Of Sex and Religion

A new study reported on this week finds members of certain religious groups to be more guilty about sex than other groups.  And then I thought of the study a few months ago that rated the various religious groups on their knowledge of, yes, religion.  Can the two be correlated?  Let's see.

Knowledge

1. Atheist/Agnostic
2. Jewish
3. Mormon
4. White Evangelical Protestant
5. White Catholic
6. White Mainline Protestant
7. Nothing in particular
8. Black Protestant
9. Hispanic Cathlic

Guilt about Sex (in order of most guilt)

1. Mormon
2. Jehovah's Witness
3. Pentacostal
4. Seventh Day Adventist
5. Baptist
6. Catholic
7. Lutheran
8. way at the bottom, atheist/agnostic

So the smartest about religion has the least guilt about sex.  Coincidence?  You have to wonder if sexual guilt gets in the way of learning.  Hey, it's a hypothesis.

What's missing?  Jewish folks on the sexual guilt study.  I can't find, at least in the news account of the study, any mention of them.

So how does our correlation hold up?  Not so good if we collapse a few categories and take a few statistical liberties with the data.  For example, Mormons are high on the guilt scale but also awfully high on the religious knowledge scale, thus screwing up any potential correlation.  Catholics kinda hold up the correlation, falling in the middle on both scales.  All in all, not much of a correlation between what you know about religion and the role religion plays in your sexual guilt.

Data once again getting in the way of some good theories.  Or at least silly fun.

Like the rest of the planet, I blogged earlier this week about the major Pew study on religious knowledge.  I'm filling in the gaps over the next couple of days, working my way through a rather long pdf to get to the news lede -- it isn't so much your religious affiliation, it's your education that matters.

On page 37, we discover:

The survey results are clear: People with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about religion.

Which makes perfectly good sense.  Education tends to drive most tests of knowledge, from politics to science to health.  Having taken a specific college-level religion course also leads to greater knowledge, at least on the items asked here -- which, by the way, strike me as both comprehensive and fair when it comes to measuring something as difficult as "knowledge" of religion.

There are some fascinating demographic breakdowns deep in the study, though few of them truly surprising.  Indeed, they look a lot like the results you'd get studying political knowledge.  For those who care about such things, Republicans outscored Democrats on religious knowledge, but self-described conservatives and liberals were a statistical tie.  Go figure.

At the end, the fine folks at Pew crank the data through a regression analysis to see what really matters when it comes to what people know about religion.  The results? 

• Education matters.  It dominates the model.
• But religious affiliation still explains some of the variance, which is a fancy way of saying even if you control for education, atheists/agnostics, Mormons, and Jews still outperform everyone else.
• Controlling for all this, having a high religious commitment also adds a bit in performance.

So what can we say?  Well, for one, I can say that in six months I'll be downloading these data and playing with them like a kid at Christmas.  Unfortunately there aren't a lot of other variables to work with here, and no serious media variables.  Too bad.

Who Knows More About Religion?Atheists and Agnostics

A new survey by the fine folks at Pew finds all kinds of interesting things about what people know and what people think they know about religion.  I can mine this thing for days and I'd love to dig more into it now but I have class soon, so let me just pop out one of the more interesting finds (see below).  On a religious knowledge survey, the least religious do the best, followed by Jews and Mormons. 

Of course it's not this simple.  The table below doesn't include controls for education, and we've not even gotten into how you actually measure religious knowledge (it's broad-based, evangelicals and Mormons, for example, do best on Christian-based knowledge).  I'll write more later, when time allows.  Fascinating stuff.

Take the 15-item quiz yourself, if you dare.