**5.2 Religious activities and demographic variables**

The part of the results shows the association between how often one attends religious activities and his or her education and other demographic variables.

Table 12 shows the control variables have significant effect on one's religion attendance and other control variable. From the table, we can see that education has a negative effect on the religious attendance (-0.027), however, the effect is insignificant with a P-value of 0.738. Other variables that have significant effects on a person's religious attendances are the following: the number of children a person have, the denomination to which the person belongs, and their marital status. As the number of children increases, the days of religious attendance will increase; if a person is from the Catholic denomination, his or her religious attendance will increase; if a person is married, his or her church attendance will decrease by 2.144, which is a large effect.

Religious Participation and Educational Attainment: An Empirical Investigation 335

variables that have a significant effect on one's school attendance. The two variables are the following: the number of children in the family, and the marital status of the person. The denomination is weakly significant at p-value of 0.05. If there are more children in the family, the person's church attendance increases significantly (0.455 with a p-value of 0.004); if the person get married, his or her church attendance decreases by 1.974, with a p-value of

Religion remains an important aspect of life in the U.S. Yet very little is known about the impact religious participation has on economic outcomes. I have attempted to remedy this shortcoming by studying the relationship between education and religious variables and

Within the U.S., education decreases religious attendance at an individual level. This does not seem unusual to us because religious attendance is a major form of social interaction and education raises every other measurable form of social connection. We do not fully understand why education has this impact on social connection, but it seems to be the best explanation of the negative connection between education and religion. At the same time, there is a strong negative connection between attendance and education across religious groups within the U.S. and elsewhere. This can be explained by the fact that education is negatively connected religious belief and there is strong sorting across denominations on the basis of beliefs. We think that the negative correlation between beliefs and education occurs because education teaches a secular belief system, which conflicts with religious ideology. This research attempts to achieve two purposes by linking religion and education. First, the study analyzes the one-to-one relationship between education and several religious activities and obtained significant results between education and some of the religious

Second, it applied the human capital models based on social factors by analyzing a framework in which social factors, such as education, occupation, income, marital status, etc. affect children's education, a la Coleman. Based on sociologists' research as well as the existing economic literature, I analyzed the effects of income, marital status, education, and

In other words, religion has a value of investment as well as a value of consumption. It suggests that there is a close relationship between an individual's education attainment and the level of her religious participation. Further, this study reaches the conclusion that education is significantly related with various religious factors proving that human capital and religious activities are strongly associated. This result helps to explain why seemingly unproductive religions can be everlasting. Sometimes, it is observed that the higher one's education attainment, the fewer religious activities he or she would attend, less fundamentalist he or she will be, and more liberal he or she will be. However, for Jewish people, it has somehow a reverse trend, the educated the Jew, he or she will be more active

religiously. Also, as the degree rises, the number of nonbelievers will also increase.

In addition, conform with the finding of the first part, the regression analysis in the second part also shows that education has a significant negative effect on religious attendance,

study the relationship between social factors and religion using the GSS data.

0.044, this result is statistically significant.

other social factors on people's religious activities.

**6. Conclusion** 

variables.


Table 12. A Person's Religion Attendance, Education, and Other Variables.


Table 13. A Person's Religious Attendance, Occupation, and Other Variables

Table 13 shows the variables that have a significant effect on one's religious attendance. However, this time we replaced education variable with occupation variable to see whether one's occupation would have a significant effect on his or her religious attendance. In this estimation, I find that a more prestigious occupation has a negative effect on one's religious attendance, but this effect is not significant with a p-value of 0.320. There are only two other variables that have a significant effect on one's school attendance. The two variables are the following: the number of children in the family, and the marital status of the person. The denomination is weakly significant at p-value of 0.05. If there are more children in the family, the person's church attendance increases significantly (0.455 with a p-value of 0.004); if the person get married, his or her church attendance decreases by 1.974, with a p-value of 0.044, this result is statistically significant.
