Five myths about white people, such as ... working-class whites are more religious than upper-class whites
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Working-class whites are more religious than upper-class whites.
This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by liberals who conflate the religious right with the working class, and by conservative evangelicals who inveigh against the godless ruling class.
Certainly, white intellectual elites have become extremely secular. However, as a whole, the white upper middle class has long displayed higher attendance at worship services and stronger allegiance to their religious faith than the white working class -- going all the way back to the first data collected in the 1920s and continuing today.
Since the early 1970s, white America has become more secular overall, but the drop has been much greater in the working classes. As of the 2000s, the General Social Survey indicates, nearly 32 percent of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 attended church regularly, compared with 17 percent of the white working class in the same age group.
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Elite colleges are bastions of white upper-middle-class privilege.
It's common to assume that upper-middle-class white kids win more slots in top universities than middle-class or working-class students not because they're smarter, but because their parents can afford to send them to the best grade schools and high schools, pay for SAT prep courses or make hefty donations to colleges.
There are two problems with this logic. First, ever since the landmark Coleman Report on educational equality back in 1966, scholars have had a hard time demonstrating that attending fancy elementary and secondary schools raises students' academic performance. And on average, those highly touted test-preparation courses boost students' SAT scores by only a few dozen points -- a finding consistent across rigorous studies of test-prep programs.
Second, educational attainment is correlated with intelligence. (The mean IQ of white Americans with just a high school diploma is about 99; the mean IQ of whites with a professional degree is about 125.) And children's IQ is tied to that of their parents.
First Published February 19, 2012 12:00 am
