Religious Ignorance in America

A book review of Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't appeared over the weekend in the Book World section of the Sunday Washington Post. The review is by Susan Jacoby, author of an excellent book on irreligion in America, Freethinkers. (I discussed Jacoby's book in several earlier posts, beginning with this one.)

The premise of Prothero's book, quite frankly, shocks me. Jacoby introduces the topic:

The United States is the most religious nation in the developed world, if religiosity is measured by belief in all things supernatural — from God and the Virgin Birth to the humbler workings of angels and demons. Americans are also the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world. Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

I never would have guessed this. Nor would I have supposed that:

Approximately 75 percent of adults, according to polls cited by Prothero, mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." More than 10 percent think that Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. Only half can name even one of the four Gospels, and — a finding that will surprise many — evangelical Christians are only slightly more knowledgeable than their non-evangelical counterparts.

This boggles my mind. It may not be surprising that the tiny minority of Americans who claim no religion whatever are thus ignorant of that which they deny. But that the nominally religious among us are in many ways clueless about what we supposedly believe in flabbergasts me.

According to the recent Baylor Religion Survey (see this post; the survey report itself can be downloaded here) nearly 90 percent of Americans say they belong to one broad religious tradition or another, and only about one in 20 Americans claims to be an atheist. Most of us (81.9 percent) are Protestant or Catholic Christians — at least nominally, that is. 2.5 percent of us say we are Jewish, and 5.9 percent of us identify ourselves as members of "other" broad religious traditions.


Where is the massive ignorance of religion on the part of religious believers themselves coming from? One source is, writes Jacoby, "the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s. The fervor of America's periodic cycles of revivalism, rooted in a personal relationship with God rather than in theology handed down by learned clergy, has always had a strong anti-intellectual as well as spiritual component."

Then there is the secular, 20th-century abdication of "the Protestant-influenced 19th-century schools [which were] an important factor in maintaining the Puritan heritage of Americans as 'people of the book.'" "The once ubiquitous McGuffey readers," Jacoby points out, "rendered the Ten Commandments in such rhymes as, 'Thou no gods shall have but me/ Before no idol bend the knee.'" That synergy between literacy teaching and religious education no longer happens.

Moreover, "a bland tolerance that, while vital to pluralistic American democracy, has also discouraged our awareness of religious distinctions," says Jacoby.

Finally, over the course of the last few decades electronic media have delivered a death blow to Americans' religious literacy. "Many of the religious allusions and metaphors explained by Prothero in his glossary were once as common as the universal reference points now supplied by television."


Jacoby parts company with Prothero when it comes to what to do about religious ignorance. Prothero wants there to be "high school and college courses dealing with the historical and cultural role of religion." There is, after all, no First Amendment ban on teaching about religion, as there is on religious advocacy in schools. (By the way, Jacoby also makes this point: "According to polls conducted by the National Constitution Center, only one third of Americans can name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.")

Even so, Jacoby is down on bringing the history of religion into school curricula:

But given the failure of so many schools to inculcate the most elementary facts about American history, it is hard to imagine that most teachers would be up to the task of explaining, say, the subtleties of biblical arguments for and against slavery. Furthermore, a curriculum that would meet with the approval of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and nonreligious parents would probably be a worthless set of platitudes.

Why is she so defeatist? Maybe it's in part because of this historical footnote:

In 1880, the average American still had only four years of schooling (although the figure was higher in cities than in rural areas). Yet 19th-century autodidacts, including Abraham Lincoln (who had less than a year of formal education) and Robert Green Ingersoll, the orator known as "the Great Agnostic," achieved both religious and secular literacy by reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible without any prompting from teachers.

In other words, if Americans are religiously illiterate today, the schools need accept neither the blame nor the burden of remedying the situation.


I think Jacoby's argument, if it can be dignified as such, is shallow and fallacious. There seems to be within it the tacit (and, I hope, false) assumption that religion simply cannot be taught about in schools in this country. If you try, the effort will either collapse under the weight of squabbling about whose religions will be covered and how, or it will ineluctably become a Trojan horse for religious advocacy on the part of those whose passionate fervor exceeds their sense. (How many Americans, by the way, know what the original Trojan horse was?)

I admit the danger Jacoby alludes to, but I see that danger as a symptom of the very problem under discussion. People who are not educated to be able to discuss ideas coolly and sensibly will inevitably be prone to having their buttons pushed by fulminators and bloviators of the worst kind. Some will fall for the rhetoric which says teaching about religion qua religion is anathema in a secular society. Others will fall for the rhetoric from people who say teaching about any religion other than their own is the devil's work.

It is yet another case of excluding the very possibility that there is a middle ground. We do that all the time in these days of polarization. In this instance, the middle position which says people in general are capable of learning to use their brains properly is the one that gets excluded by stances like Jacoby's.

Though I have not yet read Prothero's book, I imagine that I am in agreement with him on this one, and not with Jacoby. I believe that if we Americans have become anti-intellectual to the point of cultural, historical, and religious illiteracy, then we ought to collectively roll up our sleeves and do something about it!