Religious life in schooled society? A global study of the relationship between schooling and religiosity in 76 countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis that schooling inevitably leads to secularization continues to be debated. Indeed, while education has become a central and authoritative institution across the world, religiosity seems to persist. An alternative hypothesis proposes that recognizing the cultural aspects of the growth of “schooled societies” may reveal unexpected compatibilities between education and religiosity. However, research that both empirically integrates these aspects and examines their relationship with religiosity from a global perspective remains scarce. Against this background, this article first constructs a macro-level indicator that taps into cross-national variation in the different dimensions of “schooled societies.” Subsequently, we examine its relationship with the subjective importance of religion in people’s lives and individual-level educational differences in religiosity. Results based on data from 94,011 respondents across 76 countries show that in societies that are more “schooled,” people generally tend to be less religious. Moreover, the development of a schooled society moderates the relationship between educational attainment and religiosity. In societies that show more characteristics of a schooled society, especially less educated people are likely to remain religious. Finally, we found that our new indicator for the schooled society explained more variance than other, less fine-grained indicators of this concept. This illustrates the added value of a more comprehensive indicator for the role of schooling as an institution. In the conclusion, we use our findings to outline a research agenda.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".