The news reports last week about a study that found better-educated Americans attending church more regularly than less-educated (and presumably less-affluent people) led to conclusions that instead of reducing religious commitment, higher education enhanced it. That’s the wrong way to read the data.

In the first place, religious involvement is decreasing across the board; it seems to be decreasingly less among the better-educated. There may be all sorts of reasons for this, most notably the increased prevalence of divorce and single-parent families among working and lower-middle class Americans. Family-friendly churches want their families to be traditional–husband, wife, and two children.

Second, there is the problem of how the research was done. It’s not clear from the piece to which I linked above, but I assume questions about attendance at religious services were asked to survey participants. In other words, people were self-reporting their activity. These sorts of studies are notoriously unreliable. The difference between the answers given by different socioeconomic groups might be due, not to actual differences in behavior, but in different attitudes toward what they think they “ought” to be doing. That is to say, it may be the case that better-educated, more affluent Americans still feel pressure to be involved in religious institutions, something other groups no longer sense.