Ben Shapiro Breaks Down ‘Fascinating’ Study On State Of Religion In U.S.

Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro broke down a “fascinating” new study that showed that religious belief tended to be associated with key indicators of a successful life, including education level and marital status.

Shapiro made the comments on his Tuesday podcast in reference to an article put out by Ryan Burge, a political scientist who studies religion in American public life. Burge wrote in a recent Substack article that religion in the U.S. had become an “enclave” for those who have college degrees, stable marriages and children, and middle-class income.

“And this is sort of a fascinating phenomenon to look at. There are a bunch of charts that he puts up to show this. So, for example, he puts up a chart showing that as education increases, religious practice or religious belief also increases to a certain extent, which is sort of the reverse of what we’ve been told,” Shapiro said.

The Daily Wire co-founder went on to discuss how this fact was the opposite of how the media typically portrayed religious Americans.

“What the media tells you is that it’s the most educated among us who never go to church, and it’s the least educated among us who always go to church. And that actually is not true. When you identify that marital status, what you find is that married people go to religious services weekly at a far higher rate than people of any other marital status,” he said.

In his article, Burge said that the key takeaway from the numbers would be that churches should be more welcoming to those who do not have as successful lives. Shapiro said that there was an inverse way to read the data as well.

“But there’s a way to read this in reverse, and that is that the rules that the elite of our society, marital elite, the parental elite, the income elite, the educationally [elite] have applied to themselves, are very different than the rules they’ve promulgated to the rest of society. And you see this very clearly in the social science data,” Shapiro said, referencing Charles Murray’s landmark book “Coming Apart.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP

He added that the media was pushing a narrative of success that was the opposite of reality, saying that this message was harmful to society at large.

“Now, if you look at the media or if you look at the way the government treats this, it’s precisely the opposite. They pretend that the people who are most likely to be successful in our society are single female Berkeley graduates with no children who hate God and hate the church. Those are the people who are most likely to be successful if you watch TV,” Shapiro said.