This makes sense, given that if you major in theology you are likely going to a small unaccredited school with only a few dozen or a few hundred students from very similar backgrounds.
I'd expect that if you looked at religious studies majors instead, you wouldn't see any especially unusual marriage patterns.
> Plus, you're more likely to have strong religious beliefs, and most religions promote marriage.
Theology is the study of religion. You don't need to believe in religion to study it. I knew several theology students at university and none of them were religious.
Do you think people studying Greek mythology are more likely to believe in Zeus?
They weren't saying all people who study theology were religious, just more likely to be religious. Priests generally do need a bachelors degree and it would make sense if they gravitated towards theology vs other degrees.
Think you're referring to religious studies / history of religion / philosophy courses? 'Theology' studies usually refers to the courses taken to become practitioners of a particular religion - it's what you study to become a pastor / priest or the equivalent in your chosen religion.
It’s very unlikely you’d become a pastor with just a BA. The only normal cases where that happens is in rural churches, or if one goes back to their local church. Otherwise, the trend and job requirements for an Associate/Assistant Pastor is a Masters of Divinity or the pursuant of during employement.
Theology is just looking at the Study of God, god, or gods, depending on your schools background and faculty. If you go to an interfaith program like Harvard’s it is very different from going to study theology at Liberty University.
Masters of Divinity is the study of the actual execution of the faith organization, that be a Church if Christian, Temple if Buddhist and etc. That’s covers from Theology, Nonprofit taxes, Counseling, and more.
You may be thinking of religious studies. Theology is basically the study of Christian beliefs about Christianity. Or more generally the study of what people within a specific religion believe / practice.
Religious studies is an actual academic field, theology is not.
I don't think so. The theology department at my university studies 'Buddhism, Christian history and theology, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Chinese and Japanese religions'. It's not affiliated with any religion, and as I said, my friends studying it weren't even religious themselves.
In some contexts, scholars pursue theology as an academic discipline without formal affiliation to any particular church (though members of staff may well have affiliations to churches), and without focussing on ministerial training.
In some contemporary contexts, a distinction is made between theology, which is seen as involving some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied, and religious studies, which by contrast is normally seen as requiring that the question of the truth or falsehood of the religious traditions studied be kept outside its field. Religious studies involves the study of historical or contemporary practices or of those traditions' ideas using intellectual tools and frameworks that are not themselves specifically tied to any religious tradition and that are normally understood to be neutral or secular.
There is a difference between theology and religious studies.
Were they founded as a Christian college? If so, it's possible that they changed the curriculum at some point and just kept the name of the department for historical reasons. E.g. Harvard has a theology program, but my understanding is that what you're going to get there is a modern liberal academic perspective on religion.
Probably more schools than you are aware of (based on this comment) began with religious purposes -- including Harvard, founded "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University#Colonial)
I realize that most US colleges were created for religious reasons, that's why I asked that. In fact the public school system in the U.S. was also created for religious reasons, to prevent kids from being tempted by satan.
Now, since this website has plenty of international visitors, we should probably endeavor to be more specific and aware of potential differences, but there's definitely a heavy American bent to the visitors.
And, in America, Theology and Religious Studies are quite different.
http://www.ats.edu/ is one of the larger accreditation programs in the US for Theology, and you'll notice two very important bits right on the front page:
"The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) is a membership organization of more than 270 graduate schools that conduct postbaccalaureate professional and academic degree programs to educate persons for the practice of ministry and for teaching and research in the theological disciplines."
and
"ATS membership is open to schools in the Christian and Jewish faiths."
Practice of ministry, and open to Christian and Jewish faiths. This is very different from the type of theology program you are talking about. Your theology programs are our religious studies. Our theology programs are primarily focused on Judeo-Christian beliefs and preparing people to work as ministers in that field.
I’ll echo what another poster said. I was one class shy of a religion minor in college, but I’m an atheist (although was raised catholic). To this day, I spend a lot of time learning more about theology, and it’s entirely independent of my personal religious opinions.
I’m not sure how strongly correlated the study of theology is with personal strong identification of a particular theological belief.
Theology is not present in universities, religious studies is (edit: by theology I meant the study of God, not the study of religion: that's not quite right as you can see in my replies). Theology is taught in special schools, because it fundamentally does not work the same way as other studies. In Universities, there is an expectation that no specific category of ideas should be preferred above any other unless it beats out its competition on the grounds of convincingness or support by evidence. Learning new theology is quite close to learning anything else, but research is very different!
In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities). So you've got faith, evidence, and convincingness, and their followers find it difficult to talk.
There are religious studies departments named theology, and there are religious schools that also teach enough other classes to be considered universities, but no secular University would have a department that, say, gave you a Minister's license for a specific denomination. (That's because it would require you to focus on things too specific.) I am implicitly separating "the study of human religion" from "the study of this, true, specific religion" in choosing words for religious studies and theology.
In Alex's assertion above (the one a level above the one I replied to), I believe he was using Theology to mean the schools that give you Minister's licenses, and religious studies to mean the secular study of religion.
> There are religious studies departments named theology
I think your argument is trailing off into absurdity here.
If a department from a reputable university like Oxford calls itself the theology department, you're telling me that they're wrong and they aren't actually a theology department, they're something else instead? Do you think we should let them know their mistake?
> If a department from a reputable university like Oxford calls itself the theology department, you're telling me that they're wrong and they aren't actually a theology department, they're something else instead?
If Harvard was founded a hundred years earlier they'd likely call their chemistry degree a bachelor's of alchemy, yet we'd all understand that they had just retained the name for historic reasons. Does anyone actually use the word theology to mean the secular academic study of religion?
But the major would still be called 'theology', which is the relevant fact in relation to these statistics. And yes, people do use the word theology to mean that. I mean, check the first two sentences of the wikipedia article:
> Theology is the critical study of the nature of the divine. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries.
Or see what theology departments have to say about it:
It's really no different than going to medical school, where you can take a class on homeopathy and probably even do a concentration in complementary and alternative medicine, but they sure as hell aren't going to offer degrees in either of those.
>The link to the Oxford PDF supports what I'm saying, that they don't offer degrees in theology. Instead they call the program 'theology and religion.'
I really don't see how that supports what you're saying. If theology was regarded as equivalent to homeopathy (which is a comparison you could only make if you were completely ignorant of theology), then Oxford would not be offering degrees in "theology and X" any more than they offer degrees in "homeopathy and X".
See also lots of other references to theology degrees that you could easily find by googling:
> Theology is not present in universities, religious studies is. Theology is taught in special schools, because it fundamentally does not work the same way as other studies
Your comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of what you claim to be talking about. Theology was one of the most prestigious subjects taught in the original medieval universities (many of which are the most prestigious contemporary ones, e.g. Oxford), and continues to be taught in them today.
>Choice of seven papers across four subject areas, from which students select freely
Biblical studies
Systematic theology and ethics
History of religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism)
Religion and religions (Contemporary Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Hinduism)
Within my choice of words, I would call this religious studies. I'm reserving theology for when you focus on a specific religion, and the idea is that that religion is actually true (as opposed to studying many religions like you'd read many authors in an English degree.) Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)
> Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)
I'd say so. Esoteric personal definitions for established terms, even if they make a lot of sense to you, don't typically lead to productive discussions. It's probably best not to wade into one, correcting people, unless you actually understand the vocabulary.
I don't think this is the case. I think it's the difference between say sociology of philosophers, and philosophy. One approaches the field from the outside, one approaches it from within. Neither are particularly more rational than the other, but they instead focus differently. Or maybe anthropology and history is a better comparision.
Philosophers are not expected to believe any one specific theory of metaphysics, nor are historians expected to think anything specific happened except for what's directly supported by evidence. Sociology of religion would belong in a university on account of having plenty of material evidence, along with anthropology and sociology of philosophy as they study there respective subjects. Theology, if it were taken as a study of religion as a phenomenon, would fit in universities. Theology, taken as a study of any specific religion that was supposed to be true, wouldn't.
All academic fields have presuppositions that practitioners are required to start with. Your own example suggests historians would need to accept empirical evidence (it gets more complicated from there: what evidence, gathered by or attested to by whom?) -- that's a starting point. Philosophy can't make much headway without first pulling in some dependencies like Western Logic.
Your claim that Anthropology belongs due to "plenty of material evidence" comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) meeting your level of sufficiency; your claim that Theology does not belong likewise comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) NOT meeting your level of sufficiency. In other words, if one were to start from the presupposition that God didn't exist, your claim Theology does not belong would be true. Starting from the presupposition that God does exist, your claim would be ludicrous. Theology takes the second presupposition; in the light of the worldview of those who accept that presupposition, it belongs.
Presumably, there are also presuppositions that put homeopathy in universities, along with pantheology, shamanism, and even things that nobody currently believes (but could, if they invented and then accepted new presuppositions). However, philosophers will at least claim to be able to arrive at logic instead of just using it (I'm not sure if this is true, but culturally they value not assuming anything implicitly.) Moreover, science definitely has features that require no preconditioning in order to see for yourself. Even your first chemistry class will involve experiments that you don't need to put yourself in a trance in order to observe the results of. So, while I'm sure that Soplism has convinced many that there's no telling what's really true (and by extension, that any time a group agrees on something they've arrived at it through purely social means), there's definitely a bunch of things out there that you can check for yourself. Is it a presuppositon to say something like, "there is a world?" Some could argue that it is, but it's definitely different from saying something like, "there is a second world that nobody can observe or interact with."
>>In Universities, there is an expectation that no specific category of ideas should be preferred above any other unless it beats out its competition on the grounds of convincingness or support by evidence.
Your claim here is not infrequently made. But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints. We can see cherished categories of ideas in the past; it is harder to see weighted ideas within the era we live.
>>Learning new theology is quite close to learning anything else, but research is very different!
Classics is the study of what was written and what they meant by it; they can't be polled. English/Literature is also looking at what an author wrote and what they meant by it (sigh: excluding postmodernism). French/German/Latin/etc grammar is looking at what words signify when placed in certain orders. The Philosophy department does not need to conduct experiments or observations. If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.
>>In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities).
>But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints.
It's assumed that they became dominant somehow, usually by being convincing. It's almost tautological.
>If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.
Well, classicists do sometimes dig in to new documents, although rarely. Likewise, literature has a constant stream of new material, if they ended up with a model that perfectly predicted everything that was said about the human condition before 1980, it'd be falsified in a few days by some new paperback on the self-help shelf. Evidence doesn't necessarily have to come from experiments, only observations. see: astronomy.
However, those fields (not astronomy, but English and Classics) in my exposure have, like philosophy, mainly have been run on the convincingness of arguments. So, one side of the divide has evidence, and the other side primarily relies on writing convincing arguments.
>Links about scienceism.
Truthfully, I never said evidence was better than convincingness (although I do think it is), but decades of hardline scienceists have trained everyone to think that saying "evidence" means you don't value philosophy. It would be a bit funny if I didn't, because I don't think any "evidence" has come up once in this entire discussion. How could it? We're on the convincingness side of the branch right now.
I'd say this is regional. I've met lots of people in the south with a theology background and it is commonly seen as a good thing and I'd say atheists experience being ostracized far more often when a huge portion of your coworkers and children in your kids' class belong to mega churches where all socializing occurs. Granted, the exact opposite happens in other places in the US. It's all bad, but was just pointing out that your experience isn't typical of what I've seen living in multiple southern states.
I think the claim is stated as a conjecture. The linked article is not studying what you're saying, can you provide a link proving that there is no correlation between major and school size (ideally bucketed into a log scale instead of a blind regression or something like that)?
I think even possibly more of a contributor than quantity is "theology major" is a much bigger part of a person's self-identity than "business major". The "business major" (like "communications major") often acts as a neutral default for "I don't know what I really want to do with my life but I still need to get my 4-year piece of paper."
I wonder if there is a degree of separation from other students influencing the homogamy here: theology is often taught in a separate school of Divinity (eg Harvard), and at least some large universities have separate schools of Agriculture and Architecture ( eg Cornell).
I did my undergrad in the Cornell ag school. In practice it just meant having one class a semester in a different building. There wasn't any meaningful impact on my social life, other than becoming unusually proficient at identifying mushrooms. If you go through a super intensive program like architecture or medical school then that's going to have a huge impact on your life, but whether or not that program is in its own school probably doesn't matter.
I think ReligVoc is training to become a rabbi or minister or whatever. I haven't read the methodology of the actual survey, but I have a hard time believing that many religious studies majors would self-categorize themselves into the theology category rather than just checking off liberal arts or whatever.
The two people I know who teach theology teach at an accredited (Jesuit) university with about eight thousand students. Now, as it happens, one of them is a nun, so she isn't marrying anybody. Not sure about the spouse of the other, but they met well after he had tenure.
I didn't notice any control for whether the couples went to the same school. It's a well worn trope within Christian circles that people go to christian colleges to find a spouse.
It is a well-worn trope, but it's not just within christian colleges. I've seen it at several universities that have nothing to do with religious schools.
Even then, I think a lot of that is just observational bias from the life situation of people in their early twenties, which is when people often start to settle down. So the most inclined to settle down just happen to be in college.
Thanks! How did you get these? I tried opening the images in a new tab to see if they had been artificially resized, but they had been compressed to all hell.
I'd like to see whether there's a correlation here between gender imbalance in the particular subject and the marriage rate. I suspect theology is a heavily male-dominated subject, since a large number of the associated careers are either formally male-only or traditionally male-dominated.
I'm wondering if this might be a case where the men outnumber women so much that a high proportion of the women in the field can easily find suitable men to pair off with without going further than their college.
Checking whether other male-dominated subjects have similarly high intra-major marriage rates would test this(I don't know what they are, offhand, but I suspect a lot of STEM subjects might be there), and also doing the gender-reversed study (where it goes by the first marriage of the husband) might get similar results with more female-heavy subjects.
Unless graduates suddenly have their genders reassigned to balance the ratio in their field, this is still relevant. It's not a coincidence that male-dominated fields draw workers from male-dominated majors.
It seems to fit my impression too. But it feels like for STEM this would apply to women.
Most of my girl colleagues from college are married to classmates or other engineers.
For men, they usually are married with women from other areas.
I can't seem to find any hard numbers at the moment, but I believe that the gender ratio for theology is fairly close to even (or, at least quite a bit closer than engineering or other male-dominated disciplines).
Keep in mind that, while there are variations among the individual majors, but in general women tend to be over-represented in the humanities. Also, relatively few humanities majors actually end up working in a discipline that requires their major.
I don't know if it is male dominated, Missionary activity increasingly is dominated by single women, and while pastors and leadership are often male, the entire parachurch and support aspect is probably female dominated.
Religion in the west for the most part is intensely driven by the needs of women, and men for the most part take a figurehead role as leader, while being conspicuously absent from the rank and file. You can look at Christian culture overall to see this, everything from Christian bookstores to Christian movies is overwhelmingly targeted to women, who make up the majority of the market.
If anything my bet is the competition for men is fierce, and ministry tends to be something many women choose instead.
Also, mathematicians! I don't have precise statistics, but anectodally when I was in my (under)graduate years it seemed like every mathematician was dating another one, unlike what I saw happen in other faculties
Theology majors may represent a greater proportion of believers in pre-marital sexual abstinance than do business majors, therefore weighting the odds in favor of marriage.
I don't believe you need a massive set of data to reason that people who study theology are more likely to be religiously inclined though. So I'd say grandparents theory appears more likely.
Some of the context missing is many theology students intend to go into the ministry -- becoming a pastor. Or a missionary. Many of the people on this track are intensely passionate about this calling.
Many couples pair up because their goals coincide and they decide to do this together as life long partners.
Or, to put even more simply, the intersection of their shared values is much much higher than business majors.
For a similar chart (that is potentially even harder to read and visualize somehow) this came out a couple years ago wrt people actually in certain occupations rather than for graduates in certain disciplines. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/
This is not surprising to me as I expect that the average pair of theology majors has more in common from the perspective of worldview and values, important things to share with a spouse, than the average pair of business majors.
Similarly but subtly different: you can also look at things that matter to people that are more or less common. Theology majors probably have more uncommon important values than business majors do. So it should be much easier to find a non-business major with matching values for business majors, than it is for non-theology majors and theology majors
This could very well just be from the small numbers in the survey and group.
In 2016, 1,920,718 people graduated with a BA in the USA. Of those 9,800 were theology majors. The survey data used only covered roughly 26,000 people, which would give us an expected 131 theology majors. 31% of those, or forty, married each other, giving us only twenty surveyed theology-theology marriages over an eight year period.
And there were even fewer Architecture graduates and marriages.
From my perspective, the point is that it's often very easy to come up with a post hoc explanation of why the effect you see is the one you would have expected; and, had the numbers come out the other way, there probably would have been just as many people who could explain why that was the expected outcome.
The power of statistics is that it abstracts away from what should be or what we'd expect to what is, whether it is intuitive or non-. The price paid for this power is that it's very easy to ask questions that seem reasonable but aren't, so that one gets an answer to a precisely defined, rigorous question but misinterprets it as an answer to a possibly ill defined, less rigorous question; and that, to me, is what the parent comment is forcing us to remember.
This statement is also interesting and I find it to be an accurate representation of most relationships that I'm aware of:
> High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their secretaries.
In Germany, for aspiring protestant pastors, you may share a position in a parish as a couple (both getting paid 50-75% of a full position, with the unspoken expectation of being available for 100%).
Also the protestant churches are extremely territorial (a vestige of the medieval political landscape), so if you take your exam in Hamburg, you are not necessarily welcome in Munich. But you could marry a bavarian spouse who is also a pastor, which can be your entry ticket into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bavaria...
As a finance major, I don't really want my wife whispering "EBITDA" in my ear late at night, so I can believe this conjecture even if the article isn't convincing.
> As a finance major, I don't really want my wife whispering "EBITDA" in my ear late at night, so I can believe this conjecture even if the article isn't convincing.
This seems like an unfortunate argument, since, to the extent that it is valid, it is surely also an argument against anyone marrying you who doesn't long to hear financial jargon whispered in her ear at night.
128 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI'd expect that if you looked at religious studies majors instead, you wouldn't see any especially unusual marriage patterns.
Theology is the study of religion. You don't need to believe in religion to study it. I knew several theology students at university and none of them were religious.
Do you think people studying Greek mythology are more likely to believe in Zeus?
That’s “Divinity” you’re thinking of
Theology is just looking at the Study of God, god, or gods, depending on your schools background and faculty. If you go to an interfaith program like Harvard’s it is very different from going to study theology at Liberty University.
Masters of Divinity is the study of the actual execution of the faith organization, that be a Church if Christian, Temple if Buddhist and etc. That’s covers from Theology, Nonprofit taxes, Counseling, and more.
You may be thinking of religious studies. Theology is basically the study of Christian beliefs about Christianity. Or more generally the study of what people within a specific religion believe / practice.
Religious studies is an actual academic field, theology is not.
In some contexts, scholars pursue theology as an academic discipline without formal affiliation to any particular church (though members of staff may well have affiliations to churches), and without focussing on ministerial training.
In some contemporary contexts, a distinction is made between theology, which is seen as involving some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied, and religious studies, which by contrast is normally seen as requiring that the question of the truth or falsehood of the religious traditions studied be kept outside its field. Religious studies involves the study of historical or contemporary practices or of those traditions' ideas using intellectual tools and frameworks that are not themselves specifically tied to any religious tradition and that are normally understood to be neutral or secular.
There is a difference between theology and religious studies.
Now, since this website has plenty of international visitors, we should probably endeavor to be more specific and aware of potential differences, but there's definitely a heavy American bent to the visitors.
And, in America, Theology and Religious Studies are quite different.
http://www.ats.edu/ is one of the larger accreditation programs in the US for Theology, and you'll notice two very important bits right on the front page:
"The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) is a membership organization of more than 270 graduate schools that conduct postbaccalaureate professional and academic degree programs to educate persons for the practice of ministry and for teaching and research in the theological disciplines."
and
"ATS membership is open to schools in the Christian and Jewish faiths."
Practice of ministry, and open to Christian and Jewish faiths. This is very different from the type of theology program you are talking about. Your theology programs are our religious studies. Our theology programs are primarily focused on Judeo-Christian beliefs and preparing people to work as ministers in that field.
The point was their search result led you to a lot of very respected institutions where these professors have chairs. Your search result does not.
I’m not sure how strongly correlated the study of theology is with personal strong identification of a particular theological belief.
https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse-...
That's unnecessarily harsh and probably wrong.
In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities). So you've got faith, evidence, and convincingness, and their followers find it difficult to talk.
2) We are obviously talking about students whose majors are titled 'theology', not your own personal definition of the word.
I think your argument is trailing off into absurdity here.
If a department from a reputable university like Oxford calls itself the theology department, you're telling me that they're wrong and they aren't actually a theology department, they're something else instead? Do you think we should let them know their mistake?
If Harvard was founded a hundred years earlier they'd likely call their chemistry degree a bachelor's of alchemy, yet we'd all understand that they had just retained the name for historic reasons. Does anyone actually use the word theology to mean the secular academic study of religion?
> Theology is the critical study of the nature of the divine. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries.
Or see what theology departments have to say about it:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/field/field_document...
See also that even though Harvard has a theology school, they don't actually offer undergrad degrees in theology: https://college.harvard.edu/academics/fields-study/concentra...
It's really no different than going to medical school, where you can take a class on homeopathy and probably even do a concentration in complementary and alternative medicine, but they sure as hell aren't going to offer degrees in either of those.
I really don't see how that supports what you're saying. If theology was regarded as equivalent to homeopathy (which is a comparison you could only make if you were completely ignorant of theology), then Oxford would not be offering degrees in "theology and X" any more than they offer degrees in "homeopathy and X".
See also lots of other references to theology degrees that you could easily find by googling:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/subjects/what-c...
Your comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of what you claim to be talking about. Theology was one of the most prestigious subjects taught in the original medieval universities (many of which are the most prestigious contemporary ones, e.g. Oxford), and continues to be taught in them today.
Theology's existence in universities is easy verify: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...
Biblical studies Systematic theology and ethics History of religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) Religion and religions (Contemporary Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Hinduism)
Within my choice of words, I would call this religious studies. I'm reserving theology for when you focus on a specific religion, and the idea is that that religion is actually true (as opposed to studying many religions like you'd read many authors in an English degree.) Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)
I'd say so. Esoteric personal definitions for established terms, even if they make a lot of sense to you, don't typically lead to productive discussions. It's probably best not to wade into one, correcting people, unless you actually understand the vocabulary.
Your claim that Anthropology belongs due to "plenty of material evidence" comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) meeting your level of sufficiency; your claim that Theology does not belong likewise comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) NOT meeting your level of sufficiency. In other words, if one were to start from the presupposition that God didn't exist, your claim Theology does not belong would be true. Starting from the presupposition that God does exist, your claim would be ludicrous. Theology takes the second presupposition; in the light of the worldview of those who accept that presupposition, it belongs.
Your claim here is not infrequently made. But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints. We can see cherished categories of ideas in the past; it is harder to see weighted ideas within the era we live.
>>Learning new theology is quite close to learning anything else, but research is very different!
Classics is the study of what was written and what they meant by it; they can't be polled. English/Literature is also looking at what an author wrote and what they meant by it (sigh: excluding postmodernism). French/German/Latin/etc grammar is looking at what words signify when placed in certain orders. The Philosophy department does not need to conduct experiments or observations. If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.
>>In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities).
Relevant:
https://xkcd.com/435/ - https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-bb61a9b12a5047d3ca4f28...
https://xkcd.com/903/ (the ALT text)
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/62872775579482112...
http://pintswithaquinas.com/comicstrips/the-error-of-scienti...
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/other/3
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/190
It's assumed that they became dominant somehow, usually by being convincing. It's almost tautological.
>If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.
Well, classicists do sometimes dig in to new documents, although rarely. Likewise, literature has a constant stream of new material, if they ended up with a model that perfectly predicted everything that was said about the human condition before 1980, it'd be falsified in a few days by some new paperback on the self-help shelf. Evidence doesn't necessarily have to come from experiments, only observations. see: astronomy.
However, those fields (not astronomy, but English and Classics) in my exposure have, like philosophy, mainly have been run on the convincingness of arguments. So, one side of the divide has evidence, and the other side primarily relies on writing convincing arguments.
>Links about scienceism.
Truthfully, I never said evidence was better than convincingness (although I do think it is), but decades of hardline scienceists have trained everyone to think that saying "evidence" means you don't value philosophy. It would be a bit funny if I didn't, because I don't think any "evidence" has come up once in this entire discussion. How could it? We're on the convincingness side of the branch right now.
I think even possibly more of a contributor than quantity is "theology major" is a much bigger part of a person's self-identity than "business major". The "business major" (like "communications major") often acts as a neutral default for "I don't know what I really want to do with my life but I still need to get my 4-year piece of paper."
The next highest majors are Agriculture and then Architecture. How does that fit into your just-so-story?
Philosophy/ReligiousStudies is the 8th most extreme outlier, right after Liberal Arts.
Further, the article isn't about majors of students getting married, it's about majors of graduates getting married.
Even then, I think a lot of that is just observational bias from the life situation of people in their early twenties, which is when people often start to settle down. So the most inclined to settle down just happen to be in college.
https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse-...
I use the Imagus addon which does this kind of stuff automatically
But there is some truth to it since many partners meet in college, if not at a job requiring a comparable educational background.
I'm wondering if this might be a case where the men outnumber women so much that a high proportion of the women in the field can easily find suitable men to pair off with without going further than their college.
Checking whether other male-dominated subjects have similarly high intra-major marriage rates would test this(I don't know what they are, offhand, but I suspect a lot of STEM subjects might be there), and also doing the gender-reversed study (where it goes by the first marriage of the husband) might get similar results with more female-heavy subjects.
Keep in mind that, while there are variations among the individual majors, but in general women tend to be over-represented in the humanities. Also, relatively few humanities majors actually end up working in a discipline that requires their major.
Religion in the west for the most part is intensely driven by the needs of women, and men for the most part take a figurehead role as leader, while being conspicuously absent from the rank and file. You can look at Christian culture overall to see this, everything from Christian bookstores to Christian movies is overwhelmingly targeted to women, who make up the majority of the market.
If anything my bet is the competition for men is fierce, and ministry tends to be something many women choose instead.
And since most people religious or not still have urges people that value premarital abstinence will probably get married sooner.
I don't think that was what you wanted to write.
Or maybe Theology majors have a higher pregnancy rate and "need" to marry more often. ;)
Any theory is as good as any other without more data or a way to test it.
Yes, even things we believe to be true we have to put evidence for on the table in scientific discourse.
Or perhaps it's because theology majors drink more coffee.
Theory put forward to prove that clearly not all theories are "as good" even if we don't have more data or ways to test them.
Many couples pair up because their goals coincide and they decide to do this together as life long partners.
Or, to put even more simply, the intersection of their shared values is much much higher than business majors.
In 2016, 1,920,718 people graduated with a BA in the USA. Of those 9,800 were theology majors. The survey data used only covered roughly 26,000 people, which would give us an expected 131 theology majors. 31% of those, or forty, married each other, giving us only twenty surveyed theology-theology marriages over an eight year period.
And there were even fewer Architecture graduates and marriages.
From my perspective, the point is that it's often very easy to come up with a post hoc explanation of why the effect you see is the one you would have expected; and, had the numbers come out the other way, there probably would have been just as many people who could explain why that was the expected outcome.
The power of statistics is that it abstracts away from what should be or what we'd expect to what is, whether it is intuitive or non-. The price paid for this power is that it's very easy to ask questions that seem reasonable but aren't, so that one gets an answer to a precisely defined, rigorous question but misinterprets it as an answer to a possibly ill defined, less rigorous question; and that, to me, is what the parent comment is forcing us to remember.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/
This statement is also interesting and I find it to be an accurate representation of most relationships that I'm aware of:
> High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their secretaries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Business majors want to focus on their career, MBAs are mostly there and ready to settle down.
In Germany, for aspiring protestant pastors, you may share a position in a parish as a couple (both getting paid 50-75% of a full position, with the unspoken expectation of being available for 100%).
Also the protestant churches are extremely territorial (a vestige of the medieval political landscape), so if you take your exam in Hamburg, you are not necessarily welcome in Munich. But you could marry a bavarian spouse who is also a pastor, which can be your entry ticket into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bavaria...
edit: corrected name of ELCoB
also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeskirche
This seems like an unfortunate argument, since, to the extent that it is valid, it is surely also an argument against anyone marrying you who doesn't long to hear financial jargon whispered in her ear at night.