Are College Degrees Changing Modern Christian Belief? | Ryan Burge  🔗 **Source:** [Are College Degrees Changing Modern Christian Belief? | Ryan Burge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ-_WElHTHA) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [religion-data, college-majors, religious-retention, political-identity, evangelicalism, higher-education] > author: Ryan Burge > source: Holy Post Media (SkyPod) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ-_WElHTHA > date created: 2026-09-05 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > > # Title: Are College Degrees Changing Modern Christian Belief? | Ryan Burge > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## Summary - Political scientist Ryan Burge, who writes the "Graphs about Religion" Substack, joins Holy Post Media's SkyPod (host uses the name "Sky") to walk through data on college major and religiosity, drawn from a FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) survey of 68,000 students across 250 universities. - The least religious majors cluster in the humanities and arts: environmental studies, theater, fine arts, film and media studies, studio art, English, math, physics and astronomy. Fine arts majors: 60% claim no religious affiliation, 50% never attend services. - The most religious majors are finance and nursing. Finance students are also the most conservative group in the survey; nursing students are highly religious but only mildly conservative, which decouples the usual link between religiosity and politics for that one major. - Burge argues repeatedly against causal readings of the data: major choice reflects family background, ethnicity, and prior orientation more than college changes anyone's beliefs. They cite the parent's-profession effect (a doctor's kid is more likely to become a doctor) and the South Asian, largely Hindu, overrepresentation in computer science and data science as a confound that makes those majors look falsely low-religiosity by church-attendance measures. - Burge cites a separate finding that religious retention (staying in the faith you were raised in) runs 70-75% nationally, and states research data suggests political identity, not religious identity, functions as the "master identity" that other commitments get organized around for many Americans. - Risk/tradeoff: this is one podcast conversation summarizing an author's own Substack post, filtered through banter; underlying data and full methodology sit behind FIRE's own survey and Burge's Substack, neither reproduced here. - Bottom line: the data complicates two popular evangelical narratives — that secular college "causes" loss of faith, and that professors are the mechanism — by locating the real predictors upstream, in major choice, family background, and peer influence. ## Main Content Burge frames the entire piece as reporting rather than argument: "I look at the data and say to myself, what questions could I answer with the data that I have... I don't come in with a question then look at the data. I look at the data and then find questions that emerge from the data." The FIRE survey was not designed to study religion — its primary purpose is tracking student self-censorship on campus issues (Palestine, gay rights, abortion) — but it collected major, church attendance, religious affiliation, and political affiliation as secondary fields across 45+ listed majors, which let Burge cross-tabulate religiosity by major after the fact. The headline finding: the least religious cluster is the humanities and arts. Environmental studies "pops up a lot" as low-religiosity, which Burge links to overlap with environmentalist politics, socialism, and strong-government-regulation views as a "package deal." Theater, fine arts, music, film and media studies, studio art, English, math, and physics/astronomy round out the low end. Fine arts carries the starkest numbers cited on air: 60% no religious affiliation, 50% never attend services. Computer science and data science appear at the top of the "least religious" list by raw numbers, but Burge flags this as "a little misleading" — those majors are heavily populated by South Asian students who are largely Hindu, so low Christian-church-attendance numbers reflect a different religion being undercounted by a Christian-coded measure, not secularization. At the high end: finance and nursing. Finance students are, in Burge's words, "on an island by themselves" on a two-axis chart of ideology and partisanship — the most religious and most conservative group in the dataset. Burge's own explanation (offered as "punditry and speculation," his phrase) is that finance selects for people already oriented toward free-market, anti-regulation views, and that religiosity may partly be adaptive to a conservative, church-going clientele base rather than a separate causal force. Nursing breaks the usual pattern: highly religious but only "one click right of center" politically — moderate rather than conservative. Burge attributes this to nursing being a "helping profession" alongside social work and ministry, where empathy is a shared trait that does not reliably predict partisan lean the way it does in other majors. Burge repeatedly pushes back on causal readings: "People want to believe that college is causal... the causal arrow is probably pointing in the wrong direction there," using the example of a student assumed to have "turned gay" after joining a theater department, when the more likely story is that already-different students select into theater. They generalize the confound: major is shaped by parental occupation, ethnicity, geography, and family culture before the student ever "chooses" it — "they're already choosing who they are as adults before they're even adults." On the broader "kids lose faith at secular college" narrative, Burge states plainly there is data showing "your college roommate is more impactful to your politics than your professors are," and rejects the idea that professors indoctrinate students, partly on the practical grounds that most students do not do assigned reading, let alone absorb ideological instruction. Burge offers two competing narratives for why some raised-religious students leave the faith after college: (1) previously closeted skeptics use college as a socially acceptable excuse to state views they already held privately, and (2) students raised in an insular, "we've-got-the-truth" subculture meet people outside it for the first time, find them to be good people contrary to what they were taught, and experience cognitive dissonance that leads them to question the rest of the teaching. On retention broadly, Burge states national religious retention (staying in the faith you were raised in, broadly defined) sits at 70-75%, and that this holds for the non-religious as well — people raised with no faith mostly stay that way. Burge frames inertia as "the strongest force in American life." The most theologically pointed exchange concerns whether religion or politics is the "master identity." Burge, citing "more and more data coming out in my corner of the world in political science," argues politics functions as the first lens through which many Americans view the world, with religious and other commitments ordered behind it — evidenced, in Burge's telling, by the rarity of evangelical Republicans publicly breaking from a party position on biblical grounds. The episode is a Holy Post Plus paywall clip; the transcript ends mid-conversation before a promised discussion of "So You Want Your Child to Keep the Faith" data on retention by religious tradition. ### Notes - **Data source:** FIRE, "the foundation for individual rights and expression" — 68,000 college students, 250 universities, primary purpose is a campus-censorship survey; religion questions are secondary/incidental. - **Least religious majors (by attendance and affiliation):** environmental studies, theater, fine arts, film and media studies, studio art, English, math, physics and astronomy. - **Fine arts specifics:** 60% no religious affiliation, 50% never attend services. - **Most religious majors:** finance (also most conservative), nursing (highly religious, only mildly conservative). - **Confound named explicitly:** computer science/data science appear low-religiosity by raw numbers but this reflects South Asian, largely Hindu, overrepresentation rather than secularization — a measurement artifact of using Christian-coded "church attendance" as the religiosity proxy. - **Causal-direction argument:** major choice is shaped by parental profession, ethnicity, geography, and family background before the student "chooses" a major; the theater/sexuality example is offered as a direct illustration of reversed causal arrows. - **National retention baseline stated on air:** 70-75%, both for religious and non-religious upbringings; Burge calls inertia "the strongest force in American life." - **Master-identity claim:** politics, not religion, functions as the first interpretive lens for many Americans, per Burge's characterization of political-science research; illustrated by the rarity of evangelical Republicans publicly dissenting from party positions on biblical grounds. - **Professor-indoctrination claim rebutted:** Burge cites data that a student's roommate has more influence on their politics than professors do, and notes practical limits (students not doing the reading). - **Two narratives for post-college faith change offered without adjudicating between them:** (1) prior closeted skepticism revealed once independent of family, (2) insular upbringing meets outside world, cognitive dissonance follows contact with people the student was taught to fear or dismiss. - **Format note:** this is a paywall-clipped podcast segment; the transcript cuts off before the second topic (retention by tradition, "So You Want Your Child to Keep the Faith") is developed. ## References - FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) — source of the 68,000-student, 250-university survey discussed; not linked in the transcript. - Ryan Burge, "Graphs about Religion" Substack — the article being discussed is not named or linked beyond a description ("which college majors are most religious"). - Holy Post Media — SkyPod, holypost.com/skypod (subscription plug in transcript). - Referenced but not sourced: unspecified data claim that "college roommate is more impactful to your politics than your professors." ## Paraphrase Burge explains that most surveys never ask college graduates their major, so a religiosity-by-major breakdown is rare; a campus free-speech survey happened to include both religion and major questions, which let them build this analysis after noticing the data existed rather than setting out to test a hypothesis. The least religious majors turn out to be concentrated in the humanities and arts — theater, fine arts, English, environmental studies — while the most religious are finance and nursing, two majors that otherwise look nothing alike politically. Burge is emphatic that none of this shows college makes people less religious; it shows that people who are already less religious, or already positioned by family and background toward certain fields, sort into those fields. The conversation closes on a claim that political identity increasingly organizes religious identity rather than the reverse, illustrated by the disappearance of evangelical Republicans publicly citing scripture against a party position. ## Newsletter **Ryan Burge's college-major religiosity data, and why the "secular college destroys faith" story doesn't hold up.** On the Holy Post's SkyPod, data analyst and former pastor Ryan Burge walks through a 68,000-student FIRE survey cross-tabulated by major: humanities and arts majors (theater, fine arts, environmental studies, English) skew least religious, while finance and nursing skew most religious — for very different reasons, since finance also skews most conservative and nursing does not. Burge's throughline: major choice is a downstream effect of family background and identity, not a cause of belief change, and the "my kid went to a state school and lost their faith" narrative usually has the causal arrow backwards. Good listen for anyone building religion/education content or fielding "should I send my kid to a Christian college" questions — Burge's answer is a firm no, framed around trusting divine providence rather than controlling environment. ## Action Items #### Personal / Faith - Useful data point for conversations about state-school vs. Christian-college choices in Courtney's own faith community and deconstruction context: Burge's argument is explicitly that environment-control ("send them to the right school") reflects distrust in providence, not protection of faith. - Flag the "master identity" claim (politics precedes and organizes religion for many Americans) as worth tracking against other sources in the religion-and-politics research Courtney reads — it recurs across multiple analysts and deserves a standing note rather than one-off citation. #### DevRel / Community / WordPress - Not applicable to this source — no technology, developer relations, or WordPress governance content. ## Hypotheses 1. Major-choice religiosity gaps are explained primarily by selection (prior family background, ethnicity, geography) rather than college-caused belief change. Testable via longitudinal data comparing pre-college religiosity to post-graduation religiosity by major, controlling for family religiosity at intake. 2. The apparent low religiosity of computer science/data science majors is a measurement artifact of using Christian-coded church-attendance metrics on a population with high non-Christian representation. Testable by re-running the analysis with a religion-neutral religiosity index (e.g., self-rated importance of faith, not attendance) split by religious tradition. 3. Nursing's decoupling of high religiosity from moderate politics (versus finance's coupling of high religiosity with high conservatism) reflects occupational empathy norms overriding the general religiosity-conservatism correlation. Testable by comparing nursing to other high-empathy, high-licensure professions (social work, teaching) for the same decoupling pattern. 4. National religious retention (70-75%) is stable across cohorts, meaning claims of accelerating "faith exodus" are exaggerated relative to historical baselines. Testable with time-series retention data across multiple General Social Survey waves. 5. Political identity functioning as an organizing "master identity" over religious identity is more pronounced among younger cohorts than older ones. Testable by measuring rate of public break with party position on scriptural grounds, segmented by age cohort, over time. ## Methodology The only methodology described on air is FIRE's underlying survey: roughly 68,000 college students surveyed across approximately 250 U.S. universities, with self-reported major (45+ options), church attendance frequency, religious affiliation, and political affiliation as fields. Burge is explicit that the survey's primary design purpose is measuring student self-censorship on contested political topics, not religion — the religion questions are secondary and the major-by-religiosity analysis is Burge's own post-hoc cross-tabulation of that secondary data, not a study designed to test causal claims about college and belief. No sampling-error figures, response rate, or statistical significance testing are mentioned in the conversation; none of this is a criticism unique to this piece so much as a limit of a podcast-format summary of a Substack post. ## Questions 1. What is FIRE's actual response rate and sampling method, and how representative is a 250-university, 68,000-student sample of the roughly 20-million-strong U.S. undergraduate population? 2. Does Burge's Substack post include a religion-neutral religiosity index that would resolve the computer science/data science confound, or does it rely solely on church attendance? 3. Is the "roommate more impactful than professors" claim from a specific named study, and does it hold after controlling for pre-existing similarity in roommate assignment (students may self-select into similar social groups)? 4. How does nursing's religiosity-without-conservatism pattern compare across other majors with mandatory licensure and direct patient/client contact (e.g., social work, physical therapy)? 5. What does the "So You Want Your Child to Keep the Faith" piece say about retention broken out by specific religious tradition — the transcript is cut off before this is discussed? ## Future Research - A longitudinal (not cross-sectional) study tracking individual students' religiosity from high school through college graduation, by major, to separate selection effects from any genuine college-caused change. - A comparative religiosity-by-major analysis using a non-Christian-coded religiosity index, to test whether the computer science/data science "low religiosity" finding survives once Hindu and other non-Christian practice is measured on its own terms. - Cross-national replication: does the same major-religiosity pattern (arts/humanities low, finance/nursing high) hold outside the U.S., where the finance-conservatism-religiosity bundle may not exist in the same form? - A study isolating whether "master identity" effects (politics organizing religion) are cohort-specific (rising among younger evangelicals) or a stable, long-standing feature of American religious-political identity. ## Implications - **For practice (education/ministry):** Advising families that "send your kid to a Christian college to protect their faith" is not supported by this data, since major choice and family background predict post-college religiosity far more than institution type; the practical lever, if any, is what happens well before college. - **For policy:** None directly; this is descriptive social-science data, not a policy proposal. - **For education:** Useful corrective for religious-education and youth-ministry curricula that frame "the professors will get them" as the primary risk narrative for college-bound teens; the data instead points to peer influence (roommates) and self-selection into major. - **For security:** Not applicable to this source. - **For funding models:** Not applicable to this source. ## Learning Styles Assessment Reading level: informal spoken conversation, roughly a grade 8-9 Flesch-Kincaid equivalent — colloquial, joke-laden, no technical statistical vocabulary beyond "confounding variables" and "causal arrow," both explained in plain language on air. #### Visual learners - Present: none — audio/video podcast with no on-screen charts described in the transcript itself (the underlying Substack post reportedly contains graphs, per Burge's reference to "a graph in the piece"). - Improve: embed the referenced FIRE-derived charts (major-by-religiosity, ideology/partisanship scatter) alongside the transcript. #### Aural learners - Present: native format — full podcast audio/video with natural conversational cadence. - Improve: none needed; format already serves this style directly. #### Verbal learners - Present: extended analogies (finance bros as "scavenging packs of hyenas," religion as an "instrumental variable," Mark Twain's "travel is fatal to prejudice") carry much of the explanatory weight. - Improve: a short glossary translating Burge's data-analyst shorthand ("hermeneutic of data analysis," "exegesis vs. isogesis of data") for listeners unfamiliar with the joke. #### Kinesthetic learners - Present: none. - Improve: a companion worksheet letting a reader guess, then check, which majors rank where before revealing the data, mirroring the "guess the outcome" structure of the conversation itself. #### Logical learners - Present: moderately served — Burge's confound-naming (parental occupation, ethnicity, self-selection) is a clear, step-by-step causal argument. - Improve: a simple directed-acyclic-graph sketch of the causal claims Burge makes (family background → major choice → measured religiosity) would make the argument fully explicit rather than conversational. #### Social learners - Present: the two-host banter format itself models a social, dialogic way of processing the data. - Improve: none needed for this format. #### Solitary learners - Present: served adequately by a written transcript for anyone who prefers reading over listening. - Improve: a standalone summary document (like this one) removing the banter for a reader who wants the findings without the conversational scaffolding. #### Naturalistic learners - Not applicable to this source. ## Accessibility Assessment Assessed against WCAG 2.2 AA, treating the YouTube video and transcript as the artifact: 1. **1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded) (A):** the transcript itself functions as a caption source; whether YouTube's actual captions are accurate for proper nouns (FIRE, Wheaton, Substack) is not verifiable from this capture. 2. **1.1.1 Non-Text Content (A):** any charts referenced from Burge's Substack post are not present in the video capture itself; if the video does display them on-screen without audio description, that content is inaccessible to blind/low-vision viewers. 3. **1.4.2 Audio Control (A):** standard YouTube player controls apply; not assessable from the transcript alone. 4. **2.4.1 Bypass Blocks (A):** not applicable to a video artifact. 5. **Media and captions:** the biggest gap is that a data-heavy conversation — with several specific percentages and named majors — relies entirely on spoken numbers; a visual chart described but not shown in the transcript would need an audio description or a linked text summary (like this analysis) to be usable by someone who cannot see the referenced graph. ## DEIB Assessment - **Cultural breadth:** the conversation explicitly names an ethnic and religious confound (South Asian, largely Hindu, overrepresentation in computer science/data science skewing "low religiosity" numbers), which is a stronger-than-average acknowledgment of non-Christian populations for an evangelical-media podcast; the analysis stops there and does not extend the same scrutiny to other majors or populations. - **Inclusive language:** generally respectful; one host references their own South Asian immigrant family background directly and without caricature. - **Neurodiversity support:** not addressed in the source; the format (long, unstructured conversational audio with no chapter markers described) is harder to navigate for a listener who needs to jump to specific claims. - **Representation:** guest and host are both men; no note of gender balance across the majors discussed (e.g., nursing's high female representation) despite discussing nursing at length — a missed angle on the source's own analysis. - **Psychological safety:** the "finance bros" riff is affectionate mockery of a demographic in-group the hosts are adjacent to (Wheaton, Illinois finance professionals), not a marginalized group; low risk. Discussion of a hypothetical "your son picked theater then turned out gay" scenario is handled carefully by Burge, who redirects it away from a causal-college-turns-you-gay framing toward self-selection, which is the more responsible reading available in the source. ## Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - **Selection-versus-causation argument (the episode's central point).** Burge repeatedly and correctly identifies that observing "theater majors are less religious" cannot support "theater causes lower religiosity" without ruling out prior selection — a textbook and correctly applied causal-inference caution. Location: throughout, most explicitly in the "causal arrow is probably pointing in the wrong direction" exchange. - **Named confound with a mechanism.** The South Asian/Hindu overrepresentation explanation for computer science/data science's apparent low Christian-religiosity score is a specific, checkable mechanism, not a vague hedge — strong because it is falsifiable (a re-analysis excluding or coding for Hindu respondents would confirm or refute it). #### Fallacies - **Anecdotal generalization, "finance bros" and "downtown Wheaton."** Burge's explanation for finance-major conservatism and religiosity rests on personal observation of one town's finance-adjacent community rather than the survey data itself; the survey shows correlation, but the mechanism offered (clientele-driven religiosity, free-market ideology as "engine") is explicitly labeled "punditry and speculation" by Burge — a fair and transparent hedge, but still not evidence. - **Unsupported comparative claim.** "Your college roommate is more impactful to your politics than your professors are" is stated as settled fact ("there's actually data on this") without naming the study, sample, or effect size — an appeal to unspecified authority. *Fix:* name the source so the claim can be checked. #### Tone of voice Casual, joking, self-deprecating (both hosts are described or describe themselves as having been ministers), with the host adopting a light interviewer-friend register and Burge alternating between data-analyst precision and speculative riffing, explicitly flagged as such. ## DARVO Analysis Not applicable to this source. This is a data-analysis conversation with no accusation, no accused party, and no interpersonal conflict to analyze for deny/attack/reverse-victim-offender dynamics. ## Conclusion Burge's data reframes the "college destroys faith" narrative common in evangelical circles as a story about selection, not causation: students who were already less religious, or already positioned by family background toward humanities and arts fields, sort into those majors; students positioned toward finance and nursing sort into fields that read as more religious for very different underlying reasons (conservative ideology in one case, empathetic occupational culture in the other). The practical takeaway Burge offers directly is to stop trying to control religious outcomes through school choice and instead trust that faith formation happens well before, and independently of, which university a student attends. ## 🔄 Refactor Appendix — Are College Degrees Changing Modern Christian Belief? | Ryan Burge ### 📚 Literature Atoms (H3) #### [H1] Politics as the master identity > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1sdhb5g2c3421e2d712hrw3 > "there's more and more data coming out in my corner of the world in political science that says that politics is the master identity. Like it it's the first lens that we look at the world through and then everything lives downstream of that. So you can see this by the way in modern American politics. Like how many, you know, evangelical Republicans will will really step out and say, "Well, you know what? I believe in this, but the Bible disagrees with me." Like a political issue. You never see that anymore, right? It's like it's amazing what happens when people read the Bible through a partisan lens because they can justify or not justify anything. Like I had a friend the other day who goes," The episode's strongest claim: political identity now organizes scriptural interpretation for many evangelicals rather than the reverse, illustrated by the vanishing rate of believers breaking from party line on biblical grounds. Tags: `#atom/literature/h1` #### [H2] Major choice is shaped before religiosity is ever measured > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1sdhb5g2c3421e2d712hrw3 > "right? like what your major is not just chosen by you like because you wanted to be that major. Like if your dad's a doctor, you're more likely to be a doctor. If you're from Southeast Asia, you're kind of nudged toward the hard sciences. You're not nudged toward the toward the humanities. If both your parents grew up, you know, in New York City, you're more inclined to be an arts major. Like, let's just be real about this. People, students don't like when 18-year-olds don't just sit around and go, "What do I really want to be?" You know what I mean? It's it's a confluence of all these factors and influences that" The selection-not-causation mechanism the whole episode depends on: family background, ethnicity, and geography sort students into majors well before any religiosity difference shows up in the data. Tags: `#atom/literature/h2` #### [H3] The roommate claim, cited without a source > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1sdhb5g2c3421e2d712hrw3 > "I just please like say that like as plainly as possible? There's actually data on this, FYI. And the data says your college roommate is more impactful to your politics than your professors are. I can't even get my students to show up to class or read the even read the syllabus for God's sake, Sky, let alone change their minds about anything. You know, like you you the problem is I think what happens is evangelicals send their kid to a state school, the kid comes back as an atheist or a liberal or whatever and they want to blame us for that. >> I don't think that's what happened," Correctly rebuts the "professors indoctrinate students" narrative, but leans on an unnamed study ("there's actually data on this") — an appeal to unspecified authority even though the underlying point is probably right. Tags: `#atom/literature/h3` `#fallacy/unsupported-citation` ### 🧠 Permanent Candidates (H4) #### [P1] Selection effects masquerade as causal effects in "college changes your faith" narratives The theater-major-is-less-religious and finance-major-is-more-religious findings both dissolve once you account for who was already sorted into those majors before college — by family occupation, ethnicity, and hometown. The same caution applies anywhere a population studied for outcome X was never randomly assigned to condition Y: the "college secularizes students" and "college radicalizes students" narratives common in evangelical media both need this same selection-versus-causation check before they're repeated as findings rather than correlations. *Candidate; one well-argued case, matches the general causal-inference literature.* Links: [[Selection Effects vs Causation]] · [[Faith Deconstruction Notes]] · [[Media Literacy MOC]] Tags: `#atom/zettel/z1` #### [P2] Political identity now precedes and filters theological interpretation for many evangelicals Burge's observed disappearance of "I believe this, but the Bible disagrees with me" statements among evangelical Republicans describes a specific, checkable shift: partisan identity functioning as the first interpretive lens, with scripture read afterward to fit it, rather than scripture setting the position first. This is a mechanism worth watching for directly in NAR-adjacent and deconstruction contexts, not just as a general observation about polarization. *Candidate; single source, consistent with wider political-science literature Burge gestures at but doesn't cite.* Links: [[Political Identity and Theology]] · [[Faith Deconstruction Notes]] · [[NAR Governance Patterns]] Tags: `#atom/zettel/z2` ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue - Track down the actual study behind "your roommate is more impactful to your politics than your professors" — Burge cites it as settled but names no source. `#atom/fleeting/f1` - The South Asian/Hindu overrepresentation explanation for computer science's low "Christian religiosity" score is falsifiable — a re-analysis coding for religion rather than just major would confirm or refute it. `#atom/fleeting/f1` - No chapter markers or on-screen chart data described in the transcript; a data-heavy audio conversation like this one needs a linked text summary to be usable by someone who can't see referenced graphs. `#atom/fleeting/f1` ### → Things 3 (max 2 actions) - [ ] Find and name the actual roommate-vs-professor political-influence study before citing Burge's claim anywhere. `#action/h3` - [ ] Draft a short note applying the selection-vs-causation check to the "college destroys faith" claims that come up in NAR-adjacent contexts. `#action/h2` <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/Are College Degrees Changing Modern Christian Belief Ryan Burge.md|Are College Degrees Changing Modern Christian Belief? | Ryan Burge by Ryan Burge]] ## Highlights - right? like what your major is not just chosen by you like because you wanted to be that major. Like if your dad's a doctor, you're more likely to be a doctor. If you're from Southeast Asia, you're kind of nudged toward the hard sciences. You're not nudged toward the toward the humanities. If both your parents grew up, you know, in New York City, you're more inclined to be an arts major. Like, let's just be real about this. People, students don't like when 18-year-olds don't just sit around and go, "What do I really want to be?" You know what I mean? It's it's a confluence of all these factors and influences that ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1sjghha6aa1rra2xk8bzkf9)) - Note: H2 — the selection-not-causation mechanism underlying the whole episode: family background, ethnicity, and geography shape major choice before religiosity is ever measured. #atom/literature/h2 - Tags: atom/literature/h2 - there's more and more data coming out in my corner of the world in political science that says that politics is the master identity. Like it it's the first lens that we look at the world through and then everything lives downstream of that. So you can see this by the way in modern American politics. Like how many, you know, evangelical Republicans will will really step out and say, "Well, you know what? I believe in this, but the Bible disagrees with me." Like a political issue. You never see that anymore, right? It's like it's amazing what happens when people read the Bible through a partisan lens because they can justify or not justify anything. Like I had a friend the other day who goes, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1sjgeczab8908ga7ew3zt2f)) - Note: H1 — the episode's strongest claim: politics functions as the organizing "master identity" ahead of religion for many Americans, illustrated by the vanishing rate of evangelicals breaking from party lines on scriptural grounds. #atom/literature/h1 - Tags: atom/literature/h1 - I just please like say that like as plainly as possible? There's actually data on this, FYI. And the data says your college roommate is more impactful to your politics than your professors are. I can't even get my students to show up to class or read the even read the syllabus for God's sake, Sky, let alone change their minds about anything. You know, like you you the problem is I think what happens is evangelicals send their kid to a state school, the kid comes back as an atheist or a liberal or whatever and they want to blame us for that. >> I don't think that's what happened, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1sjgnfh583g01marzssbysy)) - Note: H3 — rebuts the "professors indoctrinate students" narrative, but cites an unnamed study ("there's actually data on this") without naming source or sample — an appeal to unspecified authority worth flagging even though the underlying point may be correct. #atom/literature/h3 #fallacy/unsupported-citation - Tags: atom/literature/h3, fallacy/unsupported-citation