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Survey: Americans don’t know much about religion

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Fox News story that was sent to me by Jerry, Wes, Timmy, and Mary.

Excerpt:

A new survey of Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths.

Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.

More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.

The survey released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life aimed to test a broad range of religious knowledge, including understanding of the Bible, core teachings of different faiths and major figures in religious history. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, especially compared to largely secular Western Europe, but faith leaders and educators have long lamented that Americans still know relatively little about religion.

Respondents to the survey were asked 32 questions with a range of difficulty, including whether they could name the Islamic holy book and the first book of the Bible, or say what century the Mormon religion was founded. On average, participants in the survey answered correctly overall for half of the survey questions.

Atheists and agnostics scored highest, with an average of 21 correct answers, while Jews and Mormons followed with about 20 accurate responses. Protestants overall averaged 16 correct answers, while Catholics followed with a score of about 15.

[…]On questions about Christianity, Mormons scored the highest, with an average of about eight correct answers out of 12, followed by white evangelicals, with an average of just over seven correct answers. Jews, along with atheists and agnostics, knew the most about other faiths, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Less than half of Americans know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and less than four in 10 know that Vishnu and Shiva are part of Hinduism.

Gaaaaahhhh!!! How can you be a member of any religion if you don’t know the basic claims of all the religions so you can evaluate them to see if any are true? How can you make a good choice unless you choose the one that is logically consistent and empirically validated by the external world?

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20 thoughts on “Survey: Americans don’t know much about religion”

  1. IQ and religiosity are negatively correlated, at both the individual as well as national levels. Religiosity and educational attainment are also negatively correlated. Amongst the educated classes, professors are the least likely to be religious, and finally within the academe, the more eminent the professor is, the less he/she is likely to be religious. – Gad Saad, Ph.D.

    The excerpt from the article summarize nicely why this survey maybe the case. The more people are educated, the less likely they are to be religious, therefore the agnostics and atheists would on average do better in the survey.  The data for the article is here.

    I encourage Christians and other faiths to keep studying so they too can achieve “enlightenment” :-)

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    1. I think you’re making a leap between correlation and causation. :)

      IQ is one of those odd things that people point to as a neutral arbiter of all that is good and right with humanity. Most people of astoundingly high IQ that I know are embarrassed and dismissive of the way that statistic is used by the population at large. Those others who laud tend to be pompous jerks. :)

      Which all goes to say that people of high IQ are just as subject to personal flights of fancy and dedication to pulling the wool over their own eyes as anyone else. Their ability is one of degrees, not kind, and high IQ possessing people come in all kinds. When you grow up on a pedastal created by others that your mind is a thing of awe, it is much easier to be too critical of others, and not critical enough of self.

      I think the most telling of this sort of problem is Einstein’s cosmological coefficient (both the purpose behind, and intellectual dishonesty of), and this from someone universally acknowledged as one of the smartest men of our time. The second is Hawking and his now 2nd reformulation (and the latest getting further from anything substantial), and again the paucity of reason and process to reformulate his own work. If you’re unfamiliar with those, I would recommend you do your own robust and multi-viewpoint research on the topic. It will be both eye opening and disappointing if you hold that high IQ is an indicator of anything other than high IQ.

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      1. I was more interested in the amount of education correlating to religiosity. I am not a great fan of IQ tests as they favour a certain type of cultural and educational background, and someone as dumb as me can have a Mensa level IQ disproves the test :-). Maybe that is why I am pompous! Thanks for that :-)

        Seriously, the study is relevant as when people study (i.e. Gain an education) then you except them to achieve higher in knowledge based surveys. Not really that surprising.

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        1. I do see that and agree, that people who have achieved advanced degrees are more accustomed to taking tests and have learned how to perform well on them.

          There’s other correlations to be made, though… Tribal liberalism also dominate campuses. More education almost universally means more exposure to anti-religious dogmatism. Most degreed atheists I know are incapable of having a facts-based evaluation of anything they disagree with (I can think of 2 exceptions, and they’re simply dogmatically assertive that they’ve come to the right conclusions, facts be damned, but they can at least recognize there are facts that don’t jive with their view points).

          Perhaps most significant to that is that the atheists did NOT score highest on bible knowledge and Christianity (contra the misleading headline). Liberal education places great value on studying “religion” as a general curiosity, but certainly not where it applies to the most readily available knowledge of religion: the majority religion of our society. If more liberally educated folks knew more about Christianity, there’d be more liberally educated Christians, not fewer. :)

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  2. I couldn’t believe that Protestants didn’t know our founding father of the Protestant reformation! I think part of the blame for things like this is that Christians today think they can’t be intellectual which in my opinion started with the seeker movement. Everything is based on “experience” through shouting, jumping, and trying to get “power,” like prophecy, seeing celestial beings, and such. When I read the Bible, I don’t get that the apostles were obsessed with spiritual power, rather they were more concerned with engaging in other worldviews and making sure the church knew what they professed to believe. I think the church today has really suffered by putting the mind on the back-burner and seeking religious experience.

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    1. Forgot to mention that Paul was also more concerned with the church’s sanctification, rather than being concerned with “spiritual gifts” (Corinthians).

      *Flips two cents on ground* :)

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  3. Check the cross hatching:

    Evangelicals and Mormons scored highest in Christianity and the Bible and Atheists and Jews scored highest in world religion and public life questions.

    The headline is misleading to say the least… that said, it’s clear that there’s a problem with congregational (and even pastoral) engagement in the facts of the faith.

    I’m not entirely convinced that knowing Martin Luther as a person is as important with knowing what distinguishes Protestant belief from Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, but I do think that every Protestant and Catholic should know what their view of Holy Communion is, why that is, and how it differs from those who disagree

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  4. This story was also posted today by a muslim colleague of mine. He did rather well, as did his wife. She even knew who Jonathan Edwards was! Most Christians don’t… I could only agree with them as to the sad indictment of ignorance that this is on those who call themselves Christian.

    This relates to the poor understanding of faith in the Church today. WK blogged on it last week.

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  5. This is interesting for several different reasons.

    First, as other commenters have already made clear, it seems obvious enough that a lot of us aren’t particularly well grounded in what we believe – and, more importantly, why. Jared has spoken about it relating to the desire for experience; I wonder, too, if some branches of American Christianity have become a bit, well, anti-intellectual.

    On the other hand, I find Moo’s claim that educated people are less religious on average interesting, but wonder what the real direction of causation is. Is it that education in itself causes people to lose faith in God (or gods), or is it that your typical educated person comes from a wealthy, middle-class background and is not strongly religious to begin with? It of course shouldn’t surprise us that intelligent, well-educated people do well in the “World religions” area of the quiz, which is, after all, a bunch of what are essentially general-knowledge questions.

    And then there are some questions that are really quite specialist, and draw rather on a knowledge of American history and law. For example, I readily admit that I only guessed that it was Jonathan Edwards who was involved in the First Great Awakening having seen Mary’s comment above; but it’s not clear to me that the details of Christian revivals in America should have formed a part of my learning (NB. I am a foreigner, though living in America for the present). Nor do I think that the foundations of my faith are shakier because of unfamiliarity with First Amendment precedents.

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  6. “Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.”

    Argh!!! Seriously, why do they even call themselves Catholics?!

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  7. Yeah. “More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation.” :-P

    You know what else is interesting? There’s a category called “nothing in particular”. This is actually practical atheism. i.e. They live as if there is no God, but don’t think about it much. So, in effect, the atheists have been split up into the card-carrying ones (who identify as atheists) and the ones who can’t be bothered to think about it in much depth or come to a conclusion. The “nothing in particular” set didn’t fare all that well. The other religious groups have not been split up similarly. In America, a nominally “Christian” country, nominal Christians are lumped in with those who take it seriously.

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    2. Yeah, if you say you’re a Christian, a person (most usually) will see you as a positive-speaking, blab-it grab-it, charismatic that doesn’t care about intellect and lives by blind faith; which is really sad. There are many intelligent Christians, but what the usual person sees as Christianity is what’s broadcast on TV as Christianity (not the best visual of the Christian lifestyle). So yeah, like you said, the nominal Christians are lumped in with those who take it seriously.

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  8. I took two versions of this test, one with 10 questions and one with 15 (though some of the questions were the same on both) and got 100% on both. Most of the questions were not challenging at all in my book.

    A different link on this topic was posted by an atheist (formerly Christian) friend of mine on facebook. What I pointed out to her and what looks like it wasn’t mentioned in this article (or at least the quoted part here) is that people with more formal education tended to do better **no matter what their personal beliefs are**. The article I read about this said that there were not anomalies such as people with little education scoring well or people with a lot of education scoring poorly, no matter their religious affiliation (or lack of one). So I would say that Moo’s assertion is wrong.

    It only makes sense that a person who is highly educated in general would know more basic facts about a range of religions, and that someone lacking education would score poorly. And it does make sense that atheists would score a bit higher, because atheism is not well accepted in most societies and most people are raised at least on a superficial level in some religion. For someone to reject all religions, they probably studied a bit about them. Same deal for the Mormons and Jews. They are surrounded by people of other faiths so it’s easy to pick up bits here and there.

    On the contrary, someone raised in a majority faith in a relatively homogeneous community who stays with that faith may not bother to learn about other faiths or even the roots of their own. Yes, that’s lazy, but a lot of people are lazy.

    And I also agree with the point that lots of people call themselves Christian who don’t take it seriously at all. Some say they are Christian in the sense that they aren’t Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist. I’ll never forget when I was teaching English in Japan and an American acquaintance of mine told some Japanese friends that he was a Christian. This dude was a skirt chasing, cussing, p*rn loving guy who came to church with some Christian friends a couple times but didn’t buy any of it. He just meant to say he wasn’t Jewish.

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    1. Hey Erica. One of these days you write us a post about your experiences being a Christian woman in Japan. I hear strange things about the men there, like they are not really interested in women and marriage. And I would like to know why.

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  9. I can do that. Let me know more of what you’d like to know. I also know some missionaries there who deserve all the support they can get.

    But shortly, from what I observed, it seemed that it was more the women there who don’t want to get married. Especially these days when more and more women work outside the home (because they want to or because they have to), marriage isn’t advantageous for women there.

    It’s accepted for men there to stay at work (not necessarily working for much of that time) insanely long hours, with long commutes, to not help with any housework or help raise the children and to screw around on their wives. Divorce among Japanese couples where the man just retired is very common because they find out they had nothing in common and hate being together.

    The advantage for women in this situation is they control all the money (giving the man an allowance), control everything about the home, control how the children are raised, and have lots of time for leisure activities like studying English, flower arranging, tea ceremony, sports, etc. But if women are asked to work, too (or just want to work), it’s not worth it for many of them. If they are working they’d rather just stay single and not deal with all the responsibilities of home and children, because the men do not pick up the slack.

    There’s a trend of foreign brides for Japanese men, mostly from other (poorer) Asian countries.

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