Survey: Americans Lack Some Religious Knowledge

[shipperx]

Link gakked from petzipellepingo 

I heard this on the news this morning and I wasn't particularly surprised by the results (Well, maybe a  little with the mormons)

Survey: Americans Lack Some Religious Knowledge

Some interesting points:

• The ones that tested with the most religious knowledge were the atheists and the agnostics 
  
  

  It may be that the conscious choice to take a minority faith or philosophic stand requires an intellectual engagement with religion to a greater degree than experienced by Protestants and Catholics, who dominate U.S. culture. Eight in 10 atheists and agnostics grew up in a religious tradition, chiefly a branch of Christianity, says Greg Smith, a Pew senior researcher.
  
  The single question most people answered correctly: 89% knew that according to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, public school teachers cannot lead their classes in prayer.
  
  But only 36% of respondents knew teachers are allowed to teach classes comparing world religions, and just 23% knew that teachers can read from the Bible as an example of literature.
  
  "If the public thinks there are greater restriction than there really are, how much impact does this have in the real world when they are looking at religion's place in public life?" Smith asks

  
   
• Southerners scored lowest on the test     

Me:  And yet by most measures the South is the most religious area of the country. 

Growing up in the South this counter-intuitive fact doesn't surprise me at all. As a child in Sunday School, I caught on fairly early that Sunday school teachers frequently didn't have an answer for "why?" Particularly for sticky Bible stories such as Lot offering up his daughters to be raped (Yikes!) The wtf-ness of this was readily apparent even to an eight year old.   

My sister and myself -- 12+ years apart in age -- credit our Sunday School Teacher, Mrs. Miller,  with much of our religious ambivalence because at some point in our Sunday School/Bible School 'education' we were (separately) told that you cannot question the Bible or the word of God and to do so meant that you weren't really 'saved'... to which -- separately but remarkably identically -- my sister and myself concluded that we were screwed from the start.   I mean, I can't not question. The questions are just... there.  I have them.  I can't squelch them with non-answers of 'just accept it'. (Try being 8 and explaining that to a not-exceptionally-bright Sunday School teacher.  Your questions are not appreciated)  So... yeah... that's pretty much how I arrived at where I am... starting from the ripe old age of eight.

I grew up in the pretty tepid and moderate United Methodist Church.  My grandparents were in a far more evangelical church that I grew up thinking was just a little crazy  with a minister who was more than just a little stupid (and my sister has awful tales of having gone to that church camp one summer and how awful it was.  Awful in that it was big ol' religious indoctrination for 2 weeks, and really, it's summer and couldn't they just go swimming and do crafts, already?!  Although, I went to the Methodist summer camp for a few summers and had pretty much the exact same feelings, so I'm not sure that it was any more awful than what I went through, though she claims there's no comparison.  I think it was perhaps a matter of degree.  We did at least get to go swimming and wear shorts)  And of course there were the Southern Baptists around (who in my kid-mind were most valued for having a skating rink in their community center across the street.  We Methodist kids envied that skating rink.  We just had a four-square court painted on the concrete on the back portico).   At any rate, you can tell that during my formative years of religious instruction my head tended to be more occupied with swimming, roller skating, and playing four-square.   Though I was also endlessly fascinated by the stained glass windows (future architect in me?)

Erm... what was I talking about?

Anyway,  I think I meant that I recognized as a kid that though our local ministers knew a great deal of what the Bible literally said, there was very, very little ever said (or to be perfectly honest, known) about why or how or the historical context... and I actually needed that.   In fact, the first time I ever got even a remotely satisfactory answer from a minister, it was a priest. (My sister married someone of Greek heritage. And though he isn't religious himself, he is Greek Orthodox. For a marriage to be recognized by the Greek Orthodox Church (at least then) a potential spouse would have to convert.  Not being of a particularly religious nature, my sister basically shrugged and converted.  Ten years after that, after my neice was born, for me to become my neice's godparent I'd also have to convert as the church insisted on Greek Orthodox godparents.  Much like my sister, I shrugged and converted (it basically amounted to 6 weeks of courses in Greek Orthodoxy and being re-christened.  See: My Big Fat Greek Wedding sans baby pool.  I just got sprinkled.) 

Anyway, my sis went with me and we... well... we had a tendency to ask difficult philosophical and historical questions.  The impressive thing about Father Emmanuel was that he had really good answers.  Father Emmanuel knew the history of the chuch -- Greek, Catholic, Protestant.  He had years of study in Greece and Turkey and  was a treasure trove of accurate historical information. He also had some really good answers for philosophical questions, (far, far better than Mrs. Miller's 'you can't question the word of God')  For example, when my sister asked if he really believed in word for word Genesis  (I was mortified!  She was asking a priest whether he bought the story of Genesis!) and what he thought of evolution, he actually gave a really good (and science-accepting) answer, talking about literature and metaphor, and... I was impressed.  What I believed was up to me, but this wasn't a man given to simple pablum answers.  He was someone educated in what in the frell he was talking about and didn't give or take simple, simplified answers.  (May he rest in peace.  He was a wonderful man). This was quite different than other experiences I had had where the ministers, Sunday school teachers, etc.  were strongly faithful and generally fine people but were not knowledgeable about the history of what they were believing or particularly inquisitive as to why.

So I guess this is a long way of saying that the results of this survey don't surprise me. My experiences with Southern forms of Protestantism were that they were largely well-intentioned (with areas of stubborn obstinancy that I did not accept) and deeply felt but not particularly worldly, historically educated, or literarily knowledgeable.  I can see how these results are perfectly plausible.

And, though I mostly tend to categorize myself as agnostic, I've always been highly interested in relgion and in the history of religion.  It's a fascinating subject.

Full survey here

Related article:  Why care that atheists ace/faithful fail 'religious knowledge'?
Related article:  Peers and Politics Shape Faith

Comments

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

It's the same way with me. I have grown up with a religious education. I've read the bible and I ended up an agnostic, yet a lot of times when people try to discuss religion with me, I'm surprised how much of the stuff they believe in they have not read.

There are a lot of pretty learned theologians around here too though and they can and will give you a run for your money in a philosophical discussion.

An astronomy professor of mine wrote a book about his relationship with the church and his atheism. He said that if he'd met the theological scholars he talked to to research his book, he might never have ended up quite as opposed to the church as he is.
Because they, much like the priest you wrote about, talked to him about metaphor and moral implication rather than about the literal meaning of the text which he felt required him too much to turn off his brain.

[cy-girl.livejournal.com]

I grew up Church of Christ so my Sunday School experience is very similar to yours with an added bonus of cognitive dissonance in the form of "Jesus loves you, but God is really pissed off." I am now Episcopalian, a denomination that celebrates and enourages scholarship and critical thinking about our relationship with God and the community.

I think another reason in the South for the lack of broad understanding of religion on the part of many denominations is the concept of the "personal relationship" with Jesus being just about all you need in order to be saved. Couple that with the belief that the Bible is the unerrant word of God, and it's a recipe for not looking deeper or understanding anything about other faiths.

[ww1614.livejournal.com]

I'm also always asking questions about Christianity in the classroom (What is the snake a reference to? What could the apple symbolize? Who walked on his knees over the rocks of Calvary?) and my students don't know the answers. So I point to myself and say "it's sad when the atheist in the room is the only one who knows this answer!"

I am putting up my stained glass icon just for you. :)

[ww1614.livejournal.com]

Oops, did not mean to reply to you, flake_sake. :) But I'm too lazy to delete and resubmit the comment. :)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

My nephews are like that. My sister may have converted to Greek Orthodoxy and she did go some while Father Emmanuel was alive and the boys were little, but not all that much and... not in the last 15 years. Every now and then something pops up about some fairly standard religious knowledge thing, and it becomes clear that my nephews don't even have a good working knowledge of the Bible stories that most grow up on. (I'm not sure that matters though other than the loss of literary references).

On the other hand, due to school zoning and changing houses issues, my neice attented an Episcopal Elementary School for a few years (I suppose that makes it even more obvious that my family doesn't have stong denominational convictions that my sister chose to do this.) And when Lexie was eight or so and we were tailgating at a football game she-- to the astonishment of everyone -- got into a very overheated argument over Jesus with Rachel (a similarly aged child of a family friend who is Jewish). Since none of us, either my family or Rachel's parents, count ourselves as particularly religious we were all stunned to see this argument erupt and had to place it down to the religious instruction both were receiving in their separate schools. It's one of the reasons I think that religion really needs to be kept out of school (though not in upper grades where it can be studied in a comparative religion type setting). Two seven or eight year olds were having a passionate, embittered argument about Jesus. It was astonishing (and not in particularly good way).

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

You and I have been in much the same boat then. When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my family was asked by the Baptist church in town to never bring me with them ever again. My mother was told that I asked too many questions and would confuse the other children with "heathen rhetoric" (i.e. when asked to colour a picture of Jesus I made him have a tan complexion, black hair, and a brown eyes because, at that time, the only illustrations of Jesus I had seen had him portrayed that way). This led to many years of most of my "peers" at school telling me that I was certainly going to burn in hell. I was screamed at, repeatedly, for saying that Jesus was Jewish and for celebrating Passover and only secular Christmas and Easter. I labelled myself as an Albigensian as a persecuted teenager inside joke. Cut to years later when my mother became Greek Orthodox. I like the congregation, and Father Nick is pretty awesome and sounds a lot like your Father Emmanuel. Plus, I get to make tsoureki at Easter now even though I still don't belong to any particular faith. *hugs and three cheers for studying the history of religion* :D

[spikewriter]

None of this surprises me -- but I started out as a Southern Baptist. In Texas. In the Sixties. Answered altar call at eight and surpassed the hell out everyone because my parents weren't pushing me to do it. The minister loved the fact that I'd taken on the idea ofJesus dying for my sins on my own. What he didn't stop to think about was that the same thought and reasoning which had led me to accept that as an article of faith also led me to ask some questions that were not at all in keeping with their worldview that my single goal should be to become a good Christian wife and mother. Eventually ended up being told to leave and since I'd gone to an Episcopal elementary school and there was an Episcopal church I could ride my bike to where I had a number of friends (folks we worked with in the local theatre group), I ended up going there.

So glad I did. Our priest referred to the teenage Sunday school as "Atheism 101" because there was a big emphasis on learning and questioning. His reasoning was that we were teenagers, so we were going to question anyway and better that he be there and willing to answer questions than just telling us to accept. Sadly, I know this isn't everyone's experience, I'm grateful I fell in with folks with brains.

The "check the brain God gave you at the door" attitude has always appalled me. If that's what we're supposed to do, why did he give it to us?

[usedtobeljs]

Wow, I've never actually experienced a United Methodist congregation believing in the inerrancy of the Bible; from my own Sunday School days and my parents' discussions about their bible-study classes, it was always about parable, metaphor, and the variety of translations.

[rowanswhimsy.livejournal.com]

I was a Religion major in college and I'm an atheist so I'm unsurprised by that result. :-)

I've always thought that expanded study of religions led to better understanding of the common mythic elements and therefore the likelihood of either ending up agnostic, atheist, or spiritual but not religious (defining that as believing in something supernatural but not necessarily any organized religious doctrine).

I'm vaguely amused that people don't often seem to fully understand the basic tenets of their own religion. Years ago I had a friend who had converted to Roman Catholicism upon marriage. We were discussing the Immaculate Conception. He thought it referred to the conception of Jesus. I (politely) corrected him and he refused to believe me because how could a heathen like me know Catholic doctrine? I told him I didn't need to believe it to understand it. He turned to a friend who was RC from birth and she confirmed his mistaken information. Google didn't exist then but if this conversation happened today, I'd be annoyed enough to google it in front of them.

I had another conversation with a friend years ago. She is a cafeteria Catholic. There are many things she disagrees with in the Church (e.g. abortion, birth control, etc.) and she also famously doesn't think a priest is necessary for either confession or communion. But she still considers herself RC. I told her I could understand rejecting teachings that come from the Pope, but...differing over sacraments??? Is that a foundational aspect of belief?

I find that people seem very willing to accept things to remain part of a church/organized religion that in other circumstances they'd never accept. I annoyed the crap out of some RC friends by asking how they could remain part of the church given the sexual abuse scandals, the stance against affording gays the same civil right as heterosexuals, and the fact that women weren't afforded access to the priesthood. Were they working to change these things? If not, how could they remain part of the church? I was very unpopular for a while. I'm tired of trying to pretend it's ok to check our brains at the door when we walk into a church.

[elisi]

I never realised this when I was growing up, but I was very lucky. I grew up Catholic and my father was a Deacon (still is!), but he found his faith after having been a firm atheist (he's an engineer, and very mathematically minded), and as a consequence decided to study theology to discover more. So I grew up with a very sound basis - questions were always answered, and answered *properly*. And when I was a teenager they decided to do a theology course for a few interested parishioners, which I joined it. Except it was a rather poor course, from sometime in the 70's I think, and sessions generally began with my father asking: "So, what's wrong with this?"

So - although somewhat eclectic - my knowledge of my faith is pretty well grounded in an understanding that the Bible is also a historical document, its writers influenced by their culture and the time they lived in. Plus, I know why Moses is so often pictured with horns on his head, and why this proves that it's not a good thing to always take the Bible literally. (Again, one needs to look at the context.)

[liliaeth]

This is weird to me, mostly because in Belgium, kids learn about religion in school. But, and this is the big part, since religion is allowed to be taught in school, it has to adhere to lesson plans that includes learning about the history of the bible, the meaning of metaphors and time spent on comparing religions.

Godsdienst as we called it, was more about learning about the nature, origins and reasons behind our religion, than about indoctrinating kids into a belief system.

Then again, kids get to choose if they wanted to take religion or ethics, from around the age of 12 and in my particular class, most of them chose the second. Not a hard choice to make, when the ethics class got to watch a movie, while the rest of us had to go to church on the first day of school. :-)

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much the situation in Sweden too. I remember being astonished the first time I heard that comparative religion isn't a mandatory subject in the US, where religion plays a much bigger role in daily life than it does here. (One member of parliament recently suggested that the prime minister should end all his speeches with "God bless Sweden." People laughed at her for weeks.)

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

I wasn't all that surprised, either, when I heard the story on NPR today. I consider myself only marginally knowledgeable and I couldn't answer a lot of the sample questions they asked, but then, I accept the Bible as parable and myth rather than literal truth.

I'm fortunate in that my own religious education was pretty spotty because my Dad was pretty near an atheist and Mom only made us go to church when Grandma was in town. (She's since converted back to her Catholic faith and been Confirmed, but I never have been.)

I do like to read about faiths of all kinds and it's because of that I've sort of cobbled together my own version of faith that I'm sure would horrify many ministers...

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

Sorry this is totally off topic, but I love your icon!

:)

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

Interesting thinky-thoughts. Thanks for sharing.

I'm agnostic as well, but have so much admiration for people who have strong beliefs that they arrived at through questioning and searching out history and trying to look at things objectively in order to seek out truth.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I enjoy people who are knowledgeable about history and religion and who are philosphical about it and reading the metaphors. I also enjoy the caparison of religion. On the other hand, I do tend to be frustrated by people believing stuff without knowing where it came from.

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

I grew up a catholic, w/ weekly class, more class,etc. Then I dabbled in evangelical christianity, w/ even more study. I also went to Hebrew school.

I went to a catholic university, and religion classes were part of the course requirement.

I still read about religions, beliefs. And I'm an athiest. Scored 100% on Pew's test.

That first related article is full of comments like "faith is more important than knowledge." If that's true, why aren't there people with religions that believe in fairies and elves? How do you have faith *without* knowledge - what is it you have faith *in*??

I don't get it.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

"Jesus loves you, but God is really pissed off."

The way I understood our church as a kid was basically "Jesus loves you, but you have to love him unquestioningly and unconditionally or you broke the rules and it won't count."

I'm still generally agnostic. I'm willing to entertain the 'greater' or the 'universal' but I tend to be wary of anyone who thinks they have it all figuredo ut or accepts 'just cause.'

I think there's a lot of good in Christianity (and many other religions). But I tend to vere more to the side of the philosophical and the metaphorical well above the literal.

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

The cafeteria catholics make me crazy. If she confessed those things to a priest, he'd hit the ceiling.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Baptist church in town to never bring me with them ever again.

Heh.

Well, our Methodist Church always saw itself as not being as straight-laced as the Baptist one across the street. ;)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

In defense of the Sunday School Teacher, I think she really believed it.

On the other hand, my sister and myself can't be the only kids who reacted that way.

It was very much 'What do you mean, I have to accept it whole and not ask questions? Are you listening to the stories you're telling?'

I could never quite picture how we were not supposed to question.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I don't know that this was church doctrine so much as a Sunday School teacher finding a way to shut down questions that she didn't know how to answer.

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

Hehe! We have only three churches directly in town- the Baptists, the Methodists, and the Church of Christ folk. Oh, it was like a mini-crusade every day at school. Southern religious politics are so much hilarity. XD

[http://users.livejournal.com/mad_brilliant_/]

The top scoring groups were atheists/agnostics, Jews and Mormons.

Doesn't surprise me. :)

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Baptised C of E. Sent to Sunday School at the United Reformed Chapel and I've lots of Methodist relatives. We also had Religious Education as part of the curiculum, which was all about learning about the basics of all the religions in this country - even though the village where I was brought up had no ethnic minorities and their places of worship, though of course the big industrial town my relatives all lived in did.

I'm an atheist, but when I went to uni, to work in London and go abroad I do know enough not only to be able to read what I'm seeing but know how to behave in famous churches but also mosques, Hindu temples, Buddhist ones... And that's a good thing.

Though I don't believe in any of it.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I find that people seem very willing to accept things to remain part of a church/organized religion that in other circumstances they'd never accept.

This is true. I suppose it's because religion is such a belief system, especially ones that center on salvation, that the flaws become difficult to fully acknowledge as it can threaten belief in the whole. Better to 'ignore' than to 'doubt'. If that makes sense.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

My parents just weren't very religious, full stop. I mean, I suppose my dad is inasmuch as he believes, I suppose. But he isn't much in the way of practicing. My mother, on the other hand, has developed into basically a little anti-organized religion as a whole. Although they did both take me to church as a child. We were pretty much holiday Christians though, things like Easter and Christmas. My best friend was quite religious though and so I tended to tag along with her to fellowship stuff and Methodist summer camp (then in college she got really, really, really religious with a Baptist ministry on campus so I got a up front view of evangelical Christianity in college.)

Most of my interest in religion probably has more to do with a college professor that I had that said that if you want to understand a culture, you have to look at their religion. So between that and generally being a history geek, I've found myself reading a fair bit about various religions.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

We have social studies in school which is largely studying different cultures, but the whole 'separation of church and state' thing has resulted in trying to keep religiono out of the classroom. Less because it cannot be taught comparitively than because trying to teach it would most likely be quite problematic because someone somewhere would get hyper offended and probably litigious. Ultimately, somewhere it was probably decided to avoid rather than tempt the brouhaha that it would create.

That said, I don't know what's taught in other states or in bigger cities. I grew up in a town of only about 5,000 people total. We didn't even have a Spanish teacher (which would have been useful) so I'm not surprised that we wouldn't have had anything like a comparitive religion teacher. It probably wouldn't pass the school board as far as areas chosen for funding (and if it were funded, it would probably have been to promote Christianity). The South is pretty homogeneous in regard to religion. There aren't many others represented period. There are a fair number of Catholic or Episcopalian or Baptist private schools around though. But those tend to have religious instruction about their own religion not others.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I think the chances of people having shitfits over comparative religion classes probably keeps them from existing outside of universities (where they're readily available). I mean, I read an article yesterday about a school system that just banned the Bridge to Tarabithia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Terabithia_(novel) ) because... I don't know why. They said 'damn' a few times? Basically there are enough extremely hyper people that it was probably wise to do the separation of church and state and then have the courts reinforce it. I think comparative religion would be a great thing to have, but I can see why cash strapped school systems wouldn't want to go through the lawsuits that it would bring up, and there would be a distinct possibility of it being used for reinforcing Christianity, which while I'm not judging is far and away the most dominant religious group in the U.S.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I tend to be open to the spiritual to some degree, but generally speaking I'm not big with organized religion.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I tend to respect educated faith more than blind faith. I suppose that's a bias too, but... it's the one I've got.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

That first related article is full of comments like "faith is more important than knowledge." If that's true, why aren't there people with religions that believe in fairies and elves?

I'd be willing to bet that somewhere there probably are. Remember the Hale-Bop folks? Their website read like it had been totally lifted from a Star Trek site. And then, need we mention Scientology?

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

;)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I like to try to understand religion and their place in history. I blame/credit my college history professor who said if you ant to understand a culture you need to know something about their religion.

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, how could I forget? Probably wishful thinking ;)