In A report released earlier this year by an American institutional organization traced the history of religious belief, conduct, and association in the United States since the founding of Lyman Stone. This is a magical work, I encourage readers to download the report here and explore for themselves.
Stone’s research helps us understand the decline of religious faith in the United States over the past 60 years. Secularism is the most determined development in American history, and everyone has a theory about how and why it happened. Religious conservatives cite the loosening of the country’s morals, beginning in the 60s and 70s. Secular progressives may murmur something about the march of “science” and “reason” over time. But data shows that the main driver of secularism in the United States is accelerating government spending on education and government spending on curriculum content teaching in schools.
Here our secular progressive might raise his head again and perhaps smile a little about this discovery. “Look!”, He says. “Children are the ones who have lost education and the life of the mind! By the time they reached the virtuous hand of the state they were stuck in a recession of ignorance and turmoil, elevating them to the world of literacy and critical thinking. It only took a little education to free them from the hockey superstitions. “
This is a simple theory that has historically appealed to the minds of those who supported it. But it was falsified by the data. Stone cites the early work of Rafael Frank and Lawrence Inacon in this regard, who over time meticulously monitored religious practices in their own work. According to Frank and Inacon, “Higher education is achieved No. Predicting Less Religion: More and less educated people are similarly religious. They also did not find that industrialized, urban living diminished religion: and related to urban and industrialized populations. More Religion. “There is no connection between intellectual progress / modernization and secularism. Stone summarizes:
Because urbanization is anti-religious – or because modern, educated people are naturally skeptical of religion – the declining doctrines of religion have no support in the actual historical record.
It turns out that religiosity is usually determined early in life. All data, by and large, suggest that children raised in religious homes should be religious and non-religious. As a result, childhood religion remains the most important indicator of America’s religious path. The story of the fall of religion in the United States is not the story of adults emotionally rejecting the beliefs of their ancestors: it is the story of each generation receiving more secular development than the previous generation. What is the reason for this secularism of childhood over time? Taxpayers dollars.
Childhood religiosity was greatly affected by government spending on education and, to a lesser extent, government spending on old age pensions. Thus, when there were more educated people No. Communities with less religious, more public money spent on education There were Less religious. This is not an academic achievement that diminishes religion, but government control over education and government support for low retirement.
Researchers first sought to explain the relationship between government control over education and secularism, by reducing it to the increasing desire of the state to take care of the needs and preferences of its citizens in a comprehensive way – a task traditionally carried out by religious institutions. Once people do not look after a church / synagogue / mosque for their material well-being – or the theory goes – they find little reason to stay.
But this theory does not count the data we have. As Stone noted, this is false due to the fact that “the majority of the decline of religion may be due to changes in education policy rather than welfare in general.”
How can this relationship between educational policy and religious belief not be interpreted as a factor in the interpretation of education? It’s so simple, really. Children learn more in school than reading, writing and arithmetic. They also use a whole set of assumptions about what is important in life. By avoiding religious teachings from public schools, the government-run education system quietly teaches students that religious duties are not a first-rate priority in life. Trust in God can become a favorite weekend pastime similar to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are held by teachers and administrators as weapons or narcotics – confiscated as soon as found.
In this way, the sequence of values that are explicitly and implicitly related to students in American high schools excludes religious demands from the outset. College, career and fame will become existential goals, and the arrow of every student’s soul will be marked by bow-commissioners across the country. In such an environment, secularism becomes undesirable. The New Testament states that religious faith is shaped more by places where we seek glory and validity than by naked proportions: “When you receive glory from one another, how can you be sure that you do not seek the glory that comes from one God? “(John 5:44). But the secular public high school offers verification and praise by different standards than any other great faith, which is why government control over education has led to religious decline. As Stone writes:
. . . Content of educational matters. Evidence that education diminishes religion is very weak: Despite the rapidly growing educational attainment, American religiosity rose significantly from the 1800s to the 1970s. But the evidence for that Especially secular Education may reduce religion. In fact, statistically, most researchers who have studied the long-term change of religion have argued that educational variables are a substitute for it Secular Education can explain the total extent of religious conversion.
That last point comes up again and again. Most researchers have identified “education-related variables.” . . Can explain almost the whole of religious conversion. “For religious conservatives who care about the fate of American culture, it is impossible to insist that education is a whole ball game. Nevertheless, public schools are often not a soft fit for conservative families, especially religious families, and even worse, we now see signs of a change in the ideology imposed on educated children by the state-imposed tradition of innocuous ignorance, with its own priests, prophets, saints and martyrs. Is replaced by religion.
The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state. Loyal Americans do not simply drop their sons and daughters in the trash every morning, the government must collect the garbage as they take it out. As I wrote before, a comprehensive review of public schooling would not be cheap. If we are to obey the dictates of the world’s great hopes by keeping the interests of the poor at the forefront of our minds, we must, among other things, establish charitable private educational cooperatives. But the only real path to religious renaissance is to get out of the doors of every parent’s public school.