Is it smart to believe in God? The relationship of religiosity with education and intelligence.

The relationship of religiosity with education and intelligence was investigated with data from the World Values Survey covering a total of 345,743 respondents in 96 countries. The individual-level relationship of education with religious belief was slightly but significantly negative in the majority of countries, although its relationship with religious attendance was substantially less negative. At the country level, religious belief has independent negative relationships with intelligence and a history of communist rule, but not with educational exposure and log-transformed GDP. The results suggest that a weak negative relationship of religiosity with education is culturally amplified into far larger differences at the country level, and that the effect of education is mediated by cognitive skills. The results suggest that secularization during the 20th century has been driven by cognitive rather than economic development