Did you know that Mother Teresa is Catholic, Maimonides was Jewish, and Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation? Congratulations! You’re more religiously literate than most Americans:
On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.
Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
[. . .]
On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.
On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.
One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public schools.
Some other distressing findings from the survey:
Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.
I wonder how many Lutherans missed that question? (I suspect about 53 percent.)
Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
Really, Catholics? Really? So forty-five percent of you think about communion the same way we Southern Baptists do? (By the way, I suspect at least 53 percent of Lutherans knew the answer to that question. You won’t find too many Lutheran who can’t argue about the Real Presence.)
Also, almost no one in American (8 percent) knows that Maimonides was Jewish. Even four-in-ten Jews (43 percent) do not recognize that one of the most venerated rabbis in history was Jewish. (Seriously? What do they think he was? Muslim?)
Not surprisingly, only 11 percent knew that Jonathan Edwards was associated with the First Great Awakening. I suspect only about 11 percent of Americans even know there was a First Great Awakening.
But the saddest statistic (especially for a web editor) is probably this one:
Nearly half of Americans who are affiliated with a religion (48%) say they “seldom” or “never” read books (other than Scripture) or visit websites about their own religion, and 70% say they seldom or never read books or visit websites about other religions.
Since you are reading this blog you are either one of the 52 percent that visits websites about your religion and/or one of the 30 percent who visits a website about other religions. It is therefore your duty as an educated citizen to help raise level of religious literacy. Tell someone who falls into those 48 percent/70 percent categories to read First Things online. Do it for their own good. Do it for the good of my advertisers. Do it for the good of America.
Note: You can take an abbreviated (15 question) sample quiz here. If you don’t get at least 14 questions correctly you need to turn off your computer and go read a book.
Note 2: I have to confess that while I know who he is, I can’t for the life of me correctly pronounce “Maimonides.” David Goldman told me that he was called Rambam (short for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon) so that is what I’ll be saying from now on.
September 28th, 2010 | 9:53 am
OK, the fact that atheists and agnostics scored the highest has NOTHING to do with their faith or lack thereof. Statistically, atheists and agnostics have more formal education than others and therefore inherently have a wider breadth of general knowledge and are more likely to question EVERYTHING, which makes it harder for them to believe in a higher power.
The people that win week after week, answering knowledge based questions on Jeopardy, probably can’t fix a toaster oven or problem solve their way out of an awkward social situation. Book knowledge is just that… sterile facts. Religion is based on FAITH, BELIEF, and living a purposeful LIFE. Just because someone from a suburb in Connecticut knows that the primary religion in Indonesia is Islam doesn’t make them better in some way that this study is trying to identify.
Oh, and by the way, I’m an atheist…
September 28th, 2010 | 9:58 am
According to the LATimes, not only do we not know anything about religion, but atheists and agnostics know more about religion than anyone because they ‘have thought about it’ and ‘they care’, says the Pew Forum research director. Furthermore, Christians just ‘accept their faith’ and ‘stop examining it’ which is ‘not healthy’, according to the Methodist minister they quote.
This all sounds horribly biased and definitely contradicts everything in my personal experience.
September 28th, 2010 | 9:59 am
Here is the LATimes link.
http://mobile.latimes.com/wap/news/text.jsp?sid=294&nid=23170009&cid=16686&scid=-1&ith=1&title=Nation
September 28th, 2010 | 10:49 am
I don’t know if it’s “news” (because it’s been reported before), but it certainly is a depressing statement on the quality of American education these days.
September 28th, 2010 | 10:50 am
I wonder if there is really any practical things we can do to foster religious literacy?
September 28th, 2010 | 11:15 am
The results of this survey don’t surprise me. I had a good friend who attended a Catholic church named “Church of the Transfiguration.” I happened to mention that the story of the transfiguration was one of my favorites in the Gospel, and she had no idea what I was talking about.
I suspect that for most people, Protestant or Catholic, their religious life consists of going to church or mass and that’s it. They go (“get their card punched” as a friend of mine used to say), figure they’ve done their duty for the week, and that’s the last they think about it. They don’t read the Bible, they don’t read theology, and probably don’t see any reason why they should.
September 28th, 2010 | 11:27 am
This doesn’t surprise me at all. If the teaching in my church is any indicator, the curricula used for Sunday school classes is rarely informative about biblical teaching much less church history. It is, however, hip, cool and culturally relevant. So… it’s got that going for it.
September 28th, 2010 | 11:34 am
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September 28th, 2010 | 11:40 am
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September 28th, 2010 | 12:08 pm
Having a lot of experience teaching philosophy and philosophical theology to undergraduates, the results are really not surprising. What is surprising is that, if atheists/secularists really are more “informed” about religion than supposedly “religious” people, then why are so many atheist screeds these days filled with all sorts of historical, theological and philosophical howlers? Could it be that atheists really know better, but that any “noble lie” will serve if it seems to discredit religion – Christianity in particular?
September 28th, 2010 | 12:09 pm
It’s basically a silly survey that generates more heat than light. Beyond that, when has it ever been different in America? Religious belief has always been a solipsistic, make-it-up-as-you-go-along matter for most Americans since colonial days. A handful of people might be interested in doctrine, or have an informed view on other faiths, or a smattering of Church history, but for the most part the people were, and remain, interested only in that which affects them directly. They are pragmatists–or more precisely, what Alexander Schmemann called “secularists”.
September 28th, 2010 | 12:18 pm
“Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.”
Uh, oh! I guess all we Greek Catholics are in trouble, since the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great explicitly refers to the Bread and the Wine as “the symbol of the holy Body and Blood of your Christ”.
The problem is in the use of the word “merely”, which would have puzzled the Fathers, since they understood that the symbol shares in the reality of that which it represents. You have to look to the Eucharistic controversy surrounding Berengarius of Tours for the emergence of the “symbol/reality” dichotomy: Berengarius said the Eucharist was “only” a symbol because it wasn’t real, while the Fourth Lateran Council merely inverted this by saying the Eucharist was real because it was “not” a symbol. Western Christians have been going at it ever since.
We Greek Catholics will continue to believe that the Bread and Wine are mystically transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ through the descent, power and grace of the Holy Spirit, and that Christ is sacramentally present in the Holy Eucharist. Everything else is philosophy.
September 28th, 2010 | 12:19 pm
[...] First Things – Americans are Religiously Illiterate If you have stumbled onto this blog please do take a few moments to read the following piece:- Echoes of God [...]
September 28th, 2010 | 12:41 pm
American religious education summarized:
In God we Trust, for there is one nation under God, founded by St. George of Washigton. His friends Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamitlon, Whiterspoon, et al. left us two equally held bodies of work; Declaration of Independence and a Constitution. The former we call the old testament, while the latter named the new testament. Collectively they form what is called the American Bible. However, that work has been subject to many interpretations, and annotations, which have led to schisms throughout the centuries since the great Saint and his friend.
We pray, that one day, we may return to the spirit of St George of Washington and his friend, and be enlightened like them by the almighty God so that we may partake of this divine land with respect and awe evermore. Amen.
September 28th, 2010 | 12:43 pm
Notices the names misspelled and kick myself for not knowing how to spell the names of the Saint’s friends.
September 28th, 2010 | 1:11 pm
I don’t think the question about whether or not a public school teacher can read the Bible as literature has anything to do with being religiously literate. That is a legal question.
September 28th, 2010 | 1:39 pm
It also follows that the Mainstream Media, being a subset of all Americans, are also clueless about religion.
Which, shows in their reporting. Now we know why.
-Theo
September 28th, 2010 | 2:04 pm
Server disconnections caused me to get a score of 1/15 on the quiz when I actually knew all the answers (it was pretty simple). Could something like that be distorting the results?
September 28th, 2010 | 2:21 pm
Now if we could only get the Southern Baptists to read the New Testament, instead of everything else but. In my opinion, nothing matters more than the New Testament Word of God. Sadly, lack of any systematic theology in the ordination of Southern Baptists puts men in the pulpit of gross ignorance of the very word of God. But, they can ably quote Shakespeare, Kant, Bacon, Bush, Fox News, and the sports scores from last Sunday. Sad indeed.
September 28th, 2010 | 2:35 pm
Another way of interpreting the data, possibly: If you are educated and well informed about religion, you’re more likely to be religious.
The aggregate scores of Mormons, (other?) Christians, and Jews are lower than those of atheists and agnostics by about 20 to 30 percent. But the absolute number of those who identify with some religion is greater than that of atheists and agnostics by an order of magnitude.
Granted, it’s possible that all those who are religious are clumped together in a narrow, middling range on the graph, but it’s more plausible to imagine that they’re widely distributed, with some low scores offsetting some high scores and bringing the average down.
In other words, one thing this study shows is that the default setting, as it were, for the average American is to affiliate with some religion. But among those who have read deeply and widely and thought a lot about religion, don’t more end up practicing a traditional religion than not? We can’t say, actually, from the data as they’re presented in the writeup, but from what we know about American demographics (the ratio of theists to atheists and agnostics) it’s the most plausible conclusion.
Moreover, in what respect is atheism or agnosticism not a religion? How is “religion” being defined?
One more observation: Among religious geniuses, people who have a gift for religious thought — think of the universe of individuals described by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience — the practice of a traditional religion of some sort is almost universal, is it not?
A little bit of reading, deliberation, and introspection beyond what you get at the default setting may convert us to doubt or further, to atheism, but then prodigious reading, deliberation, and introspection tend take us further, to a point where we see theism in a light we had never seen it in before.
Doubt and atheism are the brick wall on the far side of which a stunning view of the truth is enjoyed by those who, instead of stopping at the wall and saying, “See, it’s a brick wall,” had the intellectual curiosity and the mental dexterity to jump over it. They call to us from over there, and they send us messages, which are often to the effect that they can do only so much to describe the scene, that we really have to see it for ourselves.
September 28th, 2010 | 4:42 pm
I suggest that you read the survey. It turns out that the draftsman of the survey himself is in need of some education. Take, for example, the following question and the choices offered:
What is the religion of most people in Indonesia?
A. Buddhist
B. Christian
C. Muslim
D. Hindu
Good question; poor choice of answers.
None of these are religions; they are the names given to adherents to particular religions. The religion of a Buddhist is Buddhism. The religion of a Christian is Christianity. The religion of a Muslim is Islam. The religion of a Hindu is Hinduism.
One would expect that a survey meant to access the public’s level of knowledge about religion would reflect that its draftsman had accurate knowledge about religion.
I wouldn’t be so nitpicking were it not for the fact that the survey was itself designed to pick nits.
September 28th, 2010 | 7:36 pm
100% here.
Remember that these are multi-guess questions and you would expect a certain percentage of “right” answers from dumb luck.
September 28th, 2010 | 8:12 pm
George summed it up: “Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more.
September 28th, 2010 | 11:22 pm
Another aspect of religious belief that might help explain these numbers is that, unlike, say, sports, where an NFL fan also likes college football, and probably basketball and baseball to some extent, and a Mets fan wants to know how the Reds and the Red Sox are doing, it’s more than typical for a religious believer to have little to no interest in any other religion than his own.
It ranges from a Catholic finding evangelicals, and Hindus and Muslims boring, if not antipathetic, and perhaps evil to the point where one shouldn’t waste time listening to them.
As Jim Gaffigan put it, what’s more offputting than someone coming up and saying, “I’d like to tell you about Jesus.”
uh, no.
Or Seinfeld had a bit, I think, about, “Yah EVER notice how anyone who wants to tell you about THEIR religion, doesn’t want to hear about YOURS?”
It’s a strange aspect of religious belief, but probably is logical when such belief is seen as a way of viewing the world, finding right and wrong, and often, ergo, seeing other such belief systems as wrong, by definition.
That’s why media coverage of religion often is unsuccessful (apart from the general ignorance of all things religious by most journalists); because most religious people just don’t care to read or watch anything about any other religion.
September 28th, 2010 | 11:52 pm
Only someone with no religion could find all religions equally compelling. It’s like that ‘coexist’ bumper sticker, it might as well read ‘atheism.’
September 29th, 2010 | 2:21 am
I don’t like how some survey groups were divided by race/ethnicity and some weren’t…..
September 29th, 2010 | 11:49 am
As a convert from the Reformed faith, I find it distressing that my fellow Catholics are so ignorant of their faith. That being the case, we shouldn’t be surprised that many of them so easily gave up their “birthright” – the traditional liturgy developed over many centuries – for the “mess of pottage” that is so much of the post-Vatican II liturgy. And, sadly, my metaphors are also lost on them.
September 30th, 2010 | 2:43 pm
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