Only 10% of professors are athiests and another 13 percent are agnostic.<\/p>\n
So, is 23 percent many or only a few non-believers?<\/p>\n On the one hand, it may seem like\u00a0very few if you consider that the professoriate is routinely characterized as radically liberal and anti-religious.\u00a0 As Shannon Golden at Contexts Crawler<\/a> says:<\/p>\n Devout parents often worry about the \u201csecularizing\u201d effects of sending their children off to college. They envision professors pushing secular thoughts and anti-religious values on their impressionable students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Despite the stereotype, this data suggests that the majority of professors would welcome religious belief in their classrooms.<\/p>\n On the other hand, it may seem like\u00a0a lot of athiests and agnostics if you compare the numbers to the general U.S. population.\u00a0 According to the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life<\/a>, only 4% of the U.S. population is athiest or agnostic (see the data waaaay down at the bottom there):<\/p>\n From this perspective, 23% is a lot.<\/p>\n So what do you think?\u00a0 Are you surprised by how few professors report being athiests or agnostics?\u00a0 Or are you surprised by how many?<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, but not, perhaps, as non-religious as you might think. A study just published in Sociology of Religion, by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, reported that about 3\/4ths of professors report some belief in God or\u00a0a higher power.\u00a0 About 35% of professors are absolutely certain that God exists, while 21% believe, but are not absolutely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,274,42],"class_list":["post-22343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22343"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60310,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22343\/revisions\/60310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2010\/04\/discovery-91-profs-religion.png\" "\\"discovery-91-profs-religion\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2010\/04\/major_religious_traditions.gif\" "\\"major_religious_traditions\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n