Author(s) :

Zizhou Wang.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

A substantial body of empirical research reports a negative correlation between education and religiosity, a finding often read as evidence that educational expansion drives secularization. This narrative review reexamines that inference by asking what the underlying studies measure and what their findings can support. The first section synthesizes causal and descriptive studies of schooling and religion, which are concentrated in Western, predominantly Christian contexts, and organizes them by research design, educational exposure, religiosity measure, and principal limitation. Read together, the studies indicate that expanding secular schooling reduces institutional indicators such as affiliation, attendance, and prayer, while other dimensions of religion are preserved or reshaped rather than eliminated. Because these indicators operationalize institutional or conventional religiosity, they leave open the question of whether religiosity in a broader sense declines with them. The second section introduces Paul Tillich’s concept of faith as “ultimate concern” as one theological alternative, states the criteria that distinguish ultimate concern from ordinary strong commitments, considers the choice between functional and substantive definitions of religion, and applies the framework, illustratively rather than conclusively, to modern nationalism and to the Cult of the Supreme Being of the French Revolution. The final section develops a hypothesis rather than an established conclusion: that formal schooling is one institution among several through which the objects of ultimate concern are redirected. The review closes by identifying the framework’s contested premises and the measurement and comparative research that could test it.