We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults.

We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects.

Using 3 different datasets, we find that abolishing compulsory religious education statistically-significantly reduced religiosity of affected students in adulthood. It also reduced the religious actions of personal prayer, church-going, and church membership. Beyond religious attitudes, the reform led to more equalized gender roles, fewer marriages and children, and higher labor-market participation and earnings. The reform did not affect ethical and political values or non-religious school outcomes.

The 1949 Constitution of West Germany had formally enshrined religious education as the only subject that is institutionalized as a regular subject in public schools, so that religious education was a compulsory subject in state curricula. Religious education was very intense: High-school graduates were exposed to roughly 1,000 hours of religious education over their school career—more than 4× the hours of physics classes, for example (Havers 1972). In reforms enacted at different points in time 1972^–₃₂2004_20ya, the different states replaced the obligation to attend religious education with the option to choose between denominational religious education and “ethics” as a non-denominational subject. A particularly interesting feature of the reforms is that the counterfactual to compulsory religious instruction is not to have no value-oriented instruction, but rather non-denominational value-oriented instruction. As a consequence, the reforms allow us to identify the impact of the religious part of instruction, holding the overall exposure to value-oriented instruction constant.

…Our merged dataset combines up to 58,000 observations of adults who entered primary school 1950^–₅₄2004_20ya from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).

…Conditional on state and birth-year fixed effects as well as individual-level control variables, religiosity of students who were not subject to compulsory religious education is 7% of a standard deviation lower on average compared to students who were subject to compulsory religious education. Event-study graphs show that reforming states do not have statistically-significantly different trends in religiosity in the years prior to reform compared to non-reforming states.

We find similar reductions in 3 measures capturing specific religious actions: the personal act of prayer, the public act of going to church, and the formal (and costly) act of church membership. Estimation of time-varying treatment effects indicates that effects on religiosity and personal prayer phase in gradually over time, whereas the effect on church membership are closer to one-time shifts. In a subsample that allows to merge regional information, effects are mostly restricted to predominantly Catholic (rather than Protestant) counties.

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