As so often happens, truth is stranger than fiction. While thinkers from the Enlightenment onwards expected education to cause a decrease in religion, history and science have told a much more complex story. Such thinkers may not like the results of Hill’s empirical study, but what can they do? After all, they’re the ones who claim to trust science.

Since the beginning of the Enlightenment, academics assumed that as education increases, religion would decrease. Yet, in the late 19th century, the world witnessed the birth of fundamentalism, Biblical inerrancy, and papal infallibility. Despite the great increase in education beginning in the 18th century, religion has not only grown but has become more conservative. Interested in higher education’s real effect on religion, sociologist Jonathan Hill (Calvin College) found that it mildly increases skepticism toward super-empirical beliefs, decreases adherence to exclusivism, and increases preference for institutionalized religion.

Hill worries that scholars who study religion often do not do so with a fine enough comb. Rather than treating religious belief as all one thing, Hill breaks it down into three dimensions: super-empirical belief, exclusivism, and beliefs about institutionalized religion. Hill defines “super-empirical belief” as a “belief in a realm that is not immediately accessible to the human senses.”

By contrast, “exclusivism” deals with the incompatibility of various religions, and, in a related concept, beliefs about institutionalized religion address the legitimate sources of religious truths. These distinctions matter because, for example, Americans tend to hold many super-empirical religious beliefs but do not favor exclusivism or institutionalized religion.

On the other side of the equation, that is, higher education, scholars have assumed higher education would lead to weakened religiosity for a variety of reasons. For instance, universities expose students to secular theories. Additionally, they force students into a pluralistic world—a student’s classmate may hold to a radically different worldview and so challenge the certainty of the student’s worldview.

However, many students have fragmented and private religious beliefs, meaning that they never allow their beliefs to interact with their studies because they hold the two in independent worlds. While college in theory may challenge a student’s religion, in practice it need not do so. To find out what actually happens requires empirical investigation.

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