Dumbed-down religion

There's been a lot of talk this week about recent findings from a study by the Pew Forum on Religious Religion and Public Life, indicating that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do.  You can read about it here if you'd like.  Of course, there are many factors that go into putting a study like this together - everything from the quality of the questions to the pool of people surveyed to whether the survey really shows what it claims to show.  I'm not entirely sure this recent study fully meets each of those criteria (more on that later).

That being said, I think there are some issues the study reveals that are definitely worth our consideration.  Religious folk often count those in the atheist and agnostic camps as "ignorant," when in truth they are anything but.  The atheist/agnostic friends I have are by and large well-educated individuals; and a large part of the reason for their unbelief or skepticism comes from what they know about the tenets of organized religion and their conscious choice not to accept them.

That stands in contrast to the other side of the coin.  While there certainly is a tradition of well-educated people of faith (in which I'd like to count my Presbyterian heritage, thank you very much), what seems to be more important for some is what they believe about the Bible and their faith, not necessarily what they know about them.  As someone who teaches Bible in a community college setting, I come up against this all the time.  There is always a segment of students who appear to have little desire to learn anything new about the Bible; they only want to further solidify what they already believe to be true. "New learnings," for them, often amounts to nothing more than a reinforcement of personally accepted and pre-approved dogma.  Anything that falls outside that is discarded, or at the very least hashed back to me on a test or paper simply to secure a passing grade.

These are extreme cases, of course.  Still, the lack of desire among a large segment of the faithful to engage in on-going, deliberate and comprehensive religious education is a real issue.  Just ask any Christian educator and they'll tell you about dipping numbers in Sunday school attendance and Bible studies, and a general apathy toward things of that nature.  Adults often say they've "learned it all already" and offer this as the reason they don't take advantate of educational and nurture ministries in congregations.  When, in fact, what they often "know" are religious concepts and not religious facts.  And the two are not the same.

Case in point: want to take a guess at the number of religious people you know who think the phrase "God helps those who help themselves" is a direct quote from scripture?  I bet it's a lot.  Maybe you think it is, too.  The fact of the matter is that it's nowhere to be found in the Bible.  In fact, it could be argued that it's not even good Christian theology.  Or think about those who believe that the depiction of the apocalypse as presented in the famous Left Behind series is biblical.  I actually had a student in my New Testament class one semester tell me that reading Revelation was confusing, so she was glad she had the "Left Behind" series on her bookshelf because it helped Revelation make sense.  When people turn to a hyped-up fictional book series written to attract readership and make a profit as a way to help the Bible make sense, we've got issues. 

And it's not just our own faith that we need to be educated about.  As the current fervor over all things Muslim has taught us, ignorance can be extremely dangerous.  One man's ignorance in Florida a month or so ago just about sparked an international malestrom, as the threat of burning holy books tends to do.  Ignorance feeds fear, and vice versa.  Knowing the facts about all religions helps diffuse those combustible situations and makes us better believers in our own right.  And I, for one, believe people hunger for this.  A few years ago our church held a study series where we invited people from faith traditions outside our own to come speak.  The Catholic priest came.  So did a Rabbi and a Muslim doctor in town, among others.  Attendance for that series was one of the largest we've ever had, and people still talk about how much they enjoyed it.

Suffice to say that this survey has sparked a lot of great conversation.  And perhaps the best thing to do is to actually take the survey yourself.  You can do it right HERE.  As I indicated before, I have some reservations about the survey - for one thing, I think it could've served its purpose a whole lot better had it been longer than 15 questions.  Still, I bet you'll find that you may not know as much as you think you know. 

As the old saying goes, there's always room to learn.  When it comes to religion, the stakes are too high not to.

 

Comments

[Jacki Spector]

That was an interesting piece and I just had to take the survey. I was reassured to find that I scored quite well, I only missed 2 out of 15 questions. I have always found it scary how little most folks seem to understand about religious practices of religions other than their own. It certainly feeds into the distrust and disharmony among followers of different faiths. And Thank You for the coexist logo, I have only seen that as a bumper sticker and I love it! It says it all!