You’re right that the interviewer wasn’t “shrewd” because it was more like a chat between two people who share a similar philosophy than a hard-hitting piece of journalism. It was an interview intended for a very specific audience (people who are not only atheists but so committed to that worldview that they subscribe to a magazine called Free Inquiry). Anyway, I just wanted to say that I don’t feel Hitchens came across as either bigoted or an ass. To me, he comes across as someone with a strong opinion who is willing to rigorously defend that position. By making the TV show and writing the book he may have been looking for a donnybrook, but it wasn’t just a knee-jerk attack.
Also I was curious about the claim about a correlation between religion and education. What I found was somewhat surprising. The following is an abstract from an article from the Harvard Institute of Economic Research published in 2001.
“In the United States, religious attendance rises sharply with education across individuals, but religious attendance declines sharply with education across denominations. This puzzle is explained if education both increases the returns to social connection and reduces the extent of religious belief. The positive effect of education on sociability explains the positive education-religion relationship. The negative effect of education on religious belief causes more individuals to sort into less fervent religions, which explains the negative relationship between education and religion across denominations. Cross-country differences in the impact of education on religious belief can explain the large cross-country variation in the education-religion connection. These cross-country differences in the education-belief relationship can be explained by political factors (such as communism) which lead some countries to use state-controlled education to discredit religion.”
So in fact 50% of college graduates born after 1945 attend church more than several times per year, while only 36% of high school dropouts do. The authors write “In many muiltivariate regressions, education is the most statistically important factor explaining church attendance.”
However, the findings are different across denominations. They note that members of the groups with the least amount of education (such as Mormons, Pentacostalists, and Jehovah’s witnesses) attend church the most frequently, while members of more educated groups attend less frequently. In fact, “the correlation between education and religious attendance across denominations is negative 86%.”
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