Sententia // Perspective

Another neat article from Newsweek today giving the results of a poll on Americans’ religiosity. Here’s a snippet:

“A belief in God and an identification with an organized religion are widespread throughout the country, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam. Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view.”

Part of what always makes me curious about these surveys is those who identify themselves as “non-religious” as opposed to those who identify themselves as “non-Christian”. What makes someone religious? Is it if they say so? Is it if they subscribe to a particular set of beliefs or practices? Where does a Taoist fit into this — would they say they’re religious or non-religious? Would a Buddhist say they believed in God, or no? The view you get from the first line of the article (”a belief in God and an identification with an organized religion”) says one thing, but I wonder if that’s the criteria upon which people were actually answering the question. What about those who are religious, but neither believe in God, nor identify with an organized religion? Questions, question…

But you know what they say about statistics… 99% of all statistics are useless.

There is interesting piece from Newsweek today. Here’s an excerpt:

“This month, HarperSanFrancisco will publish Prothero’s new book “Religious Literacy,” a work whose message is far more sober than its author’s affect. In spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, only a tiny portion of them knows a thing about religion. When he began teaching college 17 years ago, Prothero writes, he discovered that few of his students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels. Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture. Almost no one could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Prothero, who went to Yale in the early 1980s and speaks of his all-night bull sessions on politics and religion with reverence, realized that to re-create that climate in his classroom, his students first had to know something. And so he made it his job to (1) figure out what they didn’t know and (2) teach it to them. He began giving religious literacy quizzes to his students, and, subsequently, to everyone he knew. Almost everybody failed.”

What’s sad is that I totally agree with Prothero — and he’s exactly right in what he says the consequences are:

“In a world where nearly every political conflict has a religious underpinning, Prothero writes that Americans are selling themselves short by remaining ignorant about basic religious history and texts, by not knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite or the name of Mormonism’s holy book. “Given a political environment where religion is increasingly important, it’s increasingly important to know something about religion,” he says. “The payoff is a more involved [political] conversation.””

How about you? Would you pass a religious literacy quiz? Newsweek provided one on their site; take the test and then leave a comment saying how you did, and which questions you got wrong, or which ones you thought were curious. I’m interested to see your responses…