The Most Religiously Illiterate Religious People
An interesting review by Susan Jacoby at the Washington Post.
The United States is the most religious nation in the developed world, if religiosity is measured by belief in all things supernatural — from God and the Virgin Birth to the humbler workings of angels and demons. Americans are also the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world. Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
These are just two of the depressing statistics in Stephen Prothero’s provocative and timely Religious Literacy. The author of American Jesus (2003) and the chair of the religion department at Boston University, Prothero sees America’s religious illiteracy as even more dangerous than general cultural illiteracy “because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture, because religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil.”
In this book, the author combines a lively history of the rise and fall of American religious literacy with a set of proposed remedies based on his hope that “the Fall into religious ignorance is reversible.” He also includes a useful multicultural glossary of religious definitions and allusions, in which religious illiterates can find the prodigal son, the promised land, the Quakers and the Koran.
The condition Prothero describes in Religious Literacy is unquestionably one manifestation of a more general decline in the public’s cultural and civic knowledge. According to polls conducted by the National Constitution Center, only one third of Americans can name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Is it any more startling that only one third can identify the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount?
A 2005 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly two-thirds of Americans endorse the simultaneous teaching of creationism and evolution in public schools. How can citizens know what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if fewer than half can identify Genesis? No doubt the same proportion of Americans think that Thomas Edison said, “Let there be light.”
Some of the results of the poll are hilarious. For instance: 10% of the ones polled think that Joan of Arc was… Noah’s wife.
That’s in the same category of the Swiss invasion of Liechtenstein in my book.
Americans know little about Christianity, but they know even less about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. Obviously, that’s quite a problem considering America’s role in the world.
An interesting cause of Americans’s “illiteracy”: the post-1950 shift from a print to a video culture.
Quite surprising this.
17 Responses to “The Most Religiously Illiterate Religious People”
[...] Original post by Michael van der Galien and software by Elliott [...]
I’m not surprised. Dealing with several generations, I see the ‘informed’ quotient decrease in succesive generations. Even worse, there seems to be a level of resistence to staying informed. Instead, people seek out interest groups, where their views are validated by a chorus of ‘amen’s and their curiosity about anything other than what holds the group togehter is stifled.
Thus spake MvdG:
To say the least.
I’d almost be tempted to assign blame to a fetish with separation of church and state that keeps all study of religion out our public schools, even (including, obviously, much needed courses in comparative religion).
I’d be tempted, except that religious ignorance seems to more indicative of a general level of ignorance than anything else.
As the reviewer points out:
Though I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that things like “No Child Left Behind”, with its emphasis (and federal dollars) focused exclusively on math and language skills (and therefore at the expense of everything else) is hardly helpful.
Is it any wonder that a government elected by those so uninformed about the world around us, but which none-the-less aspires to remake that world in its own image, makes such a mess of things?
I’ve long said that Americans are not really religious, merely Homer Simpsons snoozing in the pews, but while the case for religion being a source for evil is clear, its place as a source of good is a bit specious.
Even non-evangelical religions that seek harmony w others are still divorcing the believer from reality, which is a psychic form of violence, so a bit more shd be argued over in that claim.
Of course, if Joan of Arc is seen as a Biblical figure, there’s a ways to go b4 even that can be tackled.
One good aspect of the review is that it supports the notion that religion is withering away.
Perhaps, in this rare case, ignorance is….bliss.
Brings to mind this gem from the Colbert Report:
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TCR-Westmoreland.mov
Religion can’t wither away fast enough. It’s caused more suffering than anything else – and yes, that includes the Nazis and Communism.
I think America’s fundies will wither away in a couple decades. They’re still running on the fumes of millenial fever, expecting the Second Coming. As we get further into the century, that fantasy will lose its attraction. (That’s assuming the lunatics in the White House don’t start a nuclear war.)
You know, both the abolitionist movement and the black civil rights movement were born in the pews and pulpits of our nation’s churches. Those two giant social uprisings a century apart showed the power of religion to effect major positive change. So a claim that religion only spreads suffering is flat out wrong. From Desmond Tutu’s stand against apartheid to your neighborhood church’s food pantry, religion is affecting the world for positive change everywhere all the time.
Not everyone who professes a faith in Christ expects the rapture to be imminent. In fact, a whole hell of a lot of us don’t think that there will ever be a rapture. There’s a huge number of people who are disgusted with what the conservatives have done to Christianity and with the fact that the liberals are more than willing to let them do it.
If the left were smart, they’d find a way to engage the Catholics and mainline Protestants to fight major social ills like hunger, poverty, AIDS, undereducation, refugee resettlement, global warming, and the like. There are gigantic machines there that can easily be used to help the world, and they’d be happy to do it with nary a drop of proselytization to boot. After all, Jesus himself said that whatever you do to the least people, you do to him. Jesus didn’t say feed the Baptist hungry, or clothe the naked who happen to be Episcopalian. He just said feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and many Christians are working to do just that. Social justice is a longstanding tradition in many Christian denominations (as well as Judaism and Buddhism and many other faiths)
But no, the left would rather belittle the religious believers of the nation and actively shove them into the Republican party, even though the GOP only pays enough lip-service to the teachings of Christ to get people to vote Republican.
I would highly recommend doing a quick google to read Barack Obama’s keynote address to the Call to Renewal organization. It lays out the need for Christian progressives in political discourse. One relavant stanza:
“Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and not just ‘I,’ resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.”
Fortunately, there are people like Barack Obama, Rev. Jim Wallis, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Bono, and others who are recognizing the power for good that religion has done in the past and will provide in the future.
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s not just the big huge social movements…
Right now, my girlfriend is thousands of miles away working with Catholic nuns in Jamaica. The Marist Sisters work to get people out of poverty. They do it through education. My girlfriend is there teaching reading and basic computer skills, while other classes include vocational training in needed tasks like food service and housekeeping. The students earn certificates in these fields which are highly prized by employers in the area. These courses are offered at very low cost (in Jamaica, there is a social stigma assocaited with anything that is free, so they charge a token amount) to anyone of any faith. At no time do they ever proseltyze or preach. They merely teach.
I calculated something interesting the other day: she’s 70 times more likely to be killed in Monetgo Bay than she would be if she were in East St. Louis, IL. Just the other day, a teenager threatened to shoot her because she stopped him from beating up a younger, weaker kid. She gets paid about $1.50 a day. Why does she do it? Because Jesus calls us to do things like this. When she’s not in Jamaica, she’s in Boston working with Catholic Charities to get refugees into new homes in America. I don’t think she’s resettled a single Catholic yet.
I tell her story only because I know her story. There are thousands like her that I don’t know about. They aren’t on TV, they don’t drive fancy cars, they just want to make the world better, and religion offers the mechanism to do so. They hear the words of Jesus when he said, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me…. Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
So, I’m glad you think that she’s putting her life on the line to not do any good. If she weren’t making the world better, maybe then she’d come home! (Other than when she visited her family for a couple of days at Thanksgiving, I haven’t seen her since July.)
Not every Christian is Pat Robertson, William Donahue, or Ted Haggard. For every one of them, there are anonymous thousands working to improve the world. They aren’t doing it to gain appreciation. They aren’t even doing it to get into heaven. They’re doing it because it’s right.
Actually one of my pet peeves about the Religious Right is their pretense of representing all of Christianity. If one of their positions is criticized the person making the criticism is often accused of being anti-Christian. What worries me is the fact that it’s their churches that are growing the fastest in much of the world, including the U.S.
The question boils down to the social purpose of religion. Is religion a tool for maintaining social order or for promoting social justice? If it’s social order, which fundamentalists in Christianity and Islam seem to be most preoccupied with, then religion is going to lead to bigotry and war. If it’s social justice, then religion will yield the more positive elements that Tim in Wisconsin laid out. Religious people may favor both social order and social justice but the politics of religion generally forces believers into one of the two camps.
Well said Elrod.
I would further add that its not up to liberals to fix the mess of the social order types, its up to the social justice types. Liberls who try to point out the other don’t seem to get far, and get slammed by the social order tpyes. All the while the social justice types just seem to sit back more or less with out really raising their voice.
For example, If say a large portion of the the Catholics and Evangelicals appealed to the IRS to reomove the tax exampt status for some of the voiceferous hate spewers, and made a (fairly easy imho) case why… Well, it would go quite bit farther, and be much harder to cut the legs out from under, than if the left tried it. Instead the social justice types don’t seem to have a mass voice, or the will power to face this now, versus later, and so the cancer spreads…
Elrod put it very nicely:
“Is religion a tool for maintaining social order or for promoting social justice?”
We choose what we want religion to be. We choofse the goal, and religion can be one of the tools.
Prothero sees America’s religious illiteracy as even more dangerous than general cultural illiteracy “because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture, because religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil.�
The fact that many religious people rely so heavily on faith rather than rationality, is what makes this so dangerous. If one relies almost entirely on faith-based judgements, those judgements can be easily manipulated by religious leaders. That is what we are seeing with extreme Islam- I would hate to see that type of force take hold here, especially given the ignorance Prothero talks about.
Re the original post -
It is a loss that we don’t know about religion, regardless of faith.
Being ignorant of the religious references in western literature and philosophy, robs you of fully understanding them.
The ‘language police’ are robbing our children of much of our literaty heritage, as well. For parents, it’s a do it yourself project to round out children’s education. And maybe that’s a good thing; you don’t need to fight about what is or is not appropriate.
As a religious Jew who has been active in social action/social justice activities for more than 3 decades, I hate to see Michael Lerner used as a representative of Judaism. I was a member of New Jewish Agenda, used to subscribe to Tikkun, have some of Lerner’s books and am appalled by much what he has said and done in recent years. His famous father Max Lerner, whom I heard speak at my synagogue some 40 years ago, must be rolling in his grave.
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