Secular Education and the Religious Profile of Contemporary Black and White Americans

This paper deals with the relationships among social status, race, and religion in the contemporary United States. The religious data came from the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification and a sub-sample of 84,469 non-Hispanic white and 8,859 non-Hispanic black adult respondents distributed across 14 religious groups. Educational attainment, i.e., high school and college graduation rates, was used as a measure of social status. Three issues were examined. First, does the historical pattern of social ranking among religious groups still exist in the 1990s? Second, do African-Americans fit the dominant pattern? Third, do national white-black educational disparities occur across all religious groups?