Why care that atheists ace, faithful fail on 'religious knowledge'?
Election fights include 'the pill' and abortion rights vs religion

Ignorance on religion is a civic, spiritual danger: Experts

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

"So what?"

Ray Suarez of the PBS News Hour heard all the details of Americans' deep and broad lack of religious knowledge -- detailed in survey results delivered with grim humor by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life today. But, he asked, "So what?"

Are people really looking out of intellectual curiosity, spiritual hunger or just ammunition for ideological entrenchment?

While Alan Cooperman and Greg Smith, co-authors of the survey of U.S. Religious Knowledge, couldn't speak to the why-it-matters question, religious illiteracy expert Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, absolutely could.

At a symposium at the Newseum in Washington D.C., Prothero acknowledged "a kind of jeopardy quality" to Pew's 32 question survey, in which most people couldn't get more than 16 questions correct. It matters because, he says, we are handicapped as informed citizens of our country and the world if we don't know the basics.

How can Americans understand and act economically, militarily, and politically without knowing the world's religions?... How can you talk about the Tibet if you don't know the Dalai Lama is Buddhist?

At a time, he says, when the two major political parties are each trying to tag their policies and proposals to the Bible, how will people make sense of the analogies to "the Good Samaritan" or find what Scripture says on abortion if they haven't read the fundamental text of Christianity?

They were speaking to an audience assembled by Pew, the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum, and PBS and WGBH, the public broadcasters behind a series on God in America airing in October. Prothero also is one of the narrators on the television series' historical examination of religious experience from the 16th century to modern times.

Prothero says, since 9/11 we've struggled and failed to have a conversation about Islam -- volleying endlessly back and forth between people who call it a religion of peace or a religion of war.

Civic conversation about religion is simply the assertion of identity... 'This is me, you're not me, therefore go away.'

Suarez highlighted a tiff a a U.S. city zoo (he said Kansas City but I can't find confirmation on that) where Christians objected to a statue of Ganesha, a Hindu diety represented by an elephant, in front of the elephant house at the zoo. Says Suarez,

Everyone is very vehement about religion but in a kind of content free manner... Public debate is like confetti -- everybody just throwing stuff out there.

(Keep in mind, we're not all that smart on lots of questions: 4% of Americans on the same Pew survey think Stephen King wrote Moby Dick, not Herman Melville.)

But Krista Tippett, host of the radio show that recently changed names from Speaking of Faith to Being, argues that what matters is not "a cerebral knowledge of Islam but actually knowing Muslims."

What has gone wrong is that we're unfamiliar with the daily lived practice of piety of our own faith and that of our neighbors. You need a base of "intellectual curiosity," Tippett says, one that is not necessarily encouraged. Our common life needs all the information we can have about each other about the practices treasured by people across centuries, she says.

Prothero, who worked with Pew on developing questions, noted that the survey did, indeed, include questions on practices and doctrine, from the meaning of the Eucharist to the significance of Ramadan and the timing of the Jewish Sabbath. They also raised questions on the stories of the Bible, about figures like Job and Moses, because they address what the Bible says about suffering or the reach for freedom.

So did you take the Pew test? Do you think you need to know more about your own faith or your neighbors? What "should" you know?

Election fights include 'the pill' and abortion rights vs religion