Education no ‘immunization’ to faith

Susan Jacoby writes that during our debate at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV she cited a correlation between “religious fundamentalism” and “lack of education” which she claims I called “absurd.” As the video of the program clearly demonstrates, that is not at all the correlation that Ms. Jacoby was making. Rather she argued that there was a correlation between religious faith and lack of education, which I and my fellow panelist Dr. Karen King objected to vociferously (Ms. Jacoby then went on to differentiate between being “smart” and being “educated,” a distinction that is still lost on me).

In fact, Ms. Jacoby’s comment came in response to a survey I cited indicating that the rise in societal education over the last century has led to a similar rise (rather than the expected decline) in religious self-identification, a phenomenon that I attributed to globalization’s assault on national identities. In objecting to that statement, Ms. Jacoby argued that other surveys (and simple logic) demonstrate that higher education leads to a decline of religious faith. It is true that Ms. Jacoby eventually pivoted from talking generally about religious faith to talking specifically about religious fundamentalism, but her initial comments at the event, and her selective memory of it, indicate the very point that Dr. King and I were trying to highlight, not just about Ms. Jacoby, but about the new atheist movement in general.

As I have written in these pages before, the mistake many in the new atheist movement make is equating faith with literalism, religion with fundamentalism. Indeed, some of these new atheist writers (and I do not count Ms. Jacoby among them) read the scriptures more literally than any religious literalist I know. Sam Harris has gone so far as to argue that those “moderate” Jews, Christians, and Muslims who do not read the scriptures literally are not only enablers for religious fundamentalists who are literalists, they are not really Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It may be true that greater education leads to a broader view of the world, which in turn leads to a less literalist reading of scriptures. But again, that is not the argument I was refuting. I objected then, as I do now, to the notion that one so often hears from atheists these days that education is a kind of immunization from religious faith. That notion I call “absurd.”

Reza Aslan  | Nov 13, 2011 4:14 PM