It’s not difficult to see what parents find so appealing about religious schools. Some put stock in the inherent academic superiority of private academies, but many others prioritize what they see as their character-building edge over traditional district schools: tighter discipline, a unitary culture, and strong ideological foundations. Of the many virtues imparted to students by religious education, though, few would have guessed that one would be religious tolerance. This new white paper suggests that Americans who have attended some form of religious school are less likely to harbor anti-Semitic animus as adults.
The study cleverly combines multiple strands of inquiry from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative sample of 1,300 American adults conducted by the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research. That survey’s administrators queried their subjects on the variety of their K–12 schooling experiences—but also asked them to respond to a series of eleven anti-Semitic stereotypes, which were selected from the Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 analysis of anti-Semitic attitudes around the world. After striking from the sample those participants who had been homeschooled or received the bulk of their education abroad, the authors were left with a healthy data set of adults from both (predominately Christian) parochial and public schools.
The findings indicate that those who had received some portion of religious schooling were more likely to find fault with anti-Jewish sentiments than those who had attended only public schools. For each of the defamatory statements (for instance: “Jews have too much power in the business world”; “Jews in the United States are more loyal to Israel than to this country”), former students of religiously affiliated schools were between 9 and 18 percent more likely to disagree than their secularly educated peers. For a bit of context, this range of difference is roughly equivalent to the impact of a respondent’s parents having attended college rather than dropping out of high school.
Those attuned to the issues of economic inequality may be apt to wonder: Could these results possibly reflect the class distinctions that afford only some children the privilege of attending expensive private schools, either secular or religious? After all, kids from affluent families would seem intuitively less likely to fall prey to various forms of prejudice. According to the authors, however, these factors don’t play a significant role. “If we separate the effect of attending those religiously affiliated schools from secular private schools, we find that secular private schools are not significantly different from secular public schools in their effect on anti-Semitism,” they write. “The private school benefit we observe for lowering anti-Semitism is really a religious school benefit.”
It’s still hard to tell whether these survey responses point to a hidden advantage of religious education or simply a hidden advantage of religiosity. According to a recent and well-publicized Pew study, Jews are now the most popular individual religious group, and they are viewed most favorably by members of other faiths (69 percent of white evangelicals and 63 percent of white mainline Protestants offered a favorable impression of Jews, versus just 58 percent of those who characterized themselves as agnostic or unaffiliated). To the extent that these philo-Semitic believers are also more likely to send their children to religious schools, this tendency may be skewing the author’s conclusions. But if any Jewish education observers were anxious that such institutions were spreading sectarian animosity, that fear would seem to be unfounded.
SOURCE: Jay P. Greene and Cari A. Bogulski, “The Effect of Public and Private Schooling on Anti-Semitism,” American Enterprise Institute (November 2015).
