Religion in College

Inside Higher Ed reported on a study looking at how different major choices in college affect attendance at religious services.

There is little in it that is surprising. Business and education majors show an increase in religiosity. Humanities and social science majors show a decrease. None of these effects are large. Science majors remain more or less the same.

This possibly fits in with previous observations. Postmodern relativism, many have suggested, is corrosive of traditional religiosity, though it does not necessarily do anything against supernatural belief per se. Such relativism mostly lives in the humanities and social sciences. And it’s pretty well known that though science departments are very secular places, this is largely due to self-selection at every stage in the pipeline, including undergraduate choice of major. That is, the less religious are more likely to go into science in the first place, rather than becoming less religious as a result of their training.