to scrutiny.

The only warning I would interject here is to parents about to send their children off to college. Thanks to liberal professors more interested in indoctrination than instruction, there’s a good chance your children will be pressured to dump their faith. But fill them with good apologetic tools while they are young, consider sending them to a Christian college, encourage them to connect with a good college church group, give them college-oriented apologetics articles to read, and pray for them daily.