What do Americans know about religion?
It’s Sunday so let’s have a posting with a religious theme.
We all know that Americans are very religious, right? But just how much to Americans know about religion? The answers come in a recent survey of religious knowledge conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
The survey found that atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups , outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7.
You can do a mini version of the questionnaire here. I scored 14 out of 15 which apparently was better than 97% of those participating in the survey (and I’m an atheist).
You can read the full survey here.
One blog site has commented:
“In short, the ignorance of religion displayed by religious believers in America is appalling. Their reasons for believing in a particular set of religious propositions certainly cannot be based on a sound knowledge of what is on offer and deep reflection on the evidence. In America, at least, most believers simply don’t know what they’re talking about. I wonder whether it would be much better in other countries.”
I doubt it – but then I doubt everything about religion.
October 3rd, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Hi Roger. I took a version of that quiz via the Christian Science Monitor and scored 100%. I think one of the problems with a lot of people is they don’t bother to learn about other religions besides their own, and some of the questions certainly involved other religions besides Christianity.
It’s a shame. I think you have to know why you believe what you believe and at least learn about other belief systems. I would add to the blog comment you quoted above. I am not so sure the problem is exactly that most believers don’t know what they’re talking about so much as they don’t know what other people are talking about.
The controversy about the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero in NY has revealed some rather frightening views held by many Americans, and I think the center of the issue is an unwillingness to try to see things from any perspective aside from one’s own.
October 3rd, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Are there any useful conclusions from such a study? The person who scored 0% and the person who scored 100% are still equal when it comes to having the right to cast a vote …
I took the short version of the quiz via the the link from the article in the New York Times, and scored 100%. Which question did you miss, Roger? The one that I wasn’t sure about was about the First Great Awakening, and I must confess that my answer was reached by a process of elimination, rather than real knowledge of the question subject.
Which raises a question about the true meaning of the results of this type of quiz, where you have the option of choosing an answer from multiple possible ones. If it had been a quiz where I had to provide the answer myself, rather than choose one, I would not have scored as high.