Pray Tell
What Americans don’t know about religion and why they need to learn it
By Taylor McNeil
Stephen Prothero remembers sitting in front of a television in 1993 watching the standoff between federal agents and the obscure apocalyptic sect Branch Davidians, in Waco, Texas. “I was thinking that I knew things that the FBI didn’t know,” he recalls. “I’m a religious studies person and I’ve read the Bible and I know something about American religion. I felt I knew it was going to blow up and there was going to be a fire and everyone would die.” Prothero, now chairman of the religion department in the College of Arts and Sciences, was right. Seventy-five people died in the firestorm that was ignited as the FBI swept toward the building.
What Prothero took from that experience — that an understanding of religion is essential and that most people don’t have even a basic knowledge of it — started gnawing at him. Later, after the 9/11 attacks, he heard dozens of simplistic discussions of Islam, and most of them drove home this point. Again, in recent political battles, where religion seemed to play a more prominent role than it had in other elections, he found few people who really understood what was going on.
That widespread absence of basic religious knowledge is what drove Prothero to write his latest book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t. It’s part argument, part history, but largely primer, founded on the conviction that a shared understanding of religion is required of all responsible participants in our democracy. “The question is: what religious information do we need to be informed citizens?” he says.
Each year, Prothero gives his students what he calls a religious literacy quiz (see page 43 to take the quiz). And despite the presumed interest in religion of the 200-plus kids who sign up for his elective Death and Immortality class, test scores are reliably abysmal. Prothero is flipping through the most recent batch of quizzes in his office in early February, reading off the results: 45, 0, 28, 28, 8, 6, 46, 56. “This is out of 100,” he reports. “Virtually everyone’s failed: evangelicals, Catholics, mainline Protestants, everyone.”
How does it happen that so many people who are supposed to be educated lack even the most basic knowledge of religion? It’s easy, Prothero says. Religion is not taught in schools — and no, that’s not because of the 1960s Supreme Court ruling on religion in the classroom. Just as surprising, it’s not taught in churches or synagogues much, either. The result is religious illiteracy, and the consequences can be dire. “There’s something at stake here,” he says.
“Religious illiteracy makes it difficult for Americans to make sense of a world in which people kill and make peace in the name of Christ or Allah,” Prothero writes. “Today, when religion is implicated in virtually every issue of national and international import . . . U.S. citizens need to know something about religion, too. In an era when the public square is, rightly or wrongly, awash in religious reasons, can one really participate fully in public life without knowing something about Christianity and the world’s religions?” Prothero thinks not. The result, he says, is that Americans are “too easily swayed by demagogues on the left or on the right.”
The Long Fall
The decline of religious literacy has been long in the making, according to Prothero. “Some people on the religious right think that the Warren Court in the early 1960s passed these rules against school prayer and kicked God out of the public schools, and therefore the students don’t learn any religion,” he says. “But that explanation was about 100 years too late.”
In fact, he says, religion as a subject was mostly pushed out of public schools in the mid-1800s, largely a result of what he calls “the Bible wars.” In that dispute, Protestants, who controlled the public school systems, insisted on using their version of the Bible in class. Catholics had their own translation, the Douay-Rheims, and conflict was intense between the two sides, especially in areas with large Catholic populations, such as Philadelphia, New York, and Cincinnati. In the end, both sides decided it would better to have no Bible in the classroom rather than the “wrong” Bible. Brief Bible passages lived on in textbooks like the McGuffy readers, but the elimination of religious influence in public schools was, he reports, mostly complete by the early 1900s.
Some school districts continued to use the Bible devotionally, however, until 1963, when the Supreme Court outlawed school prayer and devotional readings. And while the court did not ban discussion of religion, Prothero points out, most people seemed unaware of that. “It wasn’t secular people who hated religion who undercut education about religion,” he says. “It was religious people who wanted the education tailored for their particular group. That precipitated a crisis and made us throw out education about religion altogether.” Nowadays, he says, religion might be mentioned in world history classes, but only in passing.
Even churches and other religious institutions fail to adequately teach the Bible and other scriptures, says Prothero. He points to his students who failed the religious literacy quiz. “They didn’t learn anything in church — that’s a huge part of it,” he says. “They probably go to church as much as the general population, but they’re not learning anything there.” Young Catholics go to Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) classes, where they “learn they should be nice to their fellow man and might learn to list the seven sacraments,” he says. But they don’t know Bible stories.
“Protestants used to be well versed in the Bible,” says Prothero. “To be a Christian wasn’t just to have Jesus in your heart, it was to know what Jesus said. Nowadays it’s about having a relationship with Jesus — it doesn’t matter what he said. Or it matters, but the fact that you don’t know doesn’t matter. One could imagine it shameful to be a Christian and not know anything about Christianity. But we’re not ashamed by that.”
Repairing the Damage
What’s the solution? Prothero would like to see all public schools offer a Bible course and a world religions course. That suggestion draws flak from some of his colleagues, who advocate for religious scriptures courses instead of focusing on the Bible. Prothero counters with his civic argument: What religious information do we need to be good citizens? “To me it’s very clearly the Bible that’s the scripture of American politics,” he says. He turns to the Congressional Record for proof. “People in Congress are not quoting the Bhagavad Gita or the Quran,” he says. “They are quoting the Bible.”
Learning about world religions is equally important, according to Prothero. Christianity should comprise about a fifth of that course, and students should learn about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other major religions. “They need to know the difference between a Sunni and Shiite,” he says. “How else are we going to know what to do with the situation in Iraq if we do not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? When people are talking about civil war and sectarian violence, they are talking about two very specific communities that are killing one another. We need to know that.”
Why not raise the generation now, Prothero asks rhetorically, “that has some very basic familiarity with the key terms, the key symbols, the key beliefs and practices of these five or seven great religions of the world?”
He acknowledges that talk about teaching religion in public schools makes many people nervous, often because many teachers think — incorrectly — that the Supreme Court doesn’t let them. According to Prothero, teachers have an absolute right to talk about religion, but not to proselytize, just as those teaching about American politics do not bring their own preferences into the classroom.
Prothero thinks religious studies should be required at universities, including BU. “It’s a very simple theory: someone walking out into the world in 2007 or 2008 with a bachelor’s degree who can’t tell you the difference between a Sunni and Shiite, and can’t tell you what the Good Samaritan is, is not an educated person,” he says. “I also don’t think they are prepared for citizenship the way they should be.”
For those who have had their formal schooling already, Prothero suggests holding group discussions, similar to book clubs, of religious topics. And there’s always his Dictionary of Religious Literacy, which fills the final third of his book and consists of definitions of terms and concepts, from atonement and Congregationalism to nirvana and the Torah. It’s not exhaustive, but instead focuses “on what U.S. citizens need to make sense of their country and the world,” he writes.
Prothero keeps bringing his argument back to the classroom. “How can we talk about whether the Hindu view of the afterlife makes any sense or whether it’s better than the Christian view if none of us knows anything about it?” he asks. “I want the classroom to be a space of conversation, but we can’t have conversation without basic knowledge.”
What Is Your Religious Literacy?
1. Name the four Gospels. List as many as you can.
2. Name a sacred text of Hinduism.
3. What is the name of the holy book of Islam?
4. Where according to the Bible was Jesus born?
5. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the Jericho road. What Bible story was he invoking?
6. What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament?
7. What is the Golden Rule?
8. “God helps those who help themselves”: Is this in the Bible? If so, where?
9. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God”: Does this appear in the Bible? If so, where?
10. Name the Ten Commandments. List as many as you can.
11. Name the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
12. What are the seven sacraments of Catholicism? List as many as you can.
13. The First Amendment says two things about religion, each in its own clause. What are the two religion clauses of the First Amendment?
14. What is Ramadan? In what religion is it celebrated?
15. Match the Bible characters with the stories in which they appear. Draw a line from one to the other. Hint: Some characters may be matched with more than one story or vice versa.
Adam of Eve Exodus
Paul Binding of Isaac
Moses Olive Branch
Noah Garden of Eden
Jesus Parting of the Red Sea
Abraham Road to Damascus
Serpent Garden of Gethsemane
Answers (and Grading)
To figure out how you did, add up your total points then multiply by two to get your score on a standard 100-point scale. An A is 90 points or higher. B is 80-89. C is 70-79. A passing grade is 60 points or more. Add up your points and double them to determine your score.
1. (1 point each) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
2. (1 point) There are many possibilities here. They include: the Vedas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas, Upanishads, Puranas, Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Yoga Sutras, Laws of Manu, and the Kama Sutra
3. (1 point) Quran
4. (1 point) Bethlehem
5. (1 point) The Good Samaritan
6. (1 point each) Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
7. (1 point) “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12), or a similar sentiment from Rabbi Hillel or Confucius. (“Love your neighbor as yourself” is not the Golden Rule.)
8. (2 points) No, this is not in the Bible. In fact, it is contradicted in Proverbs 28:26: “He who trusts in himself is a fool.” The words are Ben Franklin’s.
9. (2 points) Yes, in the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3).
10. (10 points) The Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish versions of the Ten Commandments differ. Give yourself credit for any ten of the following twelve commandments, each of which appears in at least one of those three versions:
1. I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.
2. You shall have no other gods besides Me.
3. You shall not make yourself a graven image.
4. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
5. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
6. Honor your father and your mother.
7. You shall not kill/murder.
8. You shall not commit adultery.
9. You shall not steal.
10. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
11. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
12. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.
11. (4 points)
Life is suffering.
Suffering has an origin.
Suffering can be overcome (nirvana).
The path to overcoming suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path.
12. (7 points)
Baptism
Eucharist/Mass
Reconciliation/Confession/Penance
Confirmation
Marriage
Holy Orders
Anointing of the Sick/Last Rites
13. (1 point each) “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The words before the comma are referred to as the establishment clause; the words that follow constitute the free exercise clause.
14. (2 points) Ramadan is a Muslim holiday characterized by a month of fasting.
15. (7 points)
Adam of Eve -- Garden of Eden
Paul -- Road to Damascus
Moses -- Exodus, Parting of the Red Sea
Noah -- Olive Branch
Jesus -- Garden of Gethsemane, Road to Damascus
Abraham -- Binding of Isaac
Serpent -- Garden of Eden
Reprinted with permission from Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t by Stephen Prothero (HarperSanFrancisco).
