This is another reason why it is so important that we pass universal preschool.

The early formative years are critical and the more that young kids get professional secular education, the less religious and the more logical they will turn out to be later in life.

Have faith () folks, I was indoctrinated for 8 years in parochial school, and now couldn’t be further alienated from the church. Unfortunately I had to waste a few years to get there..

After all it had nothing to do with a book full of contradictions or televangelists telling you that god's going to strike you down unless you buy them a Gulfstream.

The conclusion reinforces what a threat to separation of church and state Betsy DeVos and her ilk are, pushing school vouchers and draining public funds from public schools.

As for old age pensions, my parents ended up in a Catholic nursing home (they were Catholic their whole lives). There, in their old age, they were a captive audience. There was a chapel in the place, a whole wing of retired nuns, and a resident priest. Not surprisingly, they seemed to me to become more religious in those last years.

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This aside on school vouchers is from Wikipedia:

A program launched in the city of Cleveland in 1995 and authorized by the state of Ohio was challenged in court on the grounds that it violated both the federal constitutional principle of separation of church and state and the guarantee of religious liberty in the Ohio Constitution. These claims were rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court, but the federal claims were upheld by the local federal district court and by the Sixth Circuit appeals court.[116] The fact that nearly all of the families using vouchers attended Catholic schools in the Cleveland area was cited in the decisions.[117]

This was later reversed during 2002 in a landmark case before the US Supreme Court, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which the divided court, in a 5–4 decision, ruled the Ohio school voucher plan constitutional and removed any constitutional barriers to similar voucher plans in the future, with conservative justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas in the majority.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, stated that "The incidental advancement of a religious mission, or the perceived endorsement of a religious message, is reasonably attributable to the individual aid recipients not the government, whose role ends with the disbursement of benefits." The Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio program did not violate the Establishment Clause, because it passed a five-part test developed by the Court in this case, titled the Private Choice Test.

Dissenting opinions included Justice Stevens's, who wrote "...the voluntary character of the private choice to prefer a parochial education over an education in the public school system seems to me quite irrelevant to the question whether the government's choice to pay for religious indoctrination is constitutionally permissible" and Justice Souter's, whose opinion questioned how the Court could keep Everson v. Board of Education on as precedent and decide this case in the way they did, feeling it was contradictory. He also found that religious instruction and secular education could not be separated and this itself violated the Establishment Clause.

Very interesting. I wonder what a secular interpretation of the data might show. Looks like this writer is clearly in the religious camp.

I was gonna post this but I'll just post what I was gonna say here. lol.

Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education and, to a lesser degree, government spending on old-age pensions. Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious. It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.

So in essence we were supposed to be dumber in life and when we became elderly we were to be more dependent upon a deity? How's that for a power trip? Our forefathers designated religious freedom so that it wouldn't be forced upon us and yet it is.