Following the release last week of the results of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, which was widely reported as having demonstrated Americans’ considerable lack thereof, we invited a dozen leading scholars to weigh in on the survey’s significance.

What, we asked, do the results of Pew’s quiz tell us about knowledge—and ignorance—of religion in the United States? And how important is the sort of religious knowledge that the survey tested to American public life?

Our respondents are:

Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

Penny Edgell, Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Chair of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California, Berkeley

Paul Lichterman, Professor of Sociology and Religion, University of Southern California

Vincent Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia State University

Kathryn Lofton, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Yale University

Andrew Perrin, Associate Professor, Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

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Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. Since many Americans apparently do not know some of these things, it is concluded that they are ignorant not only of other people’s religions, but also of their own. Predictably, the survey’s release has been met with widespread hand-wringing about Americans’ “religious illiteracy”: “Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans,” was the headline in the New York Times.

In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion. If, for example, 45 percent of U.S. Catholics “do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ,” then perhaps it is a mistake simply to identify Catholicism with what Catholic bishops say it is. To conclude that Americans are “uninformed” about “their own traditions” betrays a subtle bias in favor of elites and begs the question of what constitutes one’s “own” religion: are we “illiterate,” or do we simply disagree about what belongs in the “canon”?

Still, whatever one’s standard, there is almost certainly room for improvement. After pronouncing Americans “deeply ignorant about religion,” the New York Times was obliged to issue the following correction: “An article on Tuesday about a poll in which Americans fared poorly in answering questions about religion misspelled the name of a beatified Roman Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was Mother Teresa, not Theresa.”

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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

As interesting as I found the Pew results, I found even more suggestive the responses they generated. There were the tender-hearted ones, fearful that we will never overcome our rancor without better testing. There were the triumphalists, mocking the “Christianists” so manifestly out of touch with their tradition. Closer to home, we witness familiar academic rituals: calls for greater religious literacy or, more provocatively, to consider the differential modes by which “religion” is established.

I wonder, however, whether tests on just about any subject would produce similar results. Would our knowledge of, say, PEN/Faulkner award winners be statistically different? Surely, novels are less obviously tied to public life than religions, whose importance is obviously central to our moment. Yet it may be that what’s significant in these findings is not people’s fluency with data about “religion” but something more.

While I certainly wish that more Americans knew more things about religions, I have no confidence that this would improve public life, as implied in many responses. Instead of explaining away the ongoing outrage that constitutes public life by pointing to religious illiteracy alone, we might also consider what this survey cannot capture. What’s striking is not that citizens are uninterested in knowledge about religion but instead that we gather data incessantly, doing so not in the service of shared civic projects but as fuel for indignation, each decontextualized datum rendered an endorsement of our self-fashioning. “Knowledge” about religion here may not link up to anything outside itself but simply keep sturdy those obstacles between us as the particulars wash away. Even as I tell myself that tomorrow’s midterm will in some way avail my students in public life, I fear that their test scores may matter little in a time of digital isolation, conspiratorial rage, and an endless smile which tells us not to worry.

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John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

Perhaps the most surprising result from the Pew survey is that most Catholics and Protestants appear not to understand the most basic elements of their own theology. 41% of Catholics incorrectly thought that their communion ritual did not transform the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Only 19% of Protestants knew that Protestants were the group that ‘traditionally teaches that salvation comes from faith alone.’ And yet these issues were precisely those over which schisms spread and blood was spilled. Why, then, have they sunk from salience in the minds of the faithful?

The answer may be that precisely because these issues divide people, ministers choose to play them down in their services. My Catholic students know that their church teaches transubstantiation (that the wafer and water are transformed), but they also report that it would be easy to miss this during the service. Anglicans (or Episcopalians) include those who believe in transubstantiation and those who do not, so the issue is deliberately fudged in those churches, and what Catholic priest would mind a few converts?

Protestant theologies have their own problems. Presbyterians may officially follow Calvin in his doctrine of strict predestination, but saying ‘you cannot do anything about your salvation’ hardly encourages people to come to church. Accordingly, it is little mentioned. And, to return to the survey question, emphasizing Sola Fide may be theologically correct for a Lutheran or a Methodist, but suggesting that good works won’t hurt on Judgment Day surely would seem like the pragmatically best message to put forward. (Some respondents also may have been puzzled by the absence of any mention of “grace.”)

In the end, why do we make much of church-goers’ failure to get the theology right? Is ‘having correct beliefs’ the main point of religion? There may be socially useful reasons to play that down in favor of encouraging shared values: compassion, service, and social justice.

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Sociology Department, University of New Hampshire

The Pew Forum’s recent survey documents major gaps in Americans’ knowledge of basic religious tenets. As the news accounts emphasize, Catholics and Protestants are far less knowledgeable than their minority Jewish and Mormon peers, and atheists know the most. As someone who defends the thesis that faith and reason are not only compatible but mutually influential in religious adherents’ lives, these data do not help my case. On the other hand, I can’t say I am too surprised by the findings. There are a couple of reasons why not. One, surveys of Americans’ civic knowledge also show remarkably high levels of ignorance and uncertainty about the basic functions of American government. Yet, this does not prevent Americans from having strong political opinions and vigorously participating in political debates. Two, religion as it is lived is really more about everyday habits and sensibility than religious knowledge. Thus, it is instructive that 45 percent of Pew interviewees think (incorrectly) that “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is one of the Ten Commandments. In practice, however, this adage aptly summarizes all the commandments, and hence it makes practical sense that respondents would equate it with the Commandments.

Nevertheless, given the contemporary relevance of religious issues, the evidence even among college graduates of major gaps in religious knowledge does not bode well for the substance and tenor of public discourse. The fact that approximately two-thirds of Americans think that public schools are prohibited from teaching classes on comparative religion suggests that many schools probably don’t teach it, and that, if they were to, the move would not be without controversy. Yet, religious pluralism requires a basic knowledge of others’ traditions even if it does not dissolve disagreements among diverse adherents. By the same token, it is hard to have faith in the religious socialization of new cohorts of Christians if so many of their parents are ignorant of their respective denominations’ distinctive beliefs.

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Penny Edgell, Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

It’s time to play the devil’s advocate—a term originating in Catholic Church history for the canon lawyer appointed during the canonization process to try to poke holes in the candidate’s case. If that question had been on the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, probably about as many people would have known that as knew that Maimonides was Jewish (8 percent).

I think there are wrong reasons and right reasons to be concerned about religious ignorance.

It is wrong to think that we must know the details regarding other people’s religion because religion motivates social action in a straightforward way. (For example, evangelical doctrine and popular culture abhors divorce, but evangelicals divorce at higher rates than do mainline Protestants.) And it is wrong to conclude that people do not care about their own religion because they can’t answer these kinds of questions. It’s crucial to remember that religion is more than doctrine. People care about it, and participate in its organized forms, for a variety of reasons, including the aesthetic and emotional appeal of ritual and the sense of community it provides.

The right reason to be concerned, it seems to me, has to do with a more general fragmentation of our common cultural references and our sense of history, fostered by a variety of factors including the proliferation, globalization, and niching of the media that deliver information. People do not know who Maimonides was, I think, for the same reason they do not know the origin of “devil’s advocate.” Our culture has become more pluralistic, and people draw upon its elements in the way of the bricoleur to construct a web of meanings that is flexible, contextually activated, and what we would call “post-modern” (though I suspect Latour was right and we were never as “modern” as some thought we were). Perhaps more fundamental, the rules that shape how the bricoleur selects the various elements have also changed. Religion is far less formative of our public discourse and culture in the deep, constitutive way that it was even as recently as the postwar period, due in large part to the rise of neo-liberalism. These changes are important, and not well understood, and more difficult to talk about than simply chiding “the American public” for its (completely unsurprising) ignorance.

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Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Chair of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University

I suspect, and I am not sure I should say this, that if we ask Americans a range of questions about matters that extend beyond their immediate horizons, we would be somewhat amazed by the blind spots in our thinking. Ignorance about religion might very well extend to ignorance about geopolitical concerns or about other cultures generally. What is striking, and simultaneously disturbing, is the degree to which our comfort and certainty about ourselves as Americans and about the world we inhabit enable us to settle into a kind of willful ignorance. So I am not inclined to single out religion in this regard; something more fundamental has been revealed.

To take seriously the results of the Pew quiz leads us to question the substance of our national commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism.

If our knowledge of other religions (even our own) is shoddy, then what constitutes the substance of our toleration of others? Is it simply a procedural concern? And, more importantly, if we fail to know basic facts about others, do we make it easier to retreat into the comfort of insular spaces, deaf to the claims of others? Do we expect, at the end of the day, no matter our public announcements to the contrary, that all others should sound and believe as the majority of Americans do? Is that the price of entry into the public domain?

Ignorance heralds, more often than not, intolerance; it also can aid in the sanctification of bigotry. Hopefully, the Pew study can help us see this and help us change.

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David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California, Berkeley

The Pew Study reveals how badly the United States needs a more candid, public discussion of religious ideas. Too often, religious utterances are given a “pass,” with the result that obscurantist ideas flourish all the more. This society would be much better off if religious believers whose ideas are the most consistent with modern standards of cognitive plausibility would join non-believers in actually criticizing the ideas that the New Atheists, for all of their throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater mistakes, are correct to lampoon. The real fault-line in American religious discourse is not between believers and non-believers. Rather, it is between the ignorant and the knowledgeable. Many educated non-believers share with believers an appreciation for religion’s role in providing structures of meaning and communities of belonging. There is a natural alliance across the believer-non-believer divide predicated on knowledge. The ignorance revealed by the Pew Study is partly the result of the failure of the relevant educated parties to engage the public in honest, sustained conversation about religious issues. This need not be done in an arrogant or patronizing manner. The key is direct, respectful, open engagement. Not everyone will listen, but lots will if given a chance. Truth is a powerful, shared ideal. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” said a great preacher (John 8:32), even if his notion of what was true, specifically (Jesus was trying to get Jews to give up Judaism and to support his monomaniacal ministry), is unpersuasive. Americans knowledgeable about religion have too often withheld what they know for fear of causing offense. Speak up, for Christ’s sake (oops . . . sorry; I mean, for the sake of all of us).

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Paul Lichterman, Professor of Sociology and Religion, University of Southern California

A headline summary of Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Knowledge survey might read “Grim prospects for evangelical Protestantism.” How else do we make sense of the fact that after decades of growing churches, multi-million dollar television ministries, bestselling book series—and VeggieTales to boot—only 28 percent of white evangelicals answered correctly that Protestantism teaches salvation through faith alone?  Combine that with the finding that nearly twice as many of that same population know that the Koran is Islam’s holy book, and we arrive all too easily at the crudest, culture-warring claims about rising Islam’s threat to Christian values. So what can we really take away from this survey? Scholars have long held that religion is America’s common coin, that it brings us together. But if it is that aspect of religion that would make the Pew findings concern us, the survey is not measuring it. The survey tapped a kind of cultural literacy that matters more to religious professionals than other people even in a still relatively religious country. If regard for religion somehow unites Americans, smooths differences, or wins elections, it’s not the religion of Sunday school primers or comparative beliefs courses in college. What if the survey had asked, “Is religion a matter of deeply personal faith?” or, “Is religion mostly a matter of being a good person and living a life worth modeling?” Probably much larger numbers, across religion and non-religion, would have answered “yes,” the correct answer in view of the American cultural mainstream. Of course this answer would show little more inter-religious knowledge or sensitivity than the results Pew obtained. But it would represent a more widespread kind of cultural literacy that, for better or worse, may unite Americans, smooth over our differences, and even win elections, in some places some of the time.

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Vincent Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia State University

Philosophers talk about two sorts of knowledge. On the one hand, knowledge-that is the belief a certain proposition is true: a triangle has three sides, Atlanta is in the South, or the world is round. On the other hand, knowledge-how is an ability: knowing how to swim, or how to bake a cake, or how to speak a foreign language.

The Pew Forum’s Religious Knowledge Survey examines one type of religious knowledge: knowledge-that. Respondents were asked whether certain propositions about world religions were true. But it is an open question whether this really is the sort of knowledge that we have in mind when we are talking about religious knowledge. At least sometimes, it seems like we mean knowledge-how.

Knowledge-how is occasionally conveyed in a way that looks like knowledge-that. We make an instruction manual intended to convey how to swim, or how to bake a cake, or how to speak a foreign language. But certainly we don’t confuse mastery of the instruction manual with knowing how to do the activity itself. This translation into knowledge-that is effected for certain pragmatic reasons, such as pedagogy or explanation. I wonder whether the high rates of religious knowledge found among atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons can be attributed to the frequency at which explanations must be given, explicitly when asked or implicitly to themselves—mutatis mutandis for the low rates among Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics.

While one response is to devise measures of religious knowledge-how (as S. Brent Plate suggests in the jargon of embodiment), I wonder whether religious knowledge might actually be a form of knowledge that resists reduction to either knowledge-how or knowledge-that. If these are secularist reductions, religious knowledge from the atheist’s perspective, what might the post-secular alternative look like?

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Kathryn Lofton, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Yale University

If you’re searching for ignorance, it is never hard to find. The question for us is the meaning of a given ignorance. If concertgoers today can’t identify Big Mama Thornton, does this make them ignorant of rock history? Or does it suggest that the interviewers have different definitions of rock, and different definitions of knowledge, than that of those fans? As a scholar of religious studies, I know I should be happy about this recent set of revelations from Pew, since it offers attention-grabbing openers for grant applications and renewed stakes to departmental pleas for funding. But for me deploying such statistically formatted failures of religious literacy seems a rather bad premise for arguments on behalf of our work. Is it the job of scholarship to teach Catholics what that wafer is? Is it the job of our courses to explain that Maimonides was Jewish, or that Indonesia is largely Muslim? It seems worrisome to imagine that our classes explain that the wafer means any one thing, or that ‘Jewish’ is a neat marker of any one person. Of course, Pew didn’t seek to supply legitimacy to my or our academic ventures, and here I may be anticipating argumentative applications that never will transpire. For now, I can only observe that a survey which pits religious groups against one another in a Quiz Bowl, and which imagines that praying Protestants ought to know the authority of Martin Luther, tell me very little about religious knowledge, and tell me even less about what the humanities do to serve such a surveyed public. It may be that we live in a budgetary time that begs for base descriptions of our basic (un)knowing. I would only warn that the minute we believe the answers we offer begin with multiple choice questions is the same minute when we cede our complexity to that formation of ignorance.

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Andrew Perrin, Associate Professor, Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Essentially, my answer to the “how important” question is “not very.” Relatively secular readers, particularly those hostile to religion, are likely to delight in the finding that, to oversimplify, many religious people don’t even know what it is they believe. But this begs the question of to what extent religious experience and even belief are essentially about a catechism, that is, a set of precepts agreed to in much the same way one might agree with precepts of science or sociological analysis. My view is that religious belonging is really not much at all about these. It is mostly about participation in a community of believers—even if the community isn’t quite sure what it believes in! The unwritten premise of the survey is that belief ought to be individual, considered, and fully-informed. But that premise fits neither religious experience nor human subjectivity over the long term. Thus to ask these questions in this way is to presume a particular kind of religious subject that is largely nonexistent, then to take pleasure in clucking over its nonexistence.

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James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

I had two initial reactions to reports about this survey. The first was cynical: the inability of Americans to articulate the particularities of even their own religious faith sort of confirms the isomorphism of American religion—that the “religion” of this “deeply religious” country is, at the end of the day, just a functional deism necessary to sustain American civil religion.

My second reaction was more critical, and perhaps more charitable: I continue to be suspicious of such surveys and reports precisely because they reduce religion to “knowledge.” Or, more specifically, they reduce religion to the sort of quantifiable knowledge that can be measured by a survey instrument, crunched with statistical analysis, and then be presented in colorful pie charts that carry an air of scientificity.

But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.

In this vein, I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules. Surveys like this mistakenly assume that everyone who plays the game (of religion) can also articulate the rules. I think Charles Taylor gives us good reason to be suspicious of such assumptions.

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