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.
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