A Link Between Religion and Education Among Working-Class Men

For the past four decades, American women have been earning more college degrees than American men. They have been earning more master’s degrees since 1987 and more doctoral degrees since 2006, and with respect to all three types of degrees, the gaps between the sexes have been steadily increasing.

A major factor contributing to this growing divergence between the educational accomplishments of the sexes in America has been the decreasing number of working-class males who are earning bachelor’s degrees. All indications are that the pandemic has only exacerbated these trends.

American colleges had nearly 700,000 fewer students in 2021 than in 2019, and more than three fourths of those missing students were males. Officials of all sorts, from college administrators to government leaders concerned with education, are focused on how to boost the number of males – and working-class males, especially – completing college degrees.

The Role of Religious Involvement

In her new book, the sociologist, Ilana Horwitz, argues that a crucial factor influencing working-class males’ success in secondary school and higher education is their involvement in a local religious community. (Although her work focuses on evangelical Christians, she argues that the underlying considerations operate in other religions as well.) Working-class males, who are religious, are two times as likely to complete college than males who are not religious or those whom she describes as “moderately religious.”

The point is not just one about religious belief. Religions’ salutary impact on working-class males’ educational achievement also turns on their participation in a local religious community. Such engagement provides these young men with what sociologists call “social capital,” which the children of professionals possess by virtue of their parents’ social and occupational networks and their neighborhoods and schools’ stability. Because of their religious involvement, these working-class males also have access to helpful social networks, which their other working-class peers lack. They enjoy trusting relationships with a circle of supportive adults, including clergy and their friends’ parents.

Horwitz argues that the social resources that their religious involvement furnishes to these young men exceed those associated with other common extracurricular activities, such as involvement in sports or clubs. That is because in addition to encouraging social skills, teamwork, and the pursuit of common interests, participation in religious groups also fosters belief in a God who not only cares about them but who monitors and judges their conduct as well.

Is Religiosity Adaptive?

One tempting inference to draw from Horwitz’s research is that these young, working-class males’ religious participation contributes to their biological fitness. This assumes that across the population of working-class males in America, earning a college degree enhances the probabilities that individuals will thrive and reproduce. That conjecture occasions a couple of comments.

First, other variables, such as gender, interact with religiosity on this front. Horwitz suggests that the resulting advantages in question are less likely to hold with regard to females. Comparable religious participation among working-class females is associated with less educational ambition. Horwitz reports that religious females are, for example, less inclined to apply to more selective colleges than comparable non-religious peers.

Second, different theorists in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religions appeal both to different units or levels of selection (concerning genes, individuals, or groups) and to different mechanisms of selection (natural selection, sexual selection, and cultural selection). Horwitz’s findings about the positive effects of religiosity on the fates of working-class males would seem most directly to support sexual selectionist proposals cast at the levels of individuals and their genes. Since males with college degrees currently earn about a million dollars more across their entire careers than males who have not done so, their enhanced access to such resources would make them, on balance, better prospective mates.