Beyond Hogwarts: Higher Education and Contemporary Pagans1
Issued Date: 12 Aug 2014
Abstract
As a number of different studies carried out in the second half of the twentieth century indicated, the people who become involved in Paganism tend to be more educated than average. In the present study, we confirm this pattern utilizing data from the national censuses of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. In addition to being more educated than the average citizens of their respective nations, Pagans also tend to be more educated than members of such mainline denominations as Anglicans, Presbyterians and Catholics.
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References
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Orion, Loretta. Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived. Prospect Heights, Il.: Waveland Press, 1995.
Wilson, Bryan, and Karel Dobbelaere. A Time to Chant: The Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Berger, Helen, Evan A. Leach, and Leigh S. Shaffer. Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
Carpenter, D. Denis, and Selena Fox. Pagan Spirit Gathering 1991 tribal survey results. Circle Network News 45 (1992): 20.
Dawson, Lorne L. “Who Joins New Religions and Why: Twenty Years of Research and What Have We Learned?” In Cults and New Religious Movements: A Reader, edited by Lorne L. Dawson, 116–30. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Day, Abby. “Euro-American Ethnic and Native Christians: Believing in Belonging.” In Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular, edited by Abby Day, Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. Cotter, 61–74. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013.
Fuller, Robert C. Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0195146808.001.0001
Jorgensen, Danny L., and Scott E. Russell. “American Neopaganism: The Participants’ Social Identities.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38, no. 3 (1999): 325–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1387755
Kirkpatrick, R. George, Rich Rainey and Kathryn Rubi. “An Empirical Study of Wiccan Religion in Postindustrial Society.“ Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 14, no. 1 (1986): 33–38.
Kosmin, Barry A., Ariela Keysar, Ryan Cragun and Juhem Navarro-Rivera. American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population. Hartford: Trinity College, 2009.
Lewis, James R. “Cracks in the Conversion Network Paradigm.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 3, no. 2 (2012): 143–62
——. “Fit for the Devil: Toward an Understanding of ‘Conversion’ to Satanism.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 1, no. 1 (2010): 117–38.
——. “New Religion Adherents: An Overview of Anglophone Census and Survey Data.” Marburg Journal of Religious Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 1–17. http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/mjr/pdf/2004/lewis2004.pdf
——. “The Pagan Explosion Revisited: A Statistical Post Mortem on the Teen Witch Fad.” The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 14, no. 1 (2012): 128–39.
——. “The Youth Crisis Model of Conversion: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed?” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions. Forthcoming 2014.
Lewis, James R., and Andreas Baumann. “New Religions and the New Zealand Census: Are Meaningful Generalizations about NRM Members Still Possible?” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 2, no. 2 (2011): 179–200.
Orion, Loretta. Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived. Prospect Heights, Il.: Waveland Press, 1995.
Wilson, Bryan, and Karel Dobbelaere. A Time to Chant: The Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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