We know that educational and religious institutions have profound effects on citizenship. But what happens to citizenship when education is religious?

Until recently, social scientists knew little about the real impact of faith-based education on civic outcomes. Recent work in the United States and Canada has begun to fill this gap—and with some unexpected results.

Kevin R. den Dulk

To understand these results requires a sense of scale. The sheer size and scope of faith-based schools in both the United States and Canada means these institutions will have a civic impact, for better or worse. In the United States, approximately 10 percent of all elementary and secondary students attend private schools. Most of those schools—over two-thirds by —have a religious identity. The Catholic Church operates the largest faith-based educational system in the United States, serving at least 2 million students in over 7,100 elementary and secondary schools; evangelical and other Protestant schools enroll 1.7 million children in more than 15,000 smaller schools. The landscape in Canada is less clear, largely because of wide variation across provinces. The best estimate is that 8 percent attend private schools, and perhaps twice that number attend publicly funded “separate” schools that have a denominational linkage.

But the scale of Christian and other forms of nonpublic education does not necessarily suggest they are seedbeds for vibrant, healthy citizenship. In fact, some commentators suggest the opposite. Many theorists worry that faith-based schools present a challenge to democratic citizenship. Their arguments come in different forms, but they tend to assume that without some kind of strong state control, schools will become either inward-looking enclaves or bastions of reactionary intolerance. In either case, a school would fail to cultivate the skills of democratic deliberation in a pluralistic society. Multiply this concern by the size and scope of religious education in the United States and Canada, and one can quickly imagine why critics worry about the impact of Christian and other schools.

But are they right? In general, recent research suggests otherwise. On the one hand, Christian schools today appear to be pushing their charges to engage culture outside the comfortable environs of church, school, and family. On the other hand, in contrast to the conservative Christian movement of the 1980s and 1990s, Christian schools today are not especially political. Schools can vary a great deal, but the general message is that Catholic and Protestant schools are not centers of antidemocratic thought or practice. Far from it; they often produce citizens who are more committed to and engaged in civic life than their counterparts.

Many theorists worry that faith-based schools present a challenge to democratic citizenship. Recent research suggests otherwise.

Consider the effects of Christian education on the “social capital” and civic skills that make democracy work. A suggests that children educated in American religious schools generally match or surpass graduates from nonreligious settings on a wide range of civic indicators, including tolerance, political knowledge, and other direct measures of civic values and skills. In addition, researchers from the Ontario-based in the United States and Canada that reveal, among other things, that graduates of Protestant schools tend to have a strong sense of self-efficacy (the belief that one’s participation matters) and commitment to relationships, two dispositions that are important to any type of collective action. (Graduates of Catholic schools scored similarly to those adults who attended public schools.) The picture can get murky (for example, the Cardus group finds that graduates from Protestant schools are more deferential to authority than others, which could be interpreted as a problem for citizenship or a virtue), but the larger point is that neither Protestant nor Catholic schools in either country appear to be undermining the key dispositions of democratic citizens. Indeed, those schools often support those dispositions.

We see similar patterns in terms of actual participation. My colleague Jonathan Hill and I found, for example, that than adults educated in any other school type. (Another interesting finding: Adults who had been homeschooled as adolescents were far less likely to volunteer than Protestant-, Catholic-, or public-educated adults.) But in terms of direct political involvement, the evidence is mixed. In the Cardus study of the United States, researchers found that graduates of Protestant schools were less likely than their counterparts to give to political parties or campaigns, volunteer for a party, or participate in various forms of political protest. Their conclusion is an intriguing contrast with that Catholic graduates tend to turn out to vote at higher rates than graduates of other school types.

These are just a few examples of a developing literature, and a great deal more research still needs to be conducted. We know enough, however, to conclude that Christian schools generally have a neutral to positive effect on civic outcomes. What is less clear is why Christian schools have these effects. It is not simply that Christian schools attract students who already have solid habits of citizenship, because all the studies cited above include controls for typical sociodemographic and interpersonal characteristics of good citizens apart from school type. We can say with confidence that the schools themselves add value beyond the preexisting qualities of their students. So what is that value?

The answers have been elusive. My work with Jon Hill is illustrative. We posited two plausible theories to explain the effect of school type on volunteering in early adulthood. One theory suggests that school types vary in the nature and scope of opportunities they provide their students. Some schools might be more effective at exposing students to volunteering experiences within school, linking students to volunteer experiences outside of school, or creating rich networks of peers who reinforce a positive view of volunteering. Another theory suggests that school types vary in how well they shape motivations for volunteering. Some schools might be more effective at developing prosocial orientations and a sense of empowerment in their students, or they might provide extrinsic inducements (for example, mandatory “volunteering”) to expose students to volunteer experiences. But while these are plausible theories, the empirical data did not lend strong support to either of them as explanations of school-types effects.

Whatever the reasons, the evidence is mounting of a vital civic role to faith-based schools.