STEPHEN PROTHERO:  …the United States is one of the most religious countries on earth, but Americans know nothing about religion, their own religions or the religions of other people.

There have been surveys done on this, not very many, but most Americans cannot name any of the Gospels. It’s about 50 percent, a little below, when you ask them to name a Gospel. Most don’t know that Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible. Ten percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. A sizeable minority think that Sodom and Gomorrah were a happily married biblical couple. This is the kind of stuff you get when you ask about the Bible, you ask about Judaism and Christianity.

If you shift over to religions outside of the Judeo-Christian canopy, it’s really quite astonishing. Americans will admit to a very high level of ignorance about Islam. There have been some surveys where people are asked: What do you know about Islam? Have you ever met a Muslim? Do you know anything about it? And Americans will typically run for the side of the survey that heads towards absolutely, positively nothing — that kind of response. There was a survey done of American teenagers, where the teenagers were asked simply to name the world’s religions, and half couldn’t name Judaism as a world religion. Half couldn’t name Buddhism as a world religion.

Now, religious illiteracy is a religious problem [even] inside religious communities. There’s a lot of writing among Jews about Jewish illiteracy. There’s a lot of hand-wringing since Vatican II among Catholics about Catholic illiteracy. Evangelicals are very worried about biblical illiteracy If you do Google searches on these kinds of terms, Jewish literacy, Catholic literacy, biblical literacy and illiteracy, you get a lot of hits.

But the angle of approach for me in this project was the civic and political side. Instead of seeing religious illiteracy as a religious problem for religious people, I’m looking at it as a civic problem and I’m looking at it from two angles. The first is the domestic angle, where we have politics now where we used to have one religious party and now we have two religious parties, in the sense that Democrats have now joined Republicans in deciding that it’s smart to talk about God and it’s smart to talk about faith because that’s the way you get elected.

So basically we have a politics where politicians on both sides are being encouraged to talk about religion, about their own faith, but also to connect their public policy initiatives to religious ideas, particularly to biblical ideas and Jewish and Christian ideas. Hillary Clinton now, when she talks about immigration, she’s quite likely to talk about the Good Samaritan story and to say why do I think that an immigration bill, where we have to turn in people who come over the border illegally, why do I think that’s wrong? Well, because of the Good Samaritan story. You know, we’re supposed to treat foreigners in a good way. We’re supposed to treat them like our neighbors, according to the Bible.

In this kind of politics, it seems to me that it’s imperative for citizens to know something about religion. How can you engage a politician who is rightly or wrongly invoking the Bible or invoking religion for political purposes on issues like gay marriage or abortion or the environment or poverty or euthanasia or capital punishment or war without knowing something about religion yourself?

We shouldn’t have a politics that is so infused with religion. Europeans, apparently, get along perfectly without it. Why do we have to be different? This is a violation in some way of at least the spirit of the First Amendment if not the letter of the First Amendment.

And my response is, well, that’s all well and good, but we have the country that we have and people are going to be talking about religion on television. Politicians are going to be invoking religious reasons for their public policy stances, and we, as citizens and as journalists and academics, should know something about religion so we can engage them, and also so we can — I think, in some cases — so we can flush out the demagogues who have a kind of religious invocation where they’re sort of invoking God or invoking religion without actually having a religious argument underneath that invocation. So that’s the domestic side.

The international side, to me, is even more urgent. This is where we have a situation like Madeline Albright observed in her book, The Mighty and the Almighty. When she was secretary of state under [President] Clinton, she had a couple dozen economic advisers she could call any time of the day or night when she wanted to figure out what was going on with the economy of some country, or the political situation. But she didn’t have anybody that she could call up and say explain to me this Sunni-Shiite thing, or what’s going on in Afghanistan with religion, or in Kashmir do people really care about Hinduism and Islam there and is that operative? Or, what’s going on with the civil war in Sri Lanka between Hindus and Buddhists? I thought Buddhists were nice to each other; I didn’t think that they liked to kill people for religious reasons.

She also observed that there’s no requirement for ambassadors to countries that have substantial religious populations, that they know anything about that religion. There’s neither a prerequisite nor a policy for having U.S. ambassadors to Middle Eastern countries, for example, have any training in Islam or to know one salient difference between Sunnis and Shiites; or for the ambassador to India to know anything about Hinduism whatsoever….

…I’m of the party that doesn’t believe the culture wars are really raging out there around religion in ordinary America. I think that it’s the conflict narrative imperative of journalism that breeds the false assumption that culture wars are really rife.

So I think there’s a perception that that’s what’s going to happen in the public schools, that it’s going to be like a Christopher Hitchens and a Jerry Falwell in the classroom, and they’re going to be talking about stuff. And, of course, if that were my proposal, I would not propose it. But my proposal is that we would read the Sermon on the Mount and say this is a very influential text in world history and it was not delivered by Billy Graham, as a third of Americans believe the Sermon on the Mount was delivered by and that we should know what it says because it’s the sort of thing that politicians appeal to, that John Edwards appeals to when he talks about poverty, and that pacifists have appealed to when they talk about “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and you can’t understand the history of American pacifism without understanding that text.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/723/what-americans-should-but-dont–know-about-religion