a) Many small and medium businessmen fall in the “No College” category; however, I consider them middle (or even upper-middle) class

b) I think that there are relevant differences in religiosity (and many other things) between “owners” and “employes”, independently of education and income:

b1) the regions of Portugal were rural populations are mostly small/micro landowners are much more religious than the regions were most people are wage-labours

b2) in the educated classes, the secularism (and social liberalism in general) are more common in the families of “professionals”, teachers, etc., while, in the families of business-owners, it is relatively common the curriculum “Catholic school as a child/teenager, a degree in the Catholic University, and member of the Opus Dei”

My theory if that family business (be a miserable small farm in the mountains or a big corporation) favor enlarged family (while being employed favors nuclear family), and enlarged family favors social conservatism

I don’t know if the GSS has a variable style “works in a family business”, but perhaps WRKSLF could be a proxy for that?

This wasn’t really true in the 1960s and into the 70s, and as more and more people get college degrees, it will become less true again, but right now, having a bachelor’s degree is the best readily-available class marker for this sort of statistical work. Better might be “is your usual work one which requires you to have a bachelor’s degree or higher?”, but that’s not a question asked by large, publicly available surveys like the GSS.

For more about class in the U.S., read Paul Fussell’s _Class_ – it’s a little dated in terms of the actual class markers, but the attitudes and ideas are still pretty current.

My understanding of “class” is that it is more defined by income level than by education. You’ve sifted them out by how religious they are, and how educated they are. I would have sifted them by how religious they are and how much money they make every year.

I’ll concede that, yes, overall, there is a correlation between whether or not someone has higher education than high school and how much money they pull down in their profession or job. But I think if you want to to look at “class” then income is the better defining criteria. There are many folks with bachelor degrees whose incomes are low enough that they may not be considered middle class, say, below $30,000 per year.

The study does seem to indicate a positive correlation between education level and secularism. What if you resorted the data using income level? It would be interesting to see what differences emerge.

Each and every one? You must be a pretty smooth talker to get all the theists on Earth to disclose their feelings.

I went to church for years, and was even a Sunday school teacher for the better part of a school year, after clearly coming to an internal belief that God did not exist. If you can be at peace with being hypocritical and just don’t care much about the metaphysics of it all, there are a variety of benefits that can come from being affilated with a church and it is possible to think of church rituals as cultural rituals that don’t call for any more sincerity of metaphysical belief than rituals related to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Groundhog day, and other elements of vestigal folk belief and paganism. I couldn’t come to peace with that, but I am probably in the minority in that regard.

Way too often secularists(who want to attack Christians) and preachers(who want to scare and shame congregations) use statistics based off of self description instead of church attendance.

For instance, the idea that there is no difference in the divorce rate between practicing Christians and everyone else is complete nonsense but it is an idea repeated over and over again.

http://brewright.blogspot.com/2006/12/christian-divorce-rates.html