{"id":3781,"date":"2010-10-03T10:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-03T09:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3781"},"modified":"2010-10-03T10:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-03T09:09:00","slug":"what-do-americans-know-about-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3781","title":{"rendered":"What do Americans know about religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Sunday so let&#8217;s have a posting with a religious theme.<\/p>\n<p>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  <a href=\"http:\/\/pewforum.org\/\">Pew Research Center\u2019s Forum on Religion &amp; Public Life<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>On average, Americans correctly  answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey\u00a0 Atheists and  agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as  well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively.\u00a0 Protestants  as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7.<\/p>\n<p>You can do a mini version of the questionnaire<a href=\"http:\/\/features.pewforum.org\/quiz\/us-religious-knowledge\/index.php\"> here<\/a>. I scored 14 out of 15 which apparently was better than 97% of those participating in the survey (and I&#8217;m an atheist).<\/p>\n<p>You can read the full survey <a href=\"http:\/\/pewforum.org\/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices\/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One <a href=\"http:\/\/metamagician3000.blogspot.com\/2010\/09\/most-american-believers-dont-know-what.html\">blog site<\/a> has commented:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;In short, the ignorance of religion displayed by religious believers in  America is appalling.\u00a0Their reasons for believing in a particular set of  religious propositions\u00a0certainly cannot be based\u00a0on a  sound\u00a0knowledge\u00a0of what is on offer and deep reflection on the evidence.  In America, at least, most believers simply don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;re  talking about. I wonder whether it would be much better in other  countries.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I doubt it &#8211; but then I doubt everything about religion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Sunday so let&#8217;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\u2019s Forum on Religion &amp; Public Life. The survey found that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3781"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3800,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3781\/revisions\/3800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}