Mark Twain gave Benjamin Disraeli credit for the line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Having posted recently on useless data, my thoughts are drawn to something worse — data that’s misappropriated, or even ginned up to make a point.

A friend asked me to read a draft document that included something he’d heard: “Studies estimate that nearly 90% of teens leave the church after graduating high school.” About the same time, another friend invoked another frequently repeated line: “Over the past few years, various research studies have found more than 75% of Christians leave their faith after high school and more than 60% after college.”

I told my friends I hadn’t seen those studies (though I’ve heard them mentioned often enough). The studies I have seen (Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008 and The National Survey of Youth and Religion) tell a different story. Both friends expressed surprise because the numbers they quoted were confidently reported by presumably reliable sources. “That’s funny,” one of them said, “because I’ve heard it from several pastors and Christian speakers…”

There is an understandable inclination for people to take at face value  premises that fit their worldview — like the woman my wife heard on television last week who, when assured that Barack Obama is a self-described Christian, shook her head and replied, “In my mind, he’s a Muslim.” I have to admit my own predisposition to distrust suits because my worldview was formed partly in reaction, not to anarchists but people who raid and ravage and pilfer by skirting, bending and breaking the law…in suits! Every day, I have to swallow that inclination and pay attention to people and situations as they are (otherwise I would end up shaking my head, saying, “In my mind, they’re all crooks.”)

The worldview of a good many American Christians includes the conviction that U.S. colleges and universities are hostile to faith. There’s no doubt this can be proved anecdotally: “My niece was ridiculed because she wrote a paper on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.” Who can even guess, without reading the paper, whether the young woman was criticized for her subject matter or the quality of her writing (or, for that matter, whether the critique was meant as a rebuke or a correction)? Be that as it may, it’s hard to make the case that higher education is any more threatening to people’s faith than entering the work force or military service or traveling the world.

In fact, higher education appears to have a less negative effect on faith than any of those.

A 2007 University of Texas study of national, longitudinal data on adolescent health — tracking more than 10,000 Americans from 1994/95, when they were adolescents, to 2001/02 — found that:

Religious decline does indeed vary by education level, but not in the way most might expect. For all three types of religious decline [lower church attendance than in high school, diminished self-reported importance of religion and dropping out of religion altogether], it is the respondents who did not go to college who exhibit the highest rates of diminished religiosity. Those with the highest level of education — the respondents with at least a bachelor’s degree — are the least likely to curtail their church attendance.

That doesn’t mean college student are going to church more; they’re not. But the report cites a 2005 analysis showing that, “all the longitudinal studies conducted since 1990 have noted increases in the strength of students’ religious convictions during college.”

All this is consistent with other recent big-sample, national studies ( Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey and The National Survey of Youth and Religion). If you want to know what lies behind these trends, you can read the study for yourself. For our purposes, suffice it to say things have changed. That has partly to do with changes in the student population and partly to do with changes in the university climate which, with “the arrival of postmodern, post-positivist thought, has served to legitimize religiosity and spirituality, even in intellectual circles. Together with heightened emphasis on religious tolerance and emerging emphases on spiritual development, antireligious hostility on campus may even be at a decades-long low.”

Universities were once widely held to be hostile to religion, but recently they have been described not as a breeding ground for apostasy, but as “a breeding ground for vital religious practice and teaching” (Cherry, DeBerg and Porterfield 2001:295). Indeed, religion may not be as marginalized as some authors (e.g., Marsden 1994) have purported. America’s institutions of higher learning — even secular state universities — instead have an (over)abundant supply of religious and para-church organizations to meet the demands of students, and they often teach tolerance and respect for religion in the classroom. In this way, universities may unwittingly accommodate and even encourage religious development in students’ lives (Cherry, DeBerg and Porterfield 2001).2

I have yet to hear a Christian speaker cite these trends. I suspect this is because the trends don’t reinforce a calcified worldview as do some other fabrications that, “in their minds,” describe the way things are.

Eric Hoffer, an iconoclast from another era, wrote, “In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” Reflections on the Human Condition, New York, Harper and Row, 1973, page 22

As far as I’m concerned, my two friends are off the hook for believing in good faith what they were told by spokesmen for christendom. It’s the spokesmen who are on the hook with me. To tear a page from their own book:

      Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers and sisters, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. We all stumble in many ways. Those who are never at fault in what they say are perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.
- James 3.1,2