A recurring theme in the Gospels is that those who were considered outsiders, more than once a Samaritan, were actually closer to God than many who considered themselves among his chosen people. With this in mind I was interested in the results of a recent study of religious knowledge in America. While some aspects tell us more about religion in America, I think some aspects may reflect the situation closer to home too. It’s also interesting that there are few studies in this area, so I’ll pick out a few extracts from the report that I think are interesting, with a few of my oen additions in italics.
In his 2007 book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t, Boston University professor Stephen Prothero wrote that “Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion.” To support his contention, Prothero offered many compelling anecdotes and some isolated findings from public opinion polls. He also cited a few studies about the extent of biblical literacy among young people. But, as he discovered, there was no comprehensive, national survey assessing the general state of religious knowledge among U.S. adults.
Previous surveys by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy organization focussing on issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs, have shown that America is among the most religious of the world’s developed nations. Nearly six-in-ten U.S. adults say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and roughly four-in-ten say they attend worship services at least once a week. But the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey shows. that large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.
More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. Although some may take the position that Vatican II moved away from this transubstantiation viewpoint, so Catholics could claim to be disadvantaged in this study. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish. In addition, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Fewer than four-in-ten (38%) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism. And only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia – the country with the world’s largest Muslim population – are Muslims.
On the full battery of seven questions about the Bible (five Old Testament and two New Testament items) Mormons do best, followed by white evangelical Protestants. Atheists/agnostics, black Protestants and Jews come next, all exhibiting greater knowledge of the Bible than white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, who in turn outscore those who describe their religion as nothing in particular.
Holding demographic factors constant, evangelical Protestants outperform most groups (with the exceptions of Mormons and atheists/agnostics) on questions about the Bible and Christianity, but evangelicals fare less well compared with other groups on questions about world religions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Mormons are the highest-scoring group on questions about the Bible.
Atheists/agnostics and Jews also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion.
So there are obviously a few things in there to reflect on, but I think the report also points to some practical actions we can take.
Factors other than education linked with religious knowledge include reading Scripture at least once a week and talking about religion with friends and family. People who say they frequently talk about religion with friends and family get an average of roughly two more questions right than those who say they rarely or never discuss religion. Interestingly, however, those who attended a private religious school score no better than those who attended a private nonreligious school.
The entire report is available online at http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge- Survey.aspx. Readers who would like to take an online quiz of 15 questions selected from the survey (and see how they perform compared with the national average and different religious groups on those questions) may do so at http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/usreligious- knowledge/.