WASHINGTON, 13 March 2007 — The premise sounds simple — many Americans, including people in the Bush administration, profess to have a profoundly personal relationship with God — but what do they actually know about their religion?
The answer is both disheartening and discouraging. According to Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, 60 percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
But if they don’t know the basics of their own religion, what do they know about others? Not much.
All this has Prothero concerned. “Americans’ deep ignorance of world religions — their own, their neighbors’ or the combatants in Iraq, Dafur, or Kashmir — is dangerous,” he told USA Today in an interview.
Just 35 percent of high school students know that Ramadan is the Islamic holy month; while 17 percent of those questioned thought it was the Jewish Day of Atonement. This, according to a recent poll of 1,000 high school students, taken by the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, a Washington, D.C. non-profit that promotes free speech.
“If you think Sunni and Shiite are the same because they’re both Muslim, and you’ve been told Islam is about peace, you won’t understand what’s happening in Iraq,” Prothero said.
“If you want to be involved, you need to know what [these holy books] are saying We’re doomed if we don’t understand what motivates the beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can’t outsource this to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda.”
Prothero, aghast at the ignorance of Americans regarding religion, has published a book entitled: “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Doesn’t.”
Scholars and theologians who agree with him told USA Today that Americans’ woeful level of religious illiteracy damages more than democracy.
“You’re going to make assumptions about people out of ignorance, and they’re going to make assumptions about you,” said Philip Goff of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University in Indianapolis.
Goff cited a widely circulated claim on the Internet that the Qur’an foretold American intervention in the Middle East, based on a supposed passage “that simply isn’t there. It’s an entire argument for war based on religious ignorance.”
“Belief is not a business,” Prothero said.
“More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected, he said, citing President Bush’s speeches laden with biblical references.
He also referred to the national furor that erupted over Congressman’s Keith Ellison’s decision to use a Qur’an during a private swear-in ceremony when he took office — until he announced he planned to use the Qur’an of Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, and presidents, of the United States. The copy was lent to him from the Library of Congress.
“We’re impoverished by ignorance,” the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council on Churches told reporters. “You cannot draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings”.... Such as not knowing that Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities destroyed for their sinful ways.
