Institutions, Education, and Religious Change: Evidence from Colombia

TL;DR

This study examines how civic education reforms in Colombia, specifically the 1991 Constitution, influenced religious identities, leading to shifts away from Catholic identification and towards other denominations or secular identities, depending on regional religious context.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that civic education can significantly alter religious identities and affiliations through constitutional instruction reforms.

Findings

Catholic self-identification declined by about three percentage points.

Regional religious supply influenced whether identities shifted towards non-Catholic denominations or secularism.

Reforms reconfigured religious identities by affecting the perceived legitimacy of different religious affiliations.

Abstract

How do religious identities change? We study the effects of civic education reforms on religious identification using Colombia's 1991 Constitution, which dismantled the country's confessional regime and mandated constitutional instruction in high schools. Exploiting cohort-based variation in exposure to the reform and nationally representative survey data, we implement a difference-in-differences design. We find that exposure to the constitutional curriculum reduced Catholic self-identification by about three percentage points. This decline reflects a reallocation of religious identities rather than a generalized decline in religiosity. In regions where Catholic institutional presence was historically weaker, Catholic losses translate into switching toward non-Catholic Christian denominations and higher religious attendance. In contrast, in regions where Catholic dominance was stronger, the decline is associated with increased secular identification and lower attendance. These patterns hold across ethnic and non-ethnic groups and are shaped primarily by regional religious supply rather than ethnicity per se. Overall, the results show that civic education can reconfigure religious identities by reshaping the relative legitimacy of competing affiliations.