The Religiosity of American College and University Professors*

Sociology of Religion 2009. 70:2 ¡01-129doi:10.I093/socrel/srp026

Advance Access Publication 29 May 2009

The Religiosity of American College andUniversity Professors*

Neil Gross[jTiii'ersir;y of British Columbia

Solon SimmonsGeorge Mason Univa:sity

For more than a century most U.S. colleges and universities have functioned as secular ii\stilutions.But /lou) reiiôus are American college ai\d university faculty in their personal lives? We amuJerthis question by analysing data from a new. natiœmlly representative survey of the American pro'fcssoriate. Contrary to the view that reliôus skepticism predominates in the academy, we find thatthe majority of professors, even at elite research institutions, are reliôus believers. We go on toexamine the distribution of faculty reUôsity across institutions, fields, and other variables, andidentify a number of issues that future research—sensitive to the fact that religious faiih and aca-demic life, at least in the American context, are by no means mutually exclusive—should take up.

Key worda: religion, professors, seculariiatian, atheism, agnosticism

Few topics have attracted as much attention from sociologists of religion inrecent years as the fate of secularization theory, the paradigm that dominatedthinking in the subfield in the 1960s and 1970s (Tscbannen 1991; Sherkat andEllison 1999). Inherited from Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, seculariza-tion theory, as formulated hy Berger (1969), Luckmann (1967), Martin (1978),and others, posited an association between modernization and the witheringaway of religious institutions and belief. Although research shows that nation-states with advanced capitalist economies do tend to evidence lower levels ofreligious belief and participation tban agrarian societies (Norris and higlehart2004; Crockett and Voas 2006), recognition over the last two decades of

*Direct correspondence to Neil Gross, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia,6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, Canada BC V6T iZI. E-JTUÏÎÎ; [email protected]. Names are listed in alphabetical order only, this is an equal collaboration. Fortheir comments on earlier drafts we thank Mark Chaves, Elaine Ecklund, Douglas Jacobsen, MarkRegnerus, John Schmalzhauer, and Christian Smith.

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Associationfor the Sociology of Religion. Ail rigbts reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:journals,[email protected].

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102 SCX:iOIX)GY OF RELIGION

continuitig high levels of religiosity in the United States (Greeley 1989;Emerson and Harttnan 2006) and in a number of <nher, structurally similarsocieties, and oí the degree to which battle lines in tnany geopolitical anddomestic struggles remain drawn around religioti, has led to an outpouritig oftheoretical and empirical work questioning and rethinking secularizationtheot^' (e.g., Warner 1993; Casanova 1994; Chaves 1994; Yamane 1997; Berger1999; Stark and Finke 2000; Chayes and Gorski 2001; Gorski 2003a; Smith2003) and exploring the role of religion in arenas of modem social life longthought destined for rationalization and an evacuation of the sacred.

One such arena is higher education. Although secularization theorists, clas-sical and postelassical, disagreed as to the full set oí mechanisms hy whichmodernization would bring about religious decline, most shared the view thatthe growth of science and higher education represented one such mechanism.For them, the breaking free of the European and American university fromchurch control in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not simplyan effect of already ongoing processes of secularization, or of more general ten-dencies toward institutional differentiation, hut was also an important contri-butor to secularization inasmuch as the scientific worldview associated with theuniversity became the preeminent form of cultural authority to compete withreligion (Smith 2003). This interpretation was consistent with that offered bymany sociologists and historians of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s,who depicted the turn oí the twentieth-century American "academic reyolu-tion" (Jencks and Riesman 1968), inyolying the professionalization of the pro-fessoriate and the institutionalization of academic freedom, as a triumph ofscience and Enlightenment ideals over religious dogmatism (e.g., Hofstadterand Metzger 1955; Veysey 1965; for discussion see Hart 1999; Smith 2003).

In light of the reformulations of secularization theory now taking place,scholars haye begun to reexamine the decoupling of higher education and reli-gion. On the one hand, sociologists and historians have written revisionist his-tories that show the dependence of the scientific revolution of the sixteenthcenrury on religious authority (Shapin 1996; also see Merttin 1973), the degreeto which Protestant ideals continued to inform scientific inyestigation and thecurriculum in American universities in the early years of rhe twentieth century(Marsden 1994), and that the decline of religious authority in Americanhigher education was not a matter of historical inevitability, hut the result ofcollective action by committed secularizers taking advantage of opportunitiesto effect institutional change (Smith 2003). On the other hand, sociologistsstudying the current American scene have noted that while in general exposureto higher education is associated with somewhat less—and less traditionalforms of—religiosity (Johnson 1997; but see Uecker, Regnerus, and Vaaler2007), by no means is religion absent from college and university life.Some authors bemoan the fact that only in religiously affiliated colleges anduniversities can one find "God on the Quad" (Benne 2001; Riley 2005), butothers see evidence of the religious engagement of many American

RELIGION AND THE AMERICAN PROFESSORIATE 103

undergraduates (Cherry, DeBerg, and Porterñeld 2001), and even a growth of"scholarship grounded in religion" in the humanities, social sciences, and otherfields (Hart 1999; Wolterstorff 2002:3; Schmalzbauer 2003.)

This paper extends the latter line of research by formulating a systematicempirical answer to a related question: How religious are American college anduniversity professors in terms of their personal beliefs? Under the influence ofsecuiarizatiíín theory, sociologists and others have Umg assumed that professors inthe modem era, as carriers of Enlightenment values and agents of secularization,would themselves tend to be religious skeptics. Analyzing data from a new,nationally representative survey of the American faculty, we show that moreextreme forms of the assumption of widespread religious skepticism are incorrect.While atheism and agnosticism are much more common among professors thanwithin the U.S. population as a whole, religious skepticism represents a minorityposition, eyen among professors teaching at elite research universities. We go onto examine how belief in Gtxl, views of the Bible, spiritual identity, religiousorientation, and attendance at religious services are distrihuted across the profes-sorial population, focusing especially on field- and institut ion-leve I differences.Our aim in undertaking this largely descriptive endeavor is precisely to castdoubt on assumptions of faculty atheism, not because we ourselves have anyinterest in advancing a religious agenda, but because such assumptions have kepta range of important sociological questions—about the processes and mechanismsresponsible for the distribution of religious views in academe, as well as about thepotential consequences of religiosity for teaching, research, and other facultyattitudes—from being given the attention they deserve. We begin our discussionby reviewing the literature on religion and the American professoriate; move onto discuss our methods and findings; and conclude by considering the impli-cations of our study for future research.

RELIGION AND THE AMERICAN PROFESSORIATE

Research on the religiosity of American professors has heen limited. Whatwork has been done revolves around four themes: the growth of the researchuniversity, changes in the ethno-religious composition of the professoriate,secularism and intellectualism, and religion and contemporary campus life.

The Qrowth of the Research universityAs many historians have noted, the growth of the American research uni-

versity around the tum of the twentieth century involved, inter alia, a severingof ties between institutions of higher education and the religious denomina-tions that had founded and supported them. "For the better part of a millen-nium" before that, a close connection had existed between "Christianity andhigher education" (Marsden and Longfield 1992:4). Although the boom inEuropean university foundings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

104 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

coincided witbi tfie rise of tfie early tnodem state (Gorski 2003b) and saw stateautfiorities attempting to harness tbie institution for tfieir own ends, "the statenever acquired exclusive jurisdiction in relat:ion to the universities"(Hammerstein 1995:122), where Church control remained entrenched, theol-ogy was preferred to science, and students and faculty were expected to demon-strate piety. The intellectual latitude offered to faculty members differedbetween Catholic and Protestant institutions, hut the thecilogical character ofuniversity life was such that the scientific revolution could only occur outsidethe university. Protestantism placed particular stress on higher education as asite for the elaboration of Reformation theology and the training of clergymembers, and this conception of the religious aims of the university wascarried hy Puritan settlers to North America. Tlie first of the colleges theyfounded. Harvard, "served the interests of confessionalism" {Marsden 1994:40).Most faculty members were ministers, religious ideas pervaded the curriculum,and many graduates went into the clergy. When population growth in theeighteenth century necessitated the founding of additional schools, religiousfactionalism set the blueprint, helping to account for the distinctive characterof Yale, Princeton, BR)wn, and other institutions. This pattern continued inthe first half of the nineteenth century, when a wave of private college found-ings occurred (Brown 1995). The geographical spread of the population andthe needs of local elites for credentialing contributed here, hut so too did theemergence of new religious sects eager to train students in their doctrines andideals, though pressures for diminished sectarianism were also being felt withcalls for the establishment of state universities. Denominational differencesnotwithstanding, "in nineteenth-century America, educational and theologicalorthodoxy almost always went together" (Veysey 1965:25). Collegiate instruc-tion prepared students to be good Christians and hence good citizens, and thedominant ideas taught—centered around the moral philosophy of the ScottishEnlighteners-—partook of a "widely shared article of faith that science,common sense, morality, and true religion were firmly allied" (Marsden1994:91).

While analysts disagree as to the processes involved, the historical evidenceindicates that between about 1870 and 1910 this "article of faith" began tocrumble. On some accounts, Darwinism and the growth oí the physical andbiological sciences after the Civil War—with the latter tied to the revving upof American industrial capitalism and the needs of an increasingly complex,urban society—-precipitated a crisis of faith among some faculty members andadministrators. This was met by calls to reinstate academic piety, and some ofthe demand for academic freedom that ensued may have stemmed from frustra-tion over the efforts of religious authorities to stop the rising tide o( science(Hofstadter and Metzger 1955; Veysey 1965). For example, such frustrationunderlay Andrew Dickson White's vision for Cornell University, founded in1865 as an institution where scientific inquiry would never be forced to take abackseat to religious verities. It is significant in this regard that when


American academic reformers brought hack from Germany the organizationalplans and "epistemic culture" (Knorr-Cetina 1999) for founding research uni-versities on American soil—not least the idea of academic freedom—they wereacting as agents of diffusion for a set of social practices forged during a periodthat saw the secularization of German university life (Collins 1998). Theirprogram for reform was also tied to notions of professionalization. The onlyway for science to advance, they believed, was for academic disciplines tobecome "self-governing and largely closed communit[ies] of practitioners...which determine . . . [their own]. . . standards for entry, promotion, and dismis-sal" (Menand 1997:205). This form of social organization, increasingly popularin the upper tiers of the occupational structure in the second half of the nine-teenth century (Larson 1977; Abbott 1988), did not demand that academiciansrelinquish their religious beliefs, but did help solidify a distinction between reli-gious and scientific/academic criteria for evaluating intellectual "merit" (Tsayet al. 2003) that allowed religious considerations to be edged out of academicdiscourse.

Other scholars, however, have questioned this account, which depictsacademic secularization as an inevitable result of tbe growth of science.Numbers (1998), for example, has argued that the American intellectualelite of the nineteenth century did not find it so difficult to reconcileDarwinism and faith. And Marsden has noted that many of tbe majorresearch universities started at the end of the century, such as the Universityof Ghicago, were founded on religious ideals. John D. Rockefeller, the uni-versity's chief benefactor, was "a pious Baptist layman of a traditional sort"who "saw a university as a way to serve botb tbe church and the society ona broad basis" (Marsden 1994:240). That "American Protestantism" at tbetime "seemed to be taking on an activist methodistic hue, emphasizing prac-tice over doctrinal traditionalism" (1994:244) meant that the universitycould serve religious aims by emphasizing its role in community service, aconception that freed up space for the hiring of faculty members with agreater variety of religious views. Where Marsden views the institutionaliza-tion of this "low church" conception of the university as responsible for theeven greater secularization of American higher education in the decades tocome insofar as it rendered "academic expressions of Christianity" "at bestsuperfluous and at worst scientific and unprofessional" (265), a different tackis taken by Smith (2003), who uses ideas drawn from social movementtheory to highlight the processes of conflict and contestation by which thosewho wished to secularize not just the university, but all of the institutions ofpublic life, went about doing so in the Progressive era. Scholarship on theacademic revolution tells us little about the religious beliefs of individualfaculty members, but it does trace a long-term process oí institutional changeby which religious and specifically Christian ideals, beliefs, and practicesbecame less important features of the official life of American colleges anduniversities (also see Burtchaell 1998).

106 SOCIOLDGY OF RELIGION

The Changing Ethno-Religious Composition of the American ProfessoriateA second area of research that speaks to the religiosity of American

professors concerns their changing ethno-religious background over the courseof the twentieth century. Hand in hand with what Hollinger (1996) calls tbe"de-Christianization" of American higher education were increasing opportu-nities for non-Protestants to enter the ranks of the faculty. Nineteenth- andearly-twentieth-century European immigration altered the religious compo-sition of the population, bringing growing numhers of Catholics and Jews. Anetwork of Catholic colleges and universities had heen founded in the1800s, and although intergenerational mobility, particularly amongIrish-Americans, meant that some Catholics would aspire to enter elite collegesand universities, spurnitig the perceived backwardness ot Catholic institutions(Gleason 1995), overall the proportion of Catholics who went to collegeremained low, as did, partly in consequence, the number of Catholic facultymembers teaching in schools not controlled hy the Church (McGreevy 2006).Jewish-Americans, by contrast, set their sights on elite institutions, and appliedin such numbers as to constitute what was perceived to he a threat to tbeProtestant academic establishment, ln the first 30 years of the twentiethcentury, elite schools imposed limits on the number of Jews they would admit atboth the undergraduate and graduate level (Karabel 2005), and few Jews werepermitted to enter faculty ranks. The effect of anti-Semitism in academe wasnot simply to push many Jewish intellectuals into altemative venues for knowUedge production, such as journalism and literary criticism, hut also to futtherconvince them that American society and its institutions needed to be radicallychanged. This sentiment, fused with socialist traditions carried from the oldcountry (Cooney 1986), Depression-era radical politics, and the culture of bohe-mian New York (Stansell 2000), led many Jewish intellectuals to embrace the"cosmopolitan values" associated with "the hroad Western tradition in thehumanities" (Cooney 1986:7, 14) that would lend them the intellectual meansto mount a critique of American culture. With immersion in Marx, Freud,Nietzsche, and Darwin often came a championing of atheism and secularism.

After World War II, barriers to the entry of Catholics and Jews intoacademe came down. This was a function not simply of the ideological difficul-ties encountered hy particularistic practices ot social exclusion in the wake ofNazism, but also of the expansion of the higher education system at the time, aproduct of the influx of veterans into the student population, govemment andprivate philanthropic investment in research in the context of the Q^ld War,and a new emphasis on the importance of a college degree with the expansionof white-collar work. As the need for faculty memhers outstripped supply,groups previously excluded could make inroads, though opportunities forwomen and people of color remained limited. "By the 1960s," McCreevy(2006:199) reports, "Catholics entered graduate school at or modestly helowthe percentage of Catholics in the population." Jews, for their part, could hefound enrolled in American colleges and universities at twice the rate of their


non-Jewish counterparts, and hy the time of the Carnegie Commission Surveyof Faculty Student Opinion in 1969 comprised 9.8 percent of the professorialpopulation and were "heavily represented on the faculties of I vy Leagueschools atid other elite private universities" (Ladd and Lipset 1975:150). Theprominence of Jewish academicians in the post-World War II era was enhancedby the fact that so many eminent European scientists and scholars of Jewishdescent had been forced to flee to the United States. As a result of thesechanges, by 1969 "one third. . . . of the faculty could he counted as havingnon-Protestant origins" (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006:66). Catholic professorstended to be concentrated in four-year colleges and in the humanities(Schuster and Finkelstein 2006); under pressure to assimilate, they often kepttheir academic work and their faith separate (McGreevy 2006; also see Alba2006). Jewish academics were more likely to embrace not just secularism butalso atheism and leftist politics, to consider themselves intellectuals (Ladd andLipset 1975), and to throw themselves behind the universalistic ideals ofscience (Hollinger 1996). Among Protestants, professors tended to be "drawndisproportior\ately from those denominations that [were]... more theologicallyliberal and of higher socioeconomic status, including Presbyterianism,Congregationalism, and Episcopalianism" (Finkelstein 1984:158), reflecting thefact that young people from conservative Protestant denominations typicallydid not aspire to high levels of educational attainment in secular institutionsor to pursue academic careers (Darnell and Sherkat 1997; hut see Beyerlein2004), and faced significant barriers to entry owing to their ideological predis-positions and lower social class backgrounds.

Diversification of the American faculty continued in the 1970s, 1980s, and1990s. The most significant change involved the growing number of womenand people of ctilor. From 1969 to 1998, the "proportion of women among thefull-time faculty . . . . doubled" (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006:51 ), though thefeminization of the academic lahor force has been greater in lower tier than inelite institutions, and greater in the humanities and social sciences than in thephysical and engineering sciences. As for people of color, they now compriseahout 14-5 percent of the professoriate overall, and about 19.8 percent of themost recent entering cohorts (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006:53-4), withAsian Americans faring better than African Americans, Latinos, and others. Itis impossible to tell what effect these changes have had, if any, on the religiousorientation of the professoriate, given the heterogeneity of the groups involved,hut the trend iti recent decades has been one of continuing erosion ofProtestant numerical dotninance. Between 1969 and 1984, the proportion ofprofessors who described themselves as having no religious identity increasedfrom 19 to 30.5 percent, the proportion who described themselves as having a

Another notable trend is the increased rare at which evangelicals appear to he enter-ing the academy (Lindsay 2006).


Protestant background decreased from 67.7 to 62.5 percent, the proportionstating their current religious identity as Protestant decreased from 49.6 to 41 2percent, the proportion of those currently identifying themselves as jews orCatholics held steady, and the proportion who gave their religious identity as"other" increased slightly (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006:460).

Religion and the IntellectualsA third literature that speaks to the religiosity—or lack of religiosity—of

the professoriate is the sociology of intellectuals (see Kurzman and Owens2002). In the 1960s and 1970s, as the sociology of knowledge underwent agrowth spurt (Camic 2001), much attention was devoted to understandingintellectuals and their role in contemporary society. In this scholarship, theintellectual was often defined in part by his alleged opposition to religiousauthority. Shils (1972:16), for example, followed Durkheim and Weber inarguing that "intellectual work arose from religious preoccupations." Yet inShils's yiew, because intellectual life outside the church tends to follow anautonomous logic, intellectuals eventually come to "reject... the prevailingsystem of cultural values" (7). While increasingly incorporated into the insti-tutional stmctures of modem society with the growth of the state and industry,intellectuals thus inevitably come into "conflict with other traditions of defer-ence toward ecclesiastical and temporal authorities" (18), making them flash-points for religious and political struggle. The assumption that the modernintellectual tends to be irreligious also characterized research on the growth ofa "new class" of knowledge workers in the post-World War U era (for discus-sion, see King and Szelenyi 2004)- Originating in the Soviet orbit, where thetechnical intelligentsia played key roles in planning the socialist economy(Konrád and Szelenyi 1979), the notion of the New Class soon became a pointaround which much discussion of the class structure in the capitalist West wasalso centered. Analysts typically assumed that members of the New Class,including professors, would have little use for religion. Bell (1973), forexample, who douhted that the New Class was really a class at all, argued thatthe emergence of a service sector economy empowered knowledge workers,whose ranks were rapidly expanding, over against hoth business elites andmembers of the working class. Although knowledge workers—professors,scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and the like—might differ intheir political views depending on their institutional locations. Bell speculatedthat they would come to hold certain cultural attitudes in common as the com-munalistic ethos of science to which they were exposed aligned them againstthose espousing more individualistic, market-based conceptions of society.They were also, in his view, destined to be atheists or agnostics, for "a techno-cratic mind-view," with "its emphasis on the logical, practical, problem-solving,instrumental, orderly, and disciplined approach to ohjectives... is a world-viewquite opposed to the traditional and customary religious, esthetic, and intuitivemodes" (Î49). The same assumption was made by Gouldner (1979), for whom


the cultural orientation common among the intelligentsia—a "culture ofcritical discourse" defined as universalistic, rational, and secular—was a meansto New Class dominance, a form of knowledge that could serve as a basis forlegitimate domination.

Research on the Religiosity of the AmeHcan College and UniversityA fourth and final area of research relevant to this study concerns the role

of religion in contemporary American college and university life. On one side,many of those who have studied long-term processes of secularization are criti-cal of what tbey see as the absence of religious perspectives in Americanbigher education today—in the curriculum, in student culture, and in facultyresearch. Marsden and Longfield (1992), for example, claim that religion in theuniversity "has moved from near the center. . . to the incidental periphery,"and tbat there is now "a definite bias against any perceptible religiouslyinformed perspectives getting a hearing in tbe university classroom" (33).Benne (2001) concurs, arguing that while a few schools are still genuinelycommitted to Christian values, most faculty members are "trained in . . . graduateschools tba t . . . imbibed beavily the Enlightenment faith" and socialized intoacademic disciplines characterized by "methodological atheism" wbere "religionas an independent variable in any human action" is "ignored" (28). As a result,today "secularized faculty factions... guard the public educational space fromincursion by those who attempt to bring religious perspectives to bear" {29;also see Sommerville 2006).

On the other side, a number of scholars have described the contemporaryperiod as having witnessed a renewed interest in religion in American highereducation. Wolterstorff (2002) notes that wbile one can speak of tbe seculari-zation of American higher education in the sense of disestablisbment from reli-gious institutions, one can equally see a "failure of secularization" (249) insofaras religion bas now been offloaded onto tbriving "para-university organizations"like Hillel that offer students ample opportunity to lead religious lives. Wolfe(1997:B4) observes tbat "a vigorous round of criticism of the modern universityhas been touched off hy critics who, arguing in the name of religion, insist thatsecularization has gone too far." Schmalzbauer (2003), drawing on interviewswith professors and journalists who are part of tbis critical contingent, suggestswe may be witnessing a "deprivatization o( religion" in various arenas of publiclife, witb increasing numbers of professionals "more open to individual acts ofreligious self-expression than has been recognized" (10), a function not simplyof the efflorescence of American religion and spirituality in the closing decadesof the twentieth century, but also of "broad changes in higher education"—-specifically tbe growth of multiculturalism and postmodernism—that "havehelped to create a climate that is more conducive to the expression of religiousviewpoints in professional life" (75). Cherry, DeBerg, and Porterfield (200Í)share the view that critics of godless American academe have overstated tbeircase. Tbey find from case study research on four schools that charges of

l i o SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

secularization and the marginalization of religion fail to attend to "the proteanflexihility that has characterized American religion as a whole throughout thenation's history" (5). Opportunities exist for students to engage in mainstreamforms of religious wtirship, they find, while also observing—employing thelanguage of Wuthnow (1998) — that many college students are now "spiritualseekers" rather than "religious dwellers," and that "if the definition of religion"is extended to "include . .. spirituality" then "opportunities for undergraduatesto practice religion" must be seen as "widely available" (275). Taking a differ-ent tack, Sherkat (2007), reviewing evidence from surveys of college students,argues that students are more religious today than in previous decades—morelikely to believe in God, more likely to attend religious services, and morelikely to belong to conservative Protestant denominations—developments hesees as related to the increasing tendency o( religious youth to opt into thecollege experience. (For a review of the evidence suggesting that religion maybe increasingly important in American higher education in general, seeSchmalzbauer and Mahoney 2007.)

This research aside, much scholarship on the state of religion in Americanhigher education today is essayistic, anecdotal, and explicitly normative. A fewempirical studies directly on the topic of professorial religiosity have heencarried out. These studies build on the pioneering contributions of Leuba(1916), who surveyed natural scientists early in the twentieth century andfound that 58 percent were religious skeptics. Reviewing several such studiescarried out in the 1960s and 1970s, Finkelstein reported in 1984 that "sociol-ogists have persistently confirmed that professors, other scientists, and artistsare, as a group, significantly less religious than other professionals and thegeneral public" (159); that this is a fiinction of selection effects more than pro-fe.ssional socialization; that "as one ascends the institutional prestige hierarchy,religiosity decreases significantly" (162); and that "faculty teaching in pro-fessional and applied fields" tend to be much more religious th;m "those housedin colleges of arts and sciences" (162). Larson and Witham (1998), replicatingLeuba's study, likewise found higb levels of religious skepticism among naturalscientists who were members of the National Academy of Sciences—only7 percent expressed belief in a personal God. By contrast. Stark and Finke(2000), critics of secularization tbeory, resuscitate data from the Carnegie (acuitysurvey of 1969 to argue that there is no "fundamental incompatibility betweenscientific and religious worldviews" (53). Their analysis of the data shows that inthe physical and life sciences, 55 percent of professors were "religious persons,"42 percent attended religious services regularly, and about a third were religiousconservatives. It was in the social sciences that religious skeptics were morecommon. Stark and Finke account for these disciplinary differences hy invokingWuthnow (1985), who speculates that those scientific fields that are mostanxious about their scientific status have the most need to engage in "boundarywork" (Gieryn 1999) that separates them off from the rest of society, withprofessions of unbelief representing one form such boundary work can take.


More recently, Ecklund and Scheitle (2007) surveyed 1646 natural andsocial scientists from 21 elite research universities to assess their levels of religi-osity. Thirty-four percent of their respondents said they did not helieve inGod, and 30 percent said they did not know if God exists and that there is noway to find out. Unlike Stark and Finke, Ecklund and Scheitle find few differ-ences in religiosity between natural and social scientists. They also find thatheing raised in a religious household is one of the strongest predictors of heingreligious as a professor, suggesting—in line with Finkelstein's earlier review ofthe evidence—-that selection processes, not professional socialization, mayaccount for the lower religiosity of professors overall. Approaching the topicfrom a different angle, Lindholm and Astin (2006), analyzing survey data froma sample of 37,827 faculty respondents in 2004-5, report that 82 percent offaculty memhers score at either a high or medium level on a composite measureof spirituality. However, their study included few measures of traditional reli-gious beliet. So how religious are today's professors when more traditionalmeasures are examined and looking not just at elite scientists—a relativelysmall slice of the professorial population—hut at the professoriate as a whole?

DATA

To answer this question, we analyze data from the Politics of the AmericanProfessoriate study, a survey we carried out in the spring of 2006 of full-timecollege and university professors teaching in U.S. institutions. The study wasdesigned to assess the social and political attitudes of professors on a widerange ot topics, and included several questions about religion. The studyfocused on professors teaching in fields where undergraduate degrees areawarded. Given the large number of such fields and our desire to have enoughcases in each to make meaningful comparisons, we drew two-thirds of oursample from the 20 largest disciplinary fields, as measured by the number ofbachelors degrees awarded in 2004, with the remaining third drawn randomlyfrom all fields. To construct our sample, we first randomly sampled from theNational Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) dataset on degree com-pletions, locating a college or university where either bachelors or associatesdegrees in the relevant field were awarded. We then selected one facultymember at random from the closest matching department or program, and sentletters and emails to secure participation in the study, which entailed fillingout an online questionnaire. We stratified our sample to ensure adequate rep-resentation of faculty members teaching at community colleges, four-year col-leges and universities, nonelite PhD granting institutions, and elite docttïraluniversities (defined conventionally as those in the top 50 in the latest U.S.News and World Report ranking), and achieved a 51 percent response rate, with1471 valid cases. (In the analyses that follow, we restrict our sample to pro-fessors with tull-time appointments, which reduces the sample size to 1417;


missing data result in further limitations in the regression analyses specifically.)In a regression model predicting response to the survey, institution type wasnot a significant variable. To better assess response hias, we conducted shortphone interviews with a random sample of 100 nonresponders. The meanresponse to our key political attitudes question among nonresponders was ahoutthe same as the mean response among survey participants, suggesting no signifi-cant response bias along political lines (nonresponders were slightly moreconservative than responders, hut the differences were small). We also askednonresponders about the frequency of their attendance at religious services.Nonresponders were less likely than responders to report attending servicesonce or twice a year or less (30.6 percent as compared to 46.1 percent), andmore likely to report attending services about every week or more (38.6percent as compared to 30.4 percent). The figures we report below on the reli-giosity oí American professors may thus underestimate actual levels of religiouscommitment.

Once collected, the data were weighted to even out the effects of over-sampling certain fields and institutions. We believe our sample to be anapproximate representation of the more than 630,000 professors teaching full-time in U.S. colleges and universities, with the important caveat that, as notedabove, professors were only eligihle to he sampled if they taught in departmentsor programs offering undergraduate degrees. Professors of law and medicine—including the many physical and biological scientists working in medicalschoolsând those teaching in other professional fields were not purposivelysampled (though professors of business were, as many business schools offerundergraduate instruction).

Dependent VariablesTo measure professorial religiosity, we examine respondents' belief in God;

whether on religious matters they think of themselves as progressives, moder-ates, or traditionalists; their self-identification as horn-again Christians or"spiritual persons"; their views of the Bihle; the religious faith, if any, withwhich they identify; and their reported frequency of attendance at religious ser-vices. To maximize construct validity, we drew questions on belief in God,views of the Bihle, and attendance directly from the General Social Survey(GSS). The question on religious faith was taken from the annual facultysurvey carried out by the Higher Educatioti Research Institute at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles.

Independent VariablesTo assess how religiosity is distributed within the professorial population,

we first present a number of cross-tabulât ions, and then fit multivariate models

Tahles showing sample demographics are available from the authors.


to determine whether initially evident variation holds up when other factorsare introduced (the multiyariate models examine fiye of the dependent yari-ables listed above.) Our goal in the regression models is not to maximallyexplain variation on the dependent variables—something that would requireboth a full-fledged theory of professorial religiosity and access to more detaileddata than we possess on our respondents' experiences with religion over the lifecourse-—but is simply to map the distribution of religiosity within the professor-ial population more definitively. We consider in this regard a number ofinstitution-level variables drawn from the same NCES dataset that we used asthe basis for our sample: whether the respondent teaches at an elite doctoralgranting university or at some other kind of institution; whether the respon-dent's school is religiously affiliated; whether it is puhlic or private; the regionof the country in which it is located; and the population density of the sur-rounding community. We also examine differences by field, looking first atvariation in religiosity between social and physical or biological scientists, andthen at more fine-grained field differences. At the individual level, we considerthe respondent's age, race, sex. Latino origin, marital status, family income,whether the respondent has a doctorate, whether the respondent is a"senior"—associate or full—professor, whether the respondent says that he orshe is more oriented toward research than toward teaching or service, and, as ameasure of social class background, whether the respondent's father received abachelors degree or higher.

RESULTS

Descriptive StatisticsTable 1 reports the figures for professors' belief in God. When asked

whether they believe, 9.8 percent of our respondents chose the statement, "Idon't believe in God," while 13.1 percent chose the statement, "I don'tknow whether there is a God, and I don't believe rhere is any way to findout." In surveys of the general U.S. population, only 3 percent ofAmericans identify themselves as atheists and 4-1 percent as agnostics(Edgell, Certeis, and Hartmann 2006), so our findings indicate that religiousskepticism is more than three times more common among professors thanamong Americans overall. Yet skepticism is hy no means the most common

Here we rely on the NCES classification of disciplinary fields. Social science includesanthropology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science, sociology, anda number of interdisciplinary fields. We also include psychology in this category. For thebiolofiical and physical sciences, we include all those fields designated as such by theNCES.

These and other descriptive statistics are slightly different than we have reported else-where because in this paper we do not exclude item nonresponse.

1381862716123549532

1,417

9.813.119.24.316.634.92.2


TABLE 1 College and University Professors' Belief in God

Belief in God Frequency PercentI don't believe in God1 don't know whether there l.s a God1 do believe in a higher power1 find myself believing in God some of the timeWhile 1 have doubts, I feel that 1 do believe in GodI know God really exists and I have no douhts about itNt) answerTotal

Politics (if the American Professoriate Survey, 2006. Gilumn does not add to 100because of rounding.

stance toward religion among professors. Just over a fifth are skeptics, whereasreligious believers—those who chose the statement, "While I have doubts, Ifeel that I do believe in God," along with those who selected "1 know Godreally exists and I have no doubts about it"—together comprise 51.5 percentof all professors.

These figures vary across types of institutions (though we do not representtbese differences in tabular form). Not surprisingly, professors in religiouslyaffiliated colleges and universities—wbo comprise 14 percent of our sample,and whose jobs often require affirmations of faith—are more likely to be believ-ers. Whereas about half of professors in nonreligiously affiliated schools sayeither that they believe in God despite tbeir doubts or that they have nodoubts about God's existence, tbis is true of 68.9 percent of professors in reli-giously affiliated scbools. Consistent witb previous research, we also find—atleast looking at tbe bivariate distributions—that professors at elite doctoral uni-versities are less likely to he believers than are professors teaching in otherkinds of institutions. 36.5 percent of respondents witb appointments in elitedoctoral schools are either atheists or agnostics, as compared to 15.3 percentof respondents teaching in community colleges, 22.0 percent of those teachingat BA granting institutions, and 22.7 percent of those teaching in nonelitedoctoral granting universities. And whereas about 44-5 percent of communitycollege professors and 38.5 percent of professors at four-year schools say theyhave no doubt God exists, the same is true for only about 20.4 percent of pro-fessors teaching at elite doctoral universities.

The figure here for atheists and agnostics at elite schools is much tower than thatreported hy Ecklund and Scheitle, which we assume is a function of the fact that oursample includes a wider array of professors.


Atheists and agnostics also appear to be more common in some disciplinesthan others. Table 2 displays the distribution of belief in God for professors inthe 20 largest disciplinary fields in order of tbeir aggregate levels of religiousbelief. In line with Finkelstein's (1984) earlier review of the evidence, we findthat the most religious fields are applied ones outside the traditional liberal artscore, whose instructors may come closer to resembling the general populationin terms of attitudes and values. Sixty-three percent of accounting professors,56.8 percent o( elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of professors offinance, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 45.0 percent oí art professors,and 44.4 percent of professors of criminal justice and of nursing say they haveno doubt that God exists. At the other extreme, psychology and mechanicalengineering have the highest proportion of atheists, while 60.8 percent of biol-ogists are either atheists or agnostics.

In Tahle 3, we report belief in God sorted by type of discipline, aggregatingup trom specific disciplinary affiliations to examine broad disciplinary areas.Atheists are somewhat mtire common in the social sciences than in the phys-ical or biological sciences or humanities, while more than twice as manyagnostics can be found in tbe pbysical or biological sciences than in any otherarea. When atheists and agnostics are combined into one category, it is amongphysical and biological scientists that religious skepticism is the most common.Professors in the health sciences^—-which in our sample means mostly professorsof nursing—are the most likely to be confirmed believers, with professors inotherwise classified fields the second highest group in terms of levels oí reli-gious belief. There are relatively few professors of the agricultural sciences inour sample, but we list them separately because of tbe interesting finding thatthree quarters claim not to believe in God per se, but in a higher power ofsome kind.

In Table 4, we move on to consider the overall religious orientation of ourrespondents. Among professors who are religious, what proportion think ofthemselves as religious progressives, moderates, or traditionalists, and how arethese orientations distributed across institutional location and disciplinary area?Here we find tbat self-identified religious progressives—presumably those whoare affiliated with a faith tradition but have relatively loose doctrinal commit-ments and believe tbat religion must change and adapt to meet new social andhistorical circumstances—comprise about .38.6 percent of religious Americanacademics. Self-identified traditionalists comprise about 19 percent, while reli-gious moderates represent the modal category, at 42.4 percent. Religious pro-gressives—along with religious traditionalists—can most commonly be found atcommunity colleges, while most religiously inclined professors at elite andnonetite PhD granting institutions consider themselves religious moderates.Looking at disciplinary differences, we see that religious progressives are morethan twice as common in the social sciences and humanities than in any otherfield, that physical and biological scientists are the most likely to considerthemselves religious moderates, and that, relative to other kinds of professors.

116 SOCIOIDGY OF RELIGION

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1 18 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

TABLE 4 Religious Orientation by Institution Type and by Discipline

Two-yearEour-yearNonelite doctoralElite doctoral

Total, religious only

Physical and biologicalsciences

StKial sciencesHumanitiesComputer science and

engineeringHealthBusinessOther

Progressive

37.819.518.623.9

38.6

13.0

32.535.011.3

12.0n.523.2

Mt)derate

13.431.226.326.3

42.4

32.2

23.020.739.6

36.132.322.4

Traditionalist

23.96.74.8

11.8

19.0

5.2

4.86.6

17.0

36.118.813.5

Notreligious

19.336.743.731.8

37.4

34.931.728.9

12.026.034.5

Noanswer

5.55.96.66.2

12.2

4.86.13.1

3.69.46.5

Politics of the American Professoriate Survey, 2006. Sample sizes differ in the subtablesbased on item nonresponse on the dependent variables. Rows may not add to 100 becauseof rounding.

physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and humanists are the leastlikely to consider themselves traditionalists.

Tahle 5 reports the religious affiliations of professors in our survey. More orless consistent with the figures on nonbelief, 31.2 percent of our respondentsdescrihe themselves as not religious. The percent that can he classified asProtestant is 37.9, 15.9 percent are Roman Catholic, and 5.4 percent identifyas Jewish. The remainder are scattered among other faiths. At elite, PhD grant-ing schools, 13.1 percent of professors are Jewish. Compared with other studies,our survey prohahly underestimates the number of Jews in academe. This is sohecause our religious identification question asked respondents ahout theircurrent religious preference. Because Judaism is hoth a religious tradition andan ethnic identity—and given the historical connections hetween Jewish intel-lectualism and atheism—an unknown numher of respondents of Jewish descentmay have described themselves as "not religious."

Overall, 18.6 percent of respondents to our survey said the term"horn-again Christian" describes them at least slightly well. Cross-tahulationsshow that professors who consider themselves bom-again are extremely rare atelite doctoral institutions, composing only ahout 1 percent of professors atsuch schools, but they are not uncommon among community college professors;ind professors teaching at four-year schools; there they represent 18.6 and


TABLE 5 Religious Affiliation of U.S. Qillege and University Professors

NoneRoman CatholicOther ChristianMethodistJewishLutheranBaptistEpiscopalianUnited Church of Christ/CongregationalistPresbyterianUnitarian/Universal istMuslimBuddhistOther religionChurch of ChristMormonEastern OrthodoxHinduQuakerSeventh Day Adventist

Frequency

437222125827568595244414137312918129981

Percent

31.215.99.05.95.44.94.23.73.12.92.92.62.22.11.30.80.70.60.60.1

Politics of the American Professoriate Survey, 2006. Ctilumn does not add to 100hecause of rounding.

24-6 percent of professors, respectively. Nor are bom-again Christians only tobe found at religiously affiliated institutions, though they are present in greaternumbers there. The percent of professors at secular schools that describethemselves as born-again Christians is 16.8, as compared to 29.5 percent atreligiously affiliated schools. About 45.9 percent of the self-identified religioustraditionalists in academe are born-again Christians.

Although we do not report the figures in tables, three other descriptivefindings are worth mentioning. The first concerns views of the Bible. Not sur-prisingly, given the textual and historical focus of many American academi-cians, only 5.7 percent of respondents say the Bible is the "actual word t)fGod," with 48.3 percent describing it as "an ancient book of fables, legends,history, and moral precepts." About 39.5 percent of respondents are of theview that the Bible is "the inspired word of God." Roughly 7 percent refused toanswer this question. Here again differences are evident by type of institution,with community college professors three times more likely than others to sub-scribe to the "actual word of God" position, and 72 percent of professors atelite doctoral universities taking the "ancient hook oí fables" view. Second, wefind that half of American professors—49.9 percent—say that the term


"spiritual person" describes them at least moderately well. This finding pointsto somewhat less faculty spirituality than that reported by Lindholm and Astin(2006), whose composite measure included one self-identification item.

A third finding is that although the professoriate is, on the whole, muchless religious than the general population, a significant proportion of professorsreport regular attendance at religious services. Figures from the 2004 GSSsuggest that about just under half of Americans attend religious services once amonth or more. The comparable figure among respondents to our survey is39.5 percent. Professors at four-year institutions attend such services the mostfrequently, witb 44-9 percent saying they do so once a month or more, com-pared with 26.9 percent of professors at elite doctoral schools.

Multivariate ModelsThese cross-tabulations are suggestive of interesting patterns in the distri-

bution of religious belief and practice in academe, but how much of the vari-ation observable in the bivariate distributions holds up when other, potentiallyconfounding factors are examined? We answer this question by fitting fivemultivariate models using ordinal logistic regression, each focusing on a differ-ent dependent variable and examining a variety of possible individual- andinstitutional-level correlates of religiosity. The models examine belief in God,views of the Bihle, overall religious orientation, frequency of attendance at reli-gious services, and spiritual selt-identification; for all these variables, responsecategories are treated as ordinal. The results are shown in Table 6. Oí particu-lar interest given tbe cross-tabulations is tbe apparent status gradient inprofessorial religiosity, according to wbich professors at mcire prestigious,research-oriented institutions are both less religious overall and less traditiona-listic in their religious orientations, and the finding that while atheism isslightly more common among social scientists, religious skepticism—encompassing botb atheism and agnosticism—is most prevalent amongphysical and biological scientists.

With respect to the status gradient, which we operationalize in thesemodels with a dummy variahle for elite, PhD-granting schools,' we find that itdisappears entirely when measures are introduced of whether respondents con-sider themselves oriented primarily toward the research enterprise, or oíwhether they hold doctoral degrees. These characteristics of respondents,especially research orientation, are much more common among professorsteaching at elite schools, and our models suggest it is these characteristics—and not institutional prestige per se—that account for the diminished religios-ity, and less traditional religiosity, of professors teaching at elite institutions.Those who are oriented primarily toward research are less likely to believe in

We obtained the same results using different measures of status, including those thatmeasured the exclusivity of schools at the undergraduate level.


TABLE 6 Coefficients from Ordinal Logistic Regression Models for Five ReligiousBelief Variables (robust standard errors in parentheses)

Elite PhDschool

Seniorprofessor

Doctorate

Male

White

Latino

Age

Married

Populationdensity***

Northeast

Midwest

West

Religiouslyaffiliation

Privateinstitution

Social scientist

Phys/bio.scientist

Researchorientation

Family income

Father college

Sample size

Meaning ofthe Bible

0.125-(0.532)

0.433-(0.255)-0.482

-(0.281)-0.457

-(0.248)-0.496

-(0.462)-0.138

-(0.927)-0.028(0.013)*0.697

(0.281)*0.116

-(0.065)-0.959(0.341)**

-0.049-(0.333)-0.805(0.358)*0.282

-(0.344)0.348

-(0.323)-0.107

-(0.408)0.264

-(0.399)-1.131(0.357)**

-0.001-(0.002)-0.662(0.261)*

1318

ReligiousOrientation

0.411-(0.414)-0.02

-(0.293)-0.843(0.313)**0.016

-(0.253)-0.654

-(0.342)0.61

-(0.527)-0.003

-(0.014)0.554

(0.260)*0,081

-(0,065)-0.49

-(0.316)-0.491

-(0.305)-0.46

-(0.322)0.449

-(0.297)0.155

-(0.279)-0.186

-(0.284)0.104

-(0.363)-1.371(0.288)**0.001

-(0.002)-0.146

-(0,226)1322

Belief inGod

0.041-(0.373)-0.093

-(0.4)-0.481

-(0.374)-0.177

-(0.286)-0.685

-(0.374)0.562

-(0.591)0.006

-(0.017)0.513

-(0.301)0.039

-(0.071)-0.833(0.342)*

-0.514-(0.333)-0.413

-(0.414)0.564

-(0.319)0.169

-(0.306)-0.209

-(0.32)-0.453

-(0.293)-0.813(0.269)**

-0.002-(0.002)-0.016

-(0.25)1377

ChurchAttendance

0.222-(0.307)-0.196

-(0.274)-0.084

-(0.281)-0.07

-(0.211)-0.983(0.364)**0.494

-(0.284)0.018

-(0.014)0.801

(0.259)**0.047

-(0.074)-0.417

-(0.264)-0.227

-(0.288)-0.27

-(0.3)0.755

(0.300)*0.153

-(0.291)-0.073

-(0.26)-0.494

-(0.389)-1.107(0.233)**

-0.004(0.002)*0.05

-(0.216)1397

SpiritualIdentity

-0.053-(0.321)

0.543-(0.299)-0.546

-(0.31)-0.403

-(0.23)-0,385

-(0.362)0.026

-(0.411)-0.017

-(0.014)0.443

-(0.229)0.129

(0.059)*-0.364

-(0.26)-0.056

-(0.332)-0.187

-(0.338)0.568

(0.254)*-0.03

-(0.245)-0.242

-(0.333)-0.328

-(0.329)-0.964(0.305)**

-0.005(0.002)**0.079

-(0.224)1390

Politics of the American Professoriate Survey, 2006,*p < .05, **p < .01, ***aided from Urban ti) Rural.


God, less likely to have a traditionalistic view of the Bible, less likely to attendreligious services, more likely to describe their overall religious orientation as"not religious," and less likely to consider themselves spiritual persons.Professors who hold doctorates, for their part, are less likely to have traditiona-listic religious orientations. These findings tell us nothing about whether biasesagainst religiosity—against religious colleagues, students, and groups—may bemore in evidence at elite research schools, as conservative critics of theacademy have alleged, but they do suggest that the diminished religiosity ofprofessors there is a function primarily of selection on nonreligious character-istics. Professors who, regardless of their institutional location, are orientedmainly toward research and hold doctoral degrees in their fields could be lessreligious because they are more committed to the scientific enterprise or torational humanistic inquiry and consciously reject religion as incompatible, orthey could be more thoroughly socialized into the culture of academe—whichis secular in orientation despite the personal religiosity of the majority of thefaculty overall—and be enacting normative social identities th;it make lessspace for religious commitment. Alternatively, given that modern academicand scientific knowledge has been defined as a secular domain, deeply religiousintellectuals may be less inclined to devote themselves to its advance, andmore inclined to see teaching or service as their academic calling. Whicheverexplanation is correct, it is important to place the finding in its proper context:on the one hand, only about a quarter of professors in our sample say that theyare oriented primarily toward research; on the other hand, 31.3 percent of suchprofessors are nonetheless religious believers.

As far as differences by field go, our multivariate findings are consistentwith those of Ecklund and Scheitle; we find no systematic differences in religi-osity, on any of our five measures, between social scientists, physical and bio-logical scientists, and other kinds of professors. Examination of an alternativeiTH)del {not shown) that excludes variables for social science and the biologicaland physical sciences and includes dummy variables for the 20 largest disciplin-ary fields in which bachelors degrees are awarded reveals that what differencesdo exist by field are exclusively at the disciplinary level. With other factorscontrolled, biologists and psychologists^—-relative to professors outside the top20 fields—-are less likely to believe in God and less likely to hold traditionalviews oí the Bible; professors of communications, English, and history are lesslikely to hold traditional views of the Bible; sociologists are less likely to havea traditionalistic religious orientation overall; and professors of accounting.

In earlier verskins of this paper, we reported that social scientists tend to he lessreligious than their counterparts in the natural sciences. This finding turns out to havebeen an artifact of using unweighted data in the regression analysis. For discussion of themerits of using weighted or unweighted data for regression, see Winship and Radhill(1994). Given the complex sampling design, we have concluded that consistently weightingthe data yields the most unbiased estimators.


finance, and nursing tend to be more religious. Boundary work and defense ofintellectual jurisdiction of the kind flagged hy Stark and Finke could he at playhere, as scientists in fields like biology who have been embroiled in intenseconflicts with creationists experience social pressures to tamp down their ownreligiosity, and as scholars in fields like English and history whose intellectualcapital requires them to insist on the historicity of all texts come to think oftraditional religiosity as, among other things, in tension with their professionalexpertise. But such boundary work is not obviously related to defense of thescientific nature of the social sciences.

Other findings are worth noting as well. In terms of other institutionalvariables, teacbing in a religiously affiliated college or university is positivelyassociated with all five measures of religiosity, but the only of these associationsto attain statistical significance are those pertaining to attendance at religiousservices and spiritual self-conception. Tbe pubic/private distinction does notmatter. Region and type of community in wbicb the institution is Ux:ated do:teaching in the Northeast is negatively associated with belief in God and withholding traditional views of the Bible. Type of community is also significant:professors teaching in schools in less populated areas are more inclined to con-sider themselves spiritual persons. Our data do not allow us to determinewhether selection processes or accommodation to local norms do the most toexplain these patterns.

A number of sociodemographic factors are also linked to variation in pro-fessorial religiosity. Younger professors tend to have less traditionalistic views ofthe Bihle; white professors tend to attend religious services less frequently thantheir nonwhite counterparts; and professors who are married are more likely tobe religious on three of our five measures. Modest social class associations arealso evident. Professors with higher family incomes attend religious servicessomewhat less frequently than those who earn less money and are less likely toconsider themselves spiritual persons, while professors whose fathers completeda bachelors degree or more tend to hold less traditional Biblical views.

On the whole, though, what is notable about the multivariate models ishow little of the variation these standard field, institution, and sociodemo-graphic variables account for: the R s for a linear regression specificatitm of thefive models are 0.20, 0.17, 0.15, 0.15, and 0.21, respectively. These numbers,while within tbe range of acceptability for social science regressions, leave thelion's share of professorial religiosity unexplained. This suggests that researchersseeking to explain why some professors are more religious than others maywant to concentrate their attention not primarily on those sociodemographicfactors that correlate with religiosity in the general population, or on the mostobvious dimensions of institutional variation in academe. Rather, researchersshould focus on processes by which, at different historical junctures, those fromreligious backgrounds—who may be more inclined to retain their religiousupbringing tbroughout their lives, regardless of their career choices—come to


be selectively incorporated into or steered out of different kinds of academiccareers.

CONCLUSION

Our goal in this paper was to provide a systematic empirical answer to thequestion of how religious are America's college and university professors. Wefound that they are more religious than is commonly assumed: less than aquarter could be classified as complete nonbelievers. What are the implicationsof this finding?

First, a modification is in order to common ways of conceptualizingacademic secularization. To be sure, religion is no longer central to tbe officiallife of most nonreligiously affiliated colleges and universities, and on manycampuses there is overt hostility among some professors toward attempts atintegrating the study of religion into the college curriculum, or toward goingtoo far to accommodate students' religious views if these conflict with thedemands of science or higher learning. But even at elite schools, there aremore professors who are religious than wbo are nonhelievers, which suggeststhat in academe—as in American society more generally—secularization hasentailed more the privatization of religious belief (Casanova 1994) and itsretreat from the public square (notwithstanding the political mobilization ofconservative Christians over the past quarter century) than its elimination. Tothe extent this is so, models of academic secularization should be revised.Consistent with the position taken by Smith (2003), we believe that moreexplanatory emphasis should be placed on understanding the processes ofcontestation—as shaped by larger structural and institutional forces—by whichresearch and teaching in the college and university setting came to be defined(and continue to be defined) as secular affairs than on understanding how theputative influx of nonreligious faculty memhers into the university, in themiddle years of the twentieth century and beyond, altered its climate withrespect to religion, as emphasized in discussions by Benne (2001), Hollinger(1996), and Marsden and Longfield (1992). Some such influx no doubt playedsome role in giving the American university its present secular hue—andindeed, as indicated above, we think that explaining variation in faculty religi-osity requires attending to processes of selective incorporation of religious andnonreligious groups and personnel. But the hypothesis that the university is asecular institution because of the irreligious tendencies of the faculty does notwithstand empirical scrutiny: it is a secular institution despite the fact that most ofits key personnel are themselves reliions believers. This also means, consistent withthe claims of Ecklund and Scheitle (2007) and Schmalzbauer (2003), that animportant and neglected topic for the sociology of academic life is to under-stand how the many professors who are religious straddle their religious andscientific or intellectual value commitments: the nature of the epistemic

RELIGION AND THE AMERIGAN PROFESSORIATE 125

cultures they inhabit that allow them to do so, the practices they have learnedto keep the two strands of their identity separate, and the ways in which theymay attempt to bring them together and thereby be influenced in tbeir worklives by their personal religiosity. These are important matters in their ownright, but they also have broader sociological significance, for answering themmay yield insight into the social mechanisms by which higher education has asecularizing effect on students, one of its key effects vis-à-vis the social system.In light of our findings, one such mechanism that might be hypothesized toexist^that students become more secular as their atheist professors call intoquestion the value of religion—seems implausible as a broad generalization. Ifanything, our finding that the most secular professors are those focused primar-ily on research—a minority of all professors—would suggest that the bulk ofthe teaching function in American colleges and universities is being carriedout by academicians who are personally sympathetic to religion, albeit not inits most traditional forms.

Second, our findings call into question the long-standing idea among the-orists and sociologists of knowledge that intellectuals, broadly construed, com-prise an ideologically cohesive group in society and tend naturally to beantagonistic towatd religion. True, nonbelief is much more common withinacademe than in American society as a whole. But the idea, proposed hy Belland others, that the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tensionwith a religious worldview, is plainly wrong. What our findings help to high-light is how heterogeneous the American professoriate is, encompassing every-one from physicists teaching at elite research universities in the Northeast tohumanists teaching at regional liberal arts colleges in the Midwest to professorsof business offering instruction at community colleges in the South. This het-erogeneity reflects the sprawling and decentralized nature of American highereducation today, and in light of it, it would be shocking if professors all camedown on the same side on a matter as fundamental as religion. With respect toreligion, at least, our findings suggest the time may be at hand to teplace loosediscussion of "the intellectuals" and their inherent tendencies with a morenuanced and empirically informed awareness of how many different types ofknowledge-producers and knowledge-disseminators currently occupy the insti-tutional space of the American college and university, and of what the distinc-tive dispositions oí each may be.

Third and finally, our findings raise a number of intriguing puzzles aboutthe distribution of religious belief in academe. We have noted that professorswho are more oriented toward research, who hold doctorates, or who arelocated in specific disciplinary fields like biology or psychology, tend to be lessreligious, while those in applied fields like nursing and accounting tend to bemore so—and we have suggested some possible reasons for these patterns—butthe topic warrants much more sustained theoretical and empirical investi-gation. This will especially seem to be the case for those who are of tbe view(as we are) that a professor's personal religious commitments, or lack thereof.


may be systematically related to her or his other sociologically relevant attri-butes or behaviors, such as political attitudes, theoretical chtiices, or pedagogi-cal practices, so that to be able to more adequately explain the distribution oífaculty religiosity is to gain fundamental knowledge about professors quasocial actors. In this regard, longitudinal studies that followed cohorts of youngadults, varying in their religiosity, as some were drawn into academic careers,would be especially helpful; so too would be cross-national and historicalresearch that examined faculty religious views and their distribution in anumber of different settings so as to shine light on the social mechanisms andprocesses uniquely operative in the American case, as well as on those operat-ive wherever modern university institutions can be found. Whatever theoutcome of these and other lines of future investigation, we have shown thatreligious believers are more common in the ranks of the American faculty thanmany strands of social-scientific analysis—and much popular discourse—wouldsuggest.

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Documents

The Religiosity of American College and University Professors*