the "believe in a higher power" is very loose description. this can include the "radical" "heathen" "devil worshiping" perspectives.

for example I fall in that category but I still take strong issue with those with steadfast attachment to beliefs that have been disproven (i.e. evolution)

so really the radicalizing factor is 42% (IMO)

I wish they'd broken the survey down by field of study. I'd be interested to know if engineering professors are more/less religious than anthropologists, or biologists, etc.

Related: Why are so many terrorists have engineering degrees?

Somewhere out there on the nets is a chart that breaks down global warming deniers by degree - an overwhelming percentage of which are engineers and chemists.

My overall point being there's much more interesting stuff to be teased out of some more granular data than just "college professors."

Can you directly compare those two sets of numbers? Asking whether you believe in / have doubts about God is not the same thing as asking what religion you are. One question is about private beliefs, the other is about social organization/membership. One can have doubts about God and identify as a member of a religion.

Additionally, that "nothing in particular" group in the bottom set is a whopping 12%. If a goodly portion of that group overlaps with a "don't know if there's a God" (and we don't know if it does or doesn't), then a lot of your hypothesized gap between professors and the general population just disappeared.

I'd be more interested to see which religious groups are represented in American professorships. I suspect you'll see Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus disproportionately represented among the believers.

When we hear whining about universities being liberal and godless, the complaints are largely about the lack of fundamentalist protestant sects, not believers in general.

I'd also be interested to see how this plays out across departments and professional schools. Arts and sciences are probably more skewed away from the Protestant-dominated national numbers, whereas law and business schools are probably much closer to the national numbers.

Plus this does not account for non-theistic religions (Buddhism being the most familiar example but by no means the only one). It is possible to be an atheist AND to be highly devout.

I would point out that none of these categories actually mean "atheist" - you can be either of those things without having any beliefs about God or any higher powers at all. Not all religions/faiths are about higher powers or gods (some Buddhists, for example, might say they don't believe in gods or higher powers of any kind, but that doesn't make them atheists).

An atheist is typically someone who *does* believe that there isn't any higher power or spiritual element to the universe, that's the universe is purely what science can discover (even if it hasn't discovered it yet), as opposed to someone who *does not* believe in God. Penn Jillette's "This I Believe" essay explains this very well - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

Seconding Sanguinity's first para, I think the comparison is a bit apples and oranges.

Also, whatever a professor believes outside the classroom, I think most are (appropriately) going to keep their religious beliefs outside the classroom; that separation itself might seem "radically liberal and anti-religious" to the evangelical 26%, who seem to have a disproportionate degree of influence on the public conversation about religion.

I think that degrees and type of religiosity don't really have anything to do with secular thought. I know plenty of very religious people who also think that religion should have nothing to do with politics.

What I would like to see are numbers comparing those who are in favor of secularism vs those who are not. That way we can see exactly how secular college professors are in comparison to the public.

Great article, but it does presume american-ness in a way most of your articles don't, the title could do with an "... in the USA" suffix.

I sure wish there were more agnostics & atheists in education; I WANT college to be a secularizing influence. Logic > belief.

I'd be interested to see those results broken down further. There are, after all, plenty of explicitly religious institutions where one would expect something approaching 100% of the faculty to be in one of the "believer" categories. The abstract suggests that a majority even at "elite research institutions"identify as believers, but I'd be surprised if it weren't much closer to an even split there.

When I read these things, I often wonder what is meant by "professor." After all, there are plenty of people at the local community college with the title "professor;" indeed such people presumably outnumber the faculty at major research universities.

One way to try to correct this is to poll faculty at PhD-granting institutions -- not to say that there aren't colleges that exhibit the same culture, but I think such a selection criteria would better reflect what we think of when we think of a "professor."

I have no idea what the result would be. In my own field (physics), however, I would guess based on my experience that about 80-90% of such faculty are atheist or agnostic.

Actually, if you click through to the actual paper you'll see some of the questions above (including mine!) addressed.

It looks like even at "elite doctoral" institutions "only" 32% are "not religious" (the fraction is somewhat higher at "four-year" and "non-elite doctoral").

In "physical and biological" sciences it reports 53% as atheist or agnostic. I estimated a much larger fraction for physics, but I think that still might hold if one restricts to doctoral institutions and physics, since I suspect among the subfields, atheists/agnostics are more prominent there.

Only four percent of Americans are atheist or agnostic? I will be lonely in Hell.

I'm not sure if these terms come from you, or the original post, but I'd like to add that I also don't like the familiarity in the question "do you believe in God", and categories like "knows God really exists.." or even "don't know if there is a God". It presupposes that we know who "God" is, what type of "God" he (because it is used in the masculine) is. It steers the thoughts toward a default God with particular characteristics.

"Belief in a higher power" may cover the rest... but I would argue that this is also often used to denote "a-religious but theistic", or not-quite-religious - those people who have a vague but nondefined theism. If other religions are incorporated into this category without acknowledgement, a casual glance from someone not familiar with non-monotheistic religions might gloss them over with their own assumptions. There is nothing in the text of the image to challenge the assumption that tehse people may be "not properly religious" as opposed to "religious, but not YOUR type of religious".

In short, the text in this image doesn't simply examine religious behaviour, it PERPETUATES a certain way of looking at religion, a certain type of religion as the default, and (from your text) this type of religion then as equating to theism in general.

I'd be curious what the numbers would look like in a survey of math and science professors...

"Despite the stereotype, this data suggests that the majority of professors would welcome religious belief in their classrooms."

Are you implying that not believing in God/gods means you are not welcoming, tolerant, or accepting of the beliefs of others? That is a hugely misleading statement if you aren't.

Three issues with this data:

1. What pool of professors did they include? Was it a diverse sampling - private and public schools, different geographic regions, different tiers, etc? Did they include community colleges, for example? We have quite a wide array of institutions in the US, and I'm not sure this data is that helpful if it's the result of combining an overwhelmingly religious Southern public school with an overly secular East coast private school.. IDK. I guess what I'm saying is that I suspect that extremes in either direction would skew the data, which is always a danger in these types of surveys.

2. The wording is curious. Why do they all use the term "God" except one option, which uses the term "higher power" instead? How was "God" defined? Did some people assume it included non-specific "higher power"? Did others assume it only meant the Judeo-Christian God?

3. As others have noted, some breakdowns would be very helpful. In addition to a breakdown by field (or more generally dividing liberal arts and sciences), I'd also like to see a breakdown by level.. that is, adjuncts, tenured, published, degrees held, etc. It'd be interesting to see the difference between professors who actually teach and those who strictly do research, as well.

I think the percentage of atheists in the average population is actually much more than what the polls say, given that most atheists are afraid to talk about their atheism. With studies coming out saying that they're the most distrusted group of Americans among the population, who can really blame them for not wanting to reveal themselves?

If this point has already been brought up, just disregard this post. I didn't even really read most of the other comments. :P

I appreciate the blog post, but want to point out that it's spelled "atheist" not "athiest".

To add to those who nitpick on the poll of religions in the US and its significance, I'm reminded of this wikipedia page on religion in France that amused me :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Religions

Notice how it's 51% Catholics... Which is then broken down into Catholics who believe in God (27%), Agnostic Catholics (who doubt God's existence, 15%) and Atheist Catholics (who don't believe in god and are Catholics by tradition, 9%).

Religious identification varies with the culture and the country so you might not get the same kind of results in the US, but it still illustrates the morass we're dealing with here. Who knows what realities are hidden behind that poll.

I'm very surprised to see the "how religious are college professors?" issue discussed this way on a sociology blog. Religion is a network of social institutions and practices, not just a matter of abstract beliefs. Is someone who believes in God (or some other "higher power") but doesn't identify as a member of any religious sect and never attends services a "religious" person? Seems quite dubious to me. It becomes even harder to characterize our non-churchgoing theist as "religious" if they don't even engage in characteristically religious practices like prayer and the study of holy texts in private.

If the goal is to measure the religiosity of college professors with a single number, rates of churchgoing would be a much, much better metric than rates of belief in a higher power.

Baba Brinkman has a pretty amazing album, Evolutionary Rap (I'm not intending to promote it and I'm not related or connected in any way - I just really enjoyed it!) Point here is he was invited to a Southern US university to do a concert, and in his own words:

Last week I did my first tour of the Southern USA with the Rap Guide to Evolution, performing in Houston, Texas and Springfield, Missouri. Brace yourselves. Controversy was brewing from the start when I got a "conditional" invitation to perform at Missouri State University, co-sponsored by the departments of Biology, Psychology, and Bio-medicine. The condition was that I had to "tone down the creationist jabs", and it was imposed by the head of the Biology dept, who felt it would be a turn off for the non-science audience if their beliefs were attacked from the outset. The primary offending material was of course the chorus of the song Natural Selection: "The weak and the strong, Darwin got it goin' on / Creationism is dead wrong!"

Invited by the science faculties, and asked to tone down the criticism of Creationism. Call me naive, but it blew me away.

(He actually handled this very well I think by modifying the words without compromising the message, though that's not the point)

I can hardly get through the comments section, so forgive me if I am redundant. I take issue with your comment "Despite the stereotype, this data suggests that the majority of professors would welcome religious belief in their classrooms." Do I understand correctly that you believe an atheist or agnostic professor is unwilling to allow someone to share differing religious beliefs in a classroom (presumably where it would fit into the discussion)?

I disagree. I do not think that a professor's own faith determines how welcome religious belief is in a classroom. I believe that a major tenet of academia is the encouragement of critical thinking and creating and encouraging dialogue. A professor (ideally, any person) needn't suppress their own views to participate or lead a discussion, but neither should they expect that of others. Discussions are so much richer for the differences we bring to them.

Having spent 5 years in college and with three children also graduating from college with one a doctorate - I don't think a professor' religiosity has any influence on his teaching, unless he is teaching religion itself. Nerly all, if not all my instructors were so busy dealing with "subject matter" there was little time for extraneous things.

In a new study, researchers from Rice University, Baruch College and West Virginia University find that U.K. scientists are indeed significantly less religious than the U.K. general population.
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