Culture wars are alive and well on college campuses — GetReligion
The data indicates that the more right-leaning religious traditions tend to find college campuses that are to their left and the same is true of those at the other end of the political spectrum.
I do want to point out the LDS here, because they buck the trend a little bit. Recall that they are the most Republican religious group in the data, however, they are not as far from the mean on their college campus compared to Protestants and Christians. That’s largely a function of the fact that the LDS attend more conservative schools, like BYU.
Atheists and agnostics tend to be outliers on their campuses as well. The average atheist is .8 more to the left on a scale that runs from 1 to 7. That’s a bigger gap than Protestants feel on their campuses. When it comes to distance from the mainstream, atheists and agnostics are clearly leading on this metric.
However, there was a series of questions in the data that I really wanted to zero in on because I think they give us a pretty clear picture of what types of issues are driving self censorship and uncomfortable conversations. Here’s the setup:
Which of the following issues, if any, would you say are difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on your campus?
They are given a list of 13 topics (I excluded Ukraine because it wasn’t that interesting). These touched on all kinds of issues — social, racial, foreign policy, religion.
I plotted the mean political partisanship of each university in the data on the x-axis. (By the way, I excluded Hillsdale and Liberty because they were just such outliers.) Then I calculated the share who said that each issue was hard to talk about on campus on the y-axis. I color coded the school based on region and the size of the circles relate to the sample size of each college.
This was a “holy cow” graph for me because it tells such a clear story.
CONTINUE READING: “The Culture War is Alive and Well on College Campuses” by Ryan Burge on his Graphs About Religion newsletter on Substack.
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