The Pew Forum has just released the results of a survey of Americans' knowledge of religious beliefs and practices. They provide a sample quiz you can take to see what you know and how you compare to the rest of the population who took the survey.
The most striking thing to come out of the survey is that persons self-identifying as atheist or agnostic scored better on average than persons self-identifying as religious (regardless of the religion they profess). Jewish respondents came in a fairly close second, followed by Mormons. Mormons and white evangelical protestants did best on the Christianity questions.
A full report (which I have yet to digest, but which may prompt follow-up posts) is also available. A cursory review of the results shows that Americans know almost nothing about the Great Awakening (either first or second) or Jonathan Edwards. Almost half believe that "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is one of the Ten Commandments. And, despite Charlton Heston's best efforts, many people do not know that Moses led the Exodus out of Egypt.
While the full survey is available at the Pew forum site, it has also been pointed out that the Christian Science Monitor has posted the complete questionnaire in a way that you can easily page through:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0928/Are-you-smarter-than-an-atheist-A-religious-quiz/When-does-the-Jewish-Sabbath-begin
ps -- tip o' the hat to Carrie Staton for that link.
ReplyDeletethe post-grads also scored comparable to the atheists/agnostics.
ReplyDeletei would guess that the mormons only cam ein well because, unlike the rest of the Xtians, they knew the answer to the joseph smith question *and* the answers to all the xtian questions.
the thing is, why should it be surprising? i mean, when you go to church - and I don't, not since maybe 4th grade? and my visits to other people's churches/temples - you are learning about your religion on a really practical level, aren't you? i mean, in your daily religious life - in whatever relationship you have with god/gods - why would it matter if you knew about another religion or even about the Great Awakening - let alone know the constitutional scholarship on the topic. isn't that precisely the kind of stuff that would be learned outside of worship?
of course, i'm coming at this from a pretty xtian view of it, where worship and critical reason don't coincide.
i also think that atheism/agnosticism is a sign for the depths of one's liberal arts education, no? (forgetting the technical survey term/social research term for it). In other words, the correlation is between education and religious knowledge: atheists and agnostics tends to have advanced degrees. which doesn't mean the religiously devout are ignorant, only that the highly educated are exposed to more ideas which tends to make them question religious traditions. in other words, and crudely put, education predicts atheism/agnosticism *and* knowledge about world religions. (I think I just channeled Wojtek there. :)
just a bunch of guesses.
(part 1)
ReplyDeleteKelley:
Thanks for the great comments . . . and for channeling Wojtek. That's not a horrible thing. Only occasionally irritating. :)
As for the rest, they are good points and good questions. I think it is easy for those of us who study religion, and especially those of us interested in the meaning and internal logic of religious ideas (which I see as a kind of definition of a kind of "theology"), to forget that religion is a practical thing. Oddly, it is often the students and believers who resist this the most, indeed preferring to see it as precisely impractical. Maybe that's part of the practicality of it. I certainly don't have a problem with that, since, well, it can be practical.
But . . . while I think that knowing about, say, the First or Second Great Awakenings may not change the worship service, may not change the prayers you say, in or out of church, may not affect your singing of the hymns, may not make you trust God more (or less!), I do think that awareness of one's tradition, both as Christian and as American, brings significant benefits, both to the faith and to the practice of life outside the church.
Here I'm going to cheat and make use of what I already wrote on Facebook. Forgive me. :) As I say there, at a certain level, what people believe is what they believe. And there's no need to know that you're part of a group stemming from a "Protestant Reformation" for that to be the case.
There's a problem and a possibility, however, around the knowledge of history and tradition (and scripture, for that matter). The problem is when people claim things that aren't true about their own traditions. If they say it doesn't matter to them, that's fine. But if i tell you that your faith comes out of this tradition, you can always just shrug and say, "so?" That's a fair answer, but leads to the possibility: particularly in the case of religious faith, imo, knowledge of the tradition enriches the faith. This will be particularly true in the case of people who are becoming self-aware with respect to their faith. I would also say the same of knowledge of other traditions. All of this gives you perspective on what you believe, different ways of looking at things, that you may very well set aside, but after having looked through those lenses. If you've done it and taken it seriously, it adds a dimension, however small, to your self-understanding and to your practice of your faith as an inner discipline, and perhaps sometimes as outward action. And I would say that explicit altering or modification of beliefs is not necessary for this effect to be realized.
So that's the private part. As a halfway decent Marxist, I think the personal is the political, but the distinction is not meaningless. Here we can talk both about enriching people's personal understanding of themselves and their relationship with their god(s), and so of their whole religious lives, but we can also talk about enhancing their ability to interact in a productive way with other people. If your faith has any implications for how you interact with other people -- and most at least claim to -- then a better understanding of the logic and historical conditions in which the faith has been produced is very pertinent to understanding what the faith means for what *you* do *today* (instead of two or three thousand years ago, or even five hundred years ago).
(cont'd in next post, due to character limit)
(cont'd from part 1 above)
ReplyDeleteKnowledge of your own tradition and other traditions puts your beliefs in a context wider than your own narrow experience. It puts you in a position to be a better person, and even a more religious person. How we understand that depends in part on what we mean by "religious," but if we mean anything at all beyond the confines of "personal belief" and "church worship," then it seems an open and shut case.
Unless I need to make an argument also for the importance of context to understanding what people do and why they do it, or even to understanding what god(s) say(s).
To come to the final point about predicting atheism or agnosticism, that doesn't explain why so many of my very educated, very smart colleagues (like my two co-bloggers) are still religious. Yes, highly educated people are more likely to be atheists or agnostics than less educated people, by a long shot, but I don't recall that this means that highly educated people are more likely to be atheists or agnostics than they are to be religious. Certainly the way these people understand their religion is different from the way many other people do. But then it's no less religious than the religion of the many other people just because it looks different. IMO. Just like people who don't know about the First Great Awakening are no less religious for it.