Abstract This literature review examines several scholarly articles that focus on the role of religion in the formation of student character. Some of the articles study the effect of religion and/or Christian beliefs on academic achievement, while some study the role the Christianity can play in people’s lives as the struggle to overcome obstacles or cope with issues that are adversely affecting them. Since education is an issue that is important to all societies, it stands to reason that if religion and Christianity in particular can have a beneficial impact on a student’s life, some research should be available to support this conclusion. The research that has been done so far does indicate that Christianity can have a positive influence on the lives of people and in particularly on the academic performance of students. However, with Christianity being a religion that has lost ground in the modern era, especially in once Catholic countries like Brazil, there is some concern among modern educators about the extent to which Christianity should be used as a conduit to quality academic performance. In an era where the concept of character formation is receiving renewed attention, the question of what goes into making a good character is one that researchers and educators disagree about. So while Christian beliefs may be associated with better performance in studies, those same beliefs are not embraced by all researchers and educators because of ideological opposition to the roots of the religion. Nonetheless, this literature review shows that by taking a classical approach to character education, the achievement gap may be closed, as Christian beliefs and the classical philosophy that supports them help to provide students with the kind of self-discipline and motivation they need to perform well in school.

Introduction: Importance of the Topic

The link between character education and academic success has not been lost on researchers in recent years as theories of education approaches continue to be revised, revisited or developed anew. Lickona (1993) broached the topic of character education to show how it is instrumental in the achievement of academic success, while Smith (2013) and Kristjansson (2014) offered their own secular takes on the concept of forming a student’s character through the development of philosophical foundations in the student’s consciousness. By delving into this issue of character formation, the concept of religion and particularly Christianity emerges as a variable that may also impact a student’s academic success. Because Christianity is oriented towards reforming one’s character, it presents itself as a factor worth understanding to better know its effect on education outcomes. This topic is important because researchers like Regnerus (2000) have indicated that religion in a student’s life can actually help to improve grades and academic performance. Understanding why this is so can have an impact on how teachers and parents and all other stakeholders approach the subject of education.

Attitudes toward Christianity have changed over the centuries. In the Middle Ages in the West, Christianity was the guiding religion and its theological and philosophical foundations were used to form character. There was no disconnect between religion and academic achievement as the two were correlated at the highest levels. Secular education did not begin to appear until the Reformation and Scientific Revolution brought about the so-called Age of Enlightenment, which introduced naturalistic principles into society and pushed religion to the margins of culture. Materialism and the ideas of liberty, fraternity and equality took hold by the end of the 18th century and new philosophies (modern philosophy which promoted a more subjectivist approach to truth, learning, experience, reality, history, and so on) became entrenched in the worldview of societies around the globe.

Today, education is an important part of every society—but there is a considerable achievement gap that exists that has alarmed many stakeholders in education. This achievement gap can be defined in a variety of forms—for example, among students of varying socio-economic backgrounds as well as among students of varying ethnic or national backgrounds. What causes this gap? As Ratcliff, Carroll, Jones et al. (2017) show in their year-long observational study of classrooms in America, students’ self-control is just as important as teaching approaches in predicting achievement gaps. Self-control is a critical aspect of character formation as Lickona (1993), Smith (2013) and Kristjansson (2014) illustrate and is also a variable that has been shown to be moderated by religiosity (McCullough, Willoughby, 2009; Laird, Marks, Marrero, 2011; Sasaki, Mojaverian, Kim, 2015). This indicates that Christianity could very well have a positive effect on education...

This literature review will assess the effect of Christianity on education and the extent to which it can be gauged as a positive or formative factor in academic success.
Literature Review

Jeynes (2015) conducted a meta-analysis to identify the variables that are most significant in closing the achievement gap. The meta-analysis included 30 scholarly articles that focused on closing the achievement gap between students of various ethnic backgrounds. The factors that were found to be most significant were ones that went “beyond the bounds of the school” and reached into the realm of the sociological as well as the psychological. Jeynes (2015) showed the cultural factors are very important to how well a student achieves in school.

As religion plays a major part in developing a culture in most societies, the relationship between religion and academic success is one that has been examined among a variety of populations. The diversity of the findings indicates that the issue is complex and that while religion can be a variable in the strengthening of culture, not all religions or religious influences have the same effect. The study on the impact of religion on education in Rio de Janeiro showed that “different religious belongings of families of elementary school students in the Rio de Janeiro municipal network, among other family, school and social factors, are positively associated with the school trajectory” of the student (Carvalho, Ramos, 2017, p. 25). Carvalho and Ramos (2017) used a logistic regression model measure more than 500,000 student performances with respect to the religious inputs of those students’ family backgrounds. The researchers found that religion (Catholic vs. Evangelical vs. other Protestant denominations vs. non-religious) played a role in widening or lessening the achievement gap. Students who identified as Catholic demonstrated the greatest likelihood of the faiths sampled of outpacing the others in terms of achievement.

The study by Klanjšek, Vazsonyi and Trejos-Castillo (2012) showed that among Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and “Bible Belt” Christians, the different impact that religion has on a young person depends upon the extent to which the religion is external vs. intrinsic to the individual’s life. In other words, the more immersed in the religious experience the person is, the more likely that person is to show success in the various aspects of his or her life. The researchers focused specifically on the role that the various religions played in mediating behavior. They measured the correlation between religiosity and deviance in Bosnia, Serbia, Slovenia and the U.S. and found that when religion was an intrinsic part of one’s life, self-control was more likely to be found in that person’s life. As self-control correlates with academic achievement, this study suggests that religion does have a mediating effect so long as it is internalized and not viewed as a means of oppression or external control.

However, not all researchers have arrived at the same conclusion. Henning, Krageloh, Thompson et al. (2015) examined whether religious affiliation had an impact on academic performance among New Zealand medical students. The researchers sampled 275 participants from the School of Medicine at a New Zealand university. They were grouped into three categories: Christian (104), Eastern religion (34) and non-religious (117). The participants responded to a World Health Organization quality of life questionnaire as well as the World Health Organization Spiritual, Religiousness, and Personal Beliefs questionnaire. What the researchers found was that spiritual perceptions varied among the three different groups, and that these expressions of spirituality did not necessarily translate into more or less academic achievement. However, the study did show that students who had spiritual beliefs also affirmed that “having a belief system assisted them when coping with the academic learning environment”—and it also showed that spirituality was a predictor of hours devoted to academic studies by the students (Henning et al., 2015, p. 3). What the survey of the medical students in New Zealand failed to reveal was any correlation between Christian, Eastern or non-religious beliefs and academic success. However, the study also differed in that the sample consisted of grown adults and not young children, which could indicate that for adults the role of religion is less impactful in terms of how committed an individual will be towards education. Additionally, the sample consisted of students in medical school, which requires a great deal of commitment already, and so the impact of religion on the sample would likely not be as noticeable as it would be in a study where the sample consists wholly of younger students whose propensities…