Age and Education Level of Catholics and Political Attitudes and Religious Beliefs

Abstract

While there is evidence that religious beliefs are related to political attitudes, the relative importance of educational level and age has not been clearly established (Jacks, 1972; Nowicki, 1969). As an extension of these earlier works the present study attempted to control for such effects with a sample of 706 church going Catholics from the state of Massachusetts. Ss were obtained from eight regions throughout the state and the 10 largest Catholic colleges. Only volunteers 18 or older who were not members of the clergy or religious order were eligible for participation. The questionnaire contained 18 Likert items selected by a panel of three judges. Each of those items offered a six-point choice ranging from agree to disagree. Nine statements such as Church censorship in matters of morality is a necessary guide were selected so as to represent opinion on a broad variety of religious issues. Nine other statements, such as Civil rights should be enforced more strongly by the Federal Government, pertained to contemporary topics of general political interest. A conservative-liberal political score and a traditional-progressive religious score were determined from the sum of the nine responses to each topic. Religious belief scores ranged from 20 to 54 (M of 37.8, SD 8.1) while political attitude scores ranged from 15 to 50 (M of 33.8, SD 6.3). Each distribution approximated a unimodal normal shape with a split-half reliability of 0.87 for the Religious Belief scale and 0.83 for the Political Attitude scale. When Pearson rs were determined between the scores, a small positive r of 0.17 ( p < .01) indicated that conservative political attitudes are somewhat related to traditional religious beliefs. A significant positive r of .31 ( p < .01) also occurred between age and conservative political attitudes. On the other hand, significant negative relationships occurred between the number of years of formal education and conservative political attitudes ('P = -.16, p < .01) and traditional religious beliefs ( r = -.25, p < .01). The first-order partial correlation removing the effects of age from the political and religious scores yielded a significant but very small association ( r = .11, p < .01). In the same way, when number of years of formal education were partialled from these scores a lower but positive correlation remained ( r = .14, p < .01) . However, when both age and educational level were controlled, the second-order partial correlation between political and religion scores fell to .01. These results suggest that, while age and education are important contributors to the association between religious and political attitudes, their combined effect is the more critical influence.