Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
I suppose that I could accept the fact that people of the Jewish faith would know more about the Christian religion and its core teachings (after all, they are responsible for authoring the Old Testament); but…Mormons? I don’t have a problem with the existence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; but they’ve only been around since 1830! One would think that the faithful of the Catholic religion - all of 2000 years old, would have a better command of knowledge regarding our shared written traditions - the Old & New Testaments.
Previous surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that America is among the most religious of the world’s developed nations. Nearly six-in-ten U.S. adults say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and roughly four-in-ten say they attend worship services at least once a week. But the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey shows that large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own.
In other words, while we Americans tend to take our religion very seriously, we aren’t as concerned about knowing why we believe what we do. From a Catholic perspective, for example, it is disturbing to discover that 45% of Catholics who responded to the survey did not know the central distinguishing tenet of Catholicism - which is that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
I suppose there is some cold comfort in the fact that this lack of religious knowledge is not limited to Catholics alone. Slightly more than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the instigator of the Protestant Reformation and 40% of Jews were unable to identify the significance of Maimonides. Nevertheless, these results help explain the rising tide of secularism in American society. Without religious literacy, it is practically impossible to refute those who seek to exclude religion from the social order, much less maintain fidelity to one’s own beliefs.
What can be done? The Pew Forum’s findings point to several important strategies. First, the survey results suggest that educational attainment (highest level of schooling) is the single largest predictor of religious literacy. Not surprisingly, the Survey also suggests that those who read Scripture on a regular basis, talk about religion with friends and family and attend church weekly are more likely to demonstrate greater religious literacy than those who don’t.
I’ve often argued the point that the purpose of the Religious Studies curriculum at La Salle is to:
• Nurture the faith of our Catholic students
• Encourage our non-Catholic students to grow in their faith tradition
• Enable our unchurched students to appreciate the religious basis for our shared moral values
We do this through the same strategies (albeit School Masses are monthly, not weekly) that the Pew Forum suggests will enhance religious literacy and, by extension, religious fidelity. In a time when our society is desperate for a moral anchor that doesn’t emerge from the “chattering class” found on television, radio and the Internet, I can’t think of a better argument for the Mission of La Salle High School than the findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
