Religion Matters Stephen Prothero Free Download

[Celena Angolo]

Thisbook could scarcely be more reader-friendly. It is written pellucidly and contains an almost endless number of charts, maps, vignettes and lists of terms. The colour is so splashy that I would not recommend it to the colour-blind.

The title of the book is also misleading. Religion matters, we are told, because there remain so many societies that are religious. The vaunted process of secularisation, which goes back at least to Marx, has occurred in certain countries in Europe but not worldwide, and certainly not in the United States. But Prothero confuses appearance with reality. Those who deny that religion matters are asserting that religious beliefs and behaviour cannot be understood on their own terms but can be best explained by psychology or anthropology or sociology or economics.

Furthermore, Prothero misses the main current trend in the study of religion: finding religious forms of thinking not just in traditional religions themselves but also in seemingly secular phenomena such as nationalism and science. As a result, his approach to religion bypasses many of the central issues raised by present-day scholars.

Robert A. Segal is sixth century chair in religious studies at the University of Aberdeen and professorial research fellow at the University of Vienna. He is also the author of Myth Analyzed (forthcoming).

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Stephen Prothero is the New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One and a professor of religion at Boston University. His work has been featured on the cover of TIME magazine, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, NPR, and other top national media outlets. He writes and reviews for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, and other publications. Visit the author at www.stephenprothero.com or follow his tweets @sprothero.

Eighty-two percent know that Mother Teresa was a Catholic. Three percent think she was Jewish. Seventy-two percent know that Moses, and not Job or Elijah or Abraham, led the Biblical exodus from Egypt. Seventy-one percent know that the Bible says Jesus was born in Bethlehem. By the way, a quarter thought he was born in Nazareth or Jerusalem.

About two-thirds of the public knows that the Constitution says that the government shall neither establish a religion nor interfere with the practice of religion. By the way, 18% think the Constitution does not say anything, one way or the other, about religion, and 3% think that the Constitution privileges Christianity. Sixty-eight percent know that most people in Pakistan are Muslim, and not Buddhist, Hindu or Christian.

This is a tough question, in some respects: Which religious group traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone? About one-in-five Americans correctly answers Protestantism. Protestants themselves do a little bit better, and Protestants who are frequent churchgoers do considerably better. But still, as you see, the vast majority of American Protestants apparently do not recognize sola fide, one of the key theological distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism.

And we know that we could have made up harder questions or easier questions, but what we can say with some confidence, and even delight, is that the questions we chose did a very good job of differentiating levels of knowledge among U.S. adults because, through a combination of good design and good luck, the overall results are an almost perfect Bell curve.

Who knows the most about religion and who knows the least? As has been alluded to, the groups that do best on our survey are atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons. Out of the 32 questions that we asked, atheists and agnostics answered an average of 20.9 questions correctly. Jews answered 20.5 questions correctly, on average. And Mormons got 20.3 questions right, on average.

Digging into the data a little bit more deeply, we see that the realm of religious knowledge in which atheists and agnostics and Jews really excel is on the questions that we asked about world religions other than Christianity, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism.

The survey also shows that, beyond overall levels of educational attainment, specific kinds of educational experiences are linked with religious knowledge. The survey asked people who had been to college whether or not they took a religion course while they were there. Those who say they did take a religion course in college answered an average of 22.1 questions right, significantly higher than the 17.9 among people who did go to college but did not take a religion course while they were there.

Let me also point out one other thing that we really tried to do with this project. In this report, we really wanted to dig below the surface and try to answer the question of what kinds of traits are strongly associated with religious knowledge and which traits seem to be linked with religious knowledge but, in reality, are only tangentially linked, if at all.

To try to address these kinds of questions, we used a technique called multiple regression analysis. We began with a statistical model that includes a variety of religious and demographic variables, like education, age, gender and race. And it considers the impact of each one of these one at a time, while holding all of the others constant. This produces a picture of how much each factor contributes to religious knowledge, independent of all of the other variables we looked at.

This analysis confirms that educational attainment is, far and away, the single leading predictor of higher religious knowledge, even when you take other things into account. It also shows that men score a little bit better than women, by about 1.4 questions, on average. It shows that whites score better on the religious knowledge test than Blacks and Hispanics. It shows that people who live outside the South do better on our survey than Southerners by about one question, on average. And it shows that the oldest group in the population gets about one fewer question right compared with younger age cohorts.

So these are some of the highlights of our survey, some of the highlights of our analysis. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons do best on religious knowledge questions overall. Large numbers of people are unfamiliar even with important aspects of their own faiths. And the public thinks that there are more restrictions on religion in the public schools than is actually the case.

But the focus of my own writing on this question has been more about the political and civic side. And I think there are two ways in which religious illiteracy matters. One is domestic and one is international.

On the domestic side, we have, now, two religious political parties. We used to have one, until maybe six years ago, or maybe four or maybe two, depending on how you count. But we now have both parties that are trying to link their particular public policy initiatives to the Bible and to Christianity in particular, and then, more broadly, to religion.

SUAREZ: But if the current elbows-out wrestling in the public sphere is as content-free as it tends to be, it has to do with self-representation rather than actual underpinnings of what this is all about.

I wonder if questions about religion, because of where the answers reside in our personalities, would change that much over time if we told people more about these things and then asked them again in two months, a year, two years, or whatever. As people who are in this game, do you find this a useful exercise and could it be applied to this set of ideas and questions?

That study is really best-known for its findings on anti-Semitism. But among the other findings in that survey were that, among Northern California churchgoers, Protestants did considerably better on knowledge questions about the Bible than Catholics did. So in the literature of sociology on this, we have known that Protestants do better on the Bible than Catholics do.

TIPPETT: So I agree with you that to be a citizen of the 21st century, we need to be more literate. Americans need to know more. I also think our public lives, our common lives, can use all the assets we can bring to it, including theological perspective, including these practices of care for the other that religious traditions have cultivated across centuries.

That said, I think it would be very interesting to look and see if there have been questions about religious history, for instance, on standardized tests or college admissions exams. I think that would be something very interesting. And that might be a way to, at least for a certain segment of the population, to try and look back over time and see what kind of a trajectory these things had.

Are they talking just about members of the Christian denomination next door? Are these Methodists who are sort of grudgingly admitting that Lutherans can get to heaven, or are these Christians who mean that, you know what, Judaism and Islam and Hinduism and even non-belief are things that can get you to eternal life? And it turns out people really mean other faiths. Christians, when they say many religions can lead to eternal life, mean religions other than Christianity.

SUAREZ: That set of data, over time, is given tremendous significance by Bob Putnam in his new book, American Grace, where he looks at people who are adherents of faiths that make very concrete, exclusive faith claims, and then asks the members of those faiths whether people who believe other things can still get to heaven based on being a decent person.

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