How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [57]
To answer these questions, we examined the correlation between a number of variables on which we collected data with several measures of religiosity (see the graphs of Appendix II). In examining our findings, it is important to remember that the results represent tendencies, not absolutes. It turns out that the three strongest predictors of religiosity and belief in God are being raised religiously, gender (women are more religious than men), and parents’ religiosity. The three strongest predictors of lower religiosity and disbelief in God are education, age, and parental conflict. In other words, being male, educated, and older tends to make people less religious, while being female and raised by religious parents generally makes you more religious. However, people do not live in a psychological laboratory where variables can be perfectly controlled. All of these variables interact, and the effect of these interactions complicates the picture. For example, being raised religiously makes people more religious unless they have conflict with their parents, in which case the rebellious thing to do is to become less religious. Likewise, a correlation between attending church when growing up and parental conflict showed that this combination led to a significant reduction in current church attendance. That is, if church attendance was high in youth but a person experienced conflict with parents, then lowered church attendance later was an apparent consequence of this conflict.
How religious attitudes change is important in understanding why people believe or do not believe in God. For example, interest in science corresponds to lower religious intensity. (It should be noted also that interest in science is itself highly predicted by education, gender, personality, and background—being educated, male, conscientious, and open to experience is associated with greater interest in science, while being raised religiously is associated with reduced interest in science.) But interest in science is only part of the larger and more powerful variable of education. Becoming more educated and getting older both cause religious attitudes to decrease. Why? As people get older they invariably encounter other belief systems that broaden their intellectual horizons, either through formal education or life experience, causing them to realize that religious attitudes and belief in God are perhaps not as certain as they seemed at a younger age. But age has other effects, and interacts with religious intensity. For example, we asked people, Was there some age when you began to seriously doubt your religious faith? Tellingly, the less the religiosity, the earlier was the age that serious doubt occurred. This makes sense, of course, since religiosity and belief in God peak in the late teens and then decline gradually until the eighties, at which point there is slight increase as people begin thinking about the end of their lives. This finding is confirmed by other studies such as a comprehensive one by Chris Brand, who discovered that the young and the elderly showed the highest levels of religious belief and involvement.
Although many of the findings were expected, there were also some surprises. For example, socioeconomic status had no direct influence on religious beliefs. However, political beliefs certainly did, with conservatives being more religious and liberals less so. Thus, while the majority of both conservatives and liberals believe in God, if you are a political liberal you are less likely to believe. Why? Probably because most religions represent the status quo, and what conservatives wish most to conserve is the status quo. (Despite the rhetoric of “change” professed by members from one end of the political spectrum to the other, when conservatives advocate change in the system, it is almost always change back to an older form of conservatism. And the most extreme examples of this type typically come from what is accurately called the