Worshiping in Ignorance

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By STEPHEN PROTHERO

For the past two years, I have given students in my introductory religious-studies course at Boston University a religious-literacy quiz. I ask them to list the four Gospels, Roman Catholicism's seven sacraments, and the Ten Commandments. I ask them to name the holy book of Islam. They do not fare well.

In their quizzes, they inform me that Ramadan is a Jewish holiday, that Revelation is one of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and that Paul led the Israelites on the Exodus out of Egypt. This year I had a Hindu student who couldn't name one Hindu scripture, a Baptist student who didn't know that "Blessed are the poor in spirit" is a Bible quote, and Catholic students unfamiliar with the golden rule. Over the past two years, only 17 percent of my students passed the quiz.

"Cultural literacy" has been hotly debated ever since E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s best seller of that name injected the desideratum into the culture wars in 1987. Today religious illiteracy is at least as pervasive as cultural illiteracy, and certainly more dangerous. Religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture. Religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil.

Nonetheless, Americans remain profoundly ignorant about their own religions and those of others. According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name even one of the four Gospels, and many high-school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. A few years ago, no one in Jay Leno's The Tonight Show audience could name any of the Twelve Apostles, but everyone was able to shout out the four Beatles.

One might imagine that religious illiteracy is nothing more than a religious problem — a challenge for ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams. But in the United States today, presidents quote from the Bible during their inauguration speeches, members of Congress cite the "Good Samaritan" story in debates over immigration legislation, and politicians of all stripes invoke the Book of Genesis in debates over the environment. So religious ignorance is a civic problem, too.

In an era when the public square is, rightly or wrongly, awash in religious rhetoric, can one really participate fully in public life without knowing something about Christianity and the world's other major religions? Is it possible to decide whether intelligent design is "religious" or "scientific" without some knowledge of religion as well as science? Is it possible to determine whether the effort to yoke Christianity and "family values" makes sense without knowing what sort of "family man" Jesus was? Is it possible to adjudicate between President Bush's description of Islam as a religion of peace and the conviction of many televangelists that Islam is a religion of war, without some basic information about Muhammad and the Quran?

Unfortunately, U.S. citizens today lack this basic religious literacy. As a result, many Americans are too easily swayed by demagogues. Few of us are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam's place in the war on terrorism, or about what the Bible says concerning homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the Third Estate (the people) to the Fourth (the press).

Over the past few months, Harvard faculty members and administrators considered whether to require a religious-studies course of all Harvard undergraduates. In December the university announced that it had dropped the proposed "reason and faith" requirement. In the process, Harvard dropped the ball. Since September 11, 2001, religion has become an increasingly visible topic on college campuses. Enrollments are up sharply in religious-studies courses at my university. But most colleges — Harvard included — continue to churn out graduates who do not know the first thing about either Christianity or Islam, the Bible or the Quran. That isn't just a shame — it is a scandal.

Rather than follow Harvard's lead and turn a blind eye to our crisis of religious ignorance, American colleges should be addressing this problem by doing what Harvard failed to do: requiring a religious-studies course of all undergraduates.

Since the 1960s, the academic study of religion has found a home at many private and public colleges and universities in the United States. Programs and departments in religious studies at roughly 800 campuses offer a major, and courses on the Bible and world religions count toward general-education requirements at most of those colleges. Religious-studies courses are required of all students in most Catholic and evangelical-Protestant institutions. Yet the vast majority of public and nonsectarian private colleges do not require a single course in the subject. So every year, colleges award bachelor's degrees to millions of students who cannot name the first book of the Bible, who think that Jesus parted the Red Sea and Moses agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane, who know nothing about what Islam teaches about war and peace, and who cannot name one salient difference between Hinduism and Buddhism.

Think of the ripple effect if recipients of B.A. degrees in communications — our future journalists, newscasters, television producers, and film directors — knew something about the world's religions. Or if college graduates going into politics or business were even mildly conversant with the Quran.

Thinkers who argue for greater attention to religion in public life are often assumed to have a theological agenda. Such assumptions are often correct. My goal, however, is civic. I do not want to make American colleges or American undergraduates more religious. My brief for religious literacy proceeds on purely secular grounds, on the theory that Americans are not equipped for citizenship (or, for that matter, cocktail-party conversation) without a basic understanding of Christianity and the world's other religions. The college courses I support would teach about religion, not proselytize for it.

In recent years, George M. Marsden, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, and Warren A. Nord, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have argued for the return of "normative religious teaching" to American colleges and universities. They want professors not only to describe religious traditions but also to weigh in on their vices and virtues. Each of these scholars has also argued that it is essential for students to learn "religious perspectives" in disciplines other than religious studies — to study theological critiques of classical economics and "religious interpretations of history." "There should be room," writes Nord, for both objective analysis of religion and "normative reflection on religion."

What Marsden and Nord seem to want is to make colleges and universities (or pockets of them) into religious places once again — to resurrect the big questions of God, creation, and sin not only in departments of religion but also in courses in philosophy and economics and history and political science. My proposal is more modest and less controversial. I simply want to persuade the lords of American higher education to stop trivializing this subject. There is no reason not to expect from America's future leaders at least minimal religious literacy.

Literacy of this sort could be cultivated in a wide variety of courses. The most obvious is a world-religions course that covers, at a minimum, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the religions of China. During such a course, students would learn the basic symbols, beliefs, practices, and narratives of those religions. At the end, they would be better equipped to understand what is at stake today for Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Jerusalem; for Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir; and for Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka.

Cynics might reply that this is too little, too late — that our collective amnesia about religion is too far advanced. If, as the French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger has argued, religion is a chain of memory, then Americans have broken the chain. Perhaps that is the case. But I believe otherwise. In fact, I am convinced that American higher education is ripe for change.

Over the course of American history, ignorance about religion has been fueled by a series of moral commitments to religious tolerance that had the effect of obscuring the differences between religious traditions. In the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, in the early 19th century, Americans obscured the differences between Protestant denominations in order to cooperate on abolitionism, women's rights, and other social reforms. During the religious revival that followed World War II, they obscured the differences between Christianity and Judaism in order to fight atheistic communism. More recently they have overlooked, in the name of the Abrahamic tradition, the differences among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, while Americans of the "spiritual but not religious" variety have overlooked, in the name of compassion, the differences between Buddhism and Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism.

But a countervailing impulse now seems to be at play — a recovery of particularity in both academe and American culture writ large. The melting pot is now widely seen as a myth. We are, as the Catholic writer Michael Novak put it, "unmeltable ethnics." But we aren't proud just of our Irishness or our Africanness, of being brown or red. We are proud as well of our Coptic Orthodoxy and our Tibetan Buddhism, our Orthodox Judaism and our evangelical Protestantism. Recent immigrants from India to the United States report few pressures to give up Hinduism; in fact, Hindus typically become more religious, not less, upon moving here. Even conservative-Christian critiques of the "naked public square" are often framed in terms of this new devotion to particularity. And born-again Christians are increasingly coming out of the closet as students and professors who have accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord.

There is doubtless a widening gap in the United States between what we actually know about religion and what we ought to know. But there is also a determination to narrow that gap — a sense of shame, or guilt at least, about our forgetfulness, about breaking the chains of memory that once bound our ancestors to one another, and to the particular religious traditions they held dear. Catholic laments over bygone Catholic literacy are routine, as are evangelical laments over the fall into biblical illiteracy and Jewish hand-wringing over Jewish illiteracy.

When it comes to religion, we have had good reasons for this collective amnesia. More often than not, it was tolerance — first for other Protestants, then for Catholics and Jews, and most recently for Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus — that drove us to jettison theology for morality, to trade in the doctrines and stories of our religious traditions for the promise of social order. There are surely many Americans today who are delighted to have the not-so-golden age of bitter sectarian disputes about infant baptism and holy communion behind us, who are convinced that nothing good can come of learning about how theologians reckon the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. But the costs of perpetuating religious ignorance are too high in a world in which faith moves, if not mountains, then elections and armies. It does nothing for the secular left to remain ignorant of the religious right, or vice versa. And it puts the United States at risk to remain ignorant as a society of the beliefs and practices of Confucians in North Korea, Hindus in India, and Muslims in Iran.

In debates about the fate of the Middle East, the propriety of gay marriage, and the politics of Islam, the stakes are too high to defer to politicians and pundits. Given the ubiquity of religious discourse in American public life, and the public power of religion at home and abroad, we Americans — whether liberals or conservatives, believers or unbelievers — need to learn about evangelicalism and Islam for ourselves, to see for ourselves what the Bible says about family values, homosexuality, war, and capital punishment, and to be aware of what Islam says about those things, too.

Each of the world's great religions has wrestled for centuries with the foundational questions of life and death and whatever (if anything) lies beyond. Each has developed sophisticated theologies for making sense of other religions, for regulating war, for fighting injustice. But we as a nation are forgetting those hard-won theologies, replacing them in many cases with bromides that only an advertising hack could be proud of — bromides, it should be noted, that are themselves ripe for replacement whenever a sexier advertising pitch comes along. Moreover, the politicians and pundits eager to exploit those bromides for partisan purposes — to turn God, Jesus, and Muhammad into pawns in their political and military games — are legion.

From this nation's beginnings, it has been widely understood that the success of the American experiment rests on an educated citizenry. Today it is simply irresponsible to use the word "educated" to describe college graduates who are ignorant of the ancient creeds, stories, and rituals that continue to motivate the beliefs and behaviors of the overwhelming majority of the world's population. In a world as robustly religious as ours, it is foolish to imagine that such graduates are equipped to participate fully in the politics of the nation or the affairs of the world.

It is now commonplace in the United States to outsource computer programming and customer-service work to developing nations. But democracy cannot be outsourced. To continue to defer to television's talkocracy on matters as important as the political theology of Islam, the biblical view of marriage, or what Jesus would do about the environment is to recuse ourselves from democracy itself. The alternative is to "get" religion — to cultivate in our college students basic literacy about the world's religions.

Moving forward on the problem of religious illiteracy will require compromise on both the secular left and the religious right. In Divided by God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), the New York University law professor Noah Feldman charts a creative middle path between "values evangelicals" and "legal secularists." On the broader question of religion in the public square, he proposes a compromise that allows for more leeway on public displays of religion but stricter controls over the flow of state funds to religious institutions.

Setting aside the merits of this particular effort to reunite a nation "divided by God" into blues and reds, Feldman is right to sense a desire for reconciliation. Most Americans are weary of the culture wars, which owe their continued existence almost entirely to partisan politicians and pundits — in other words, to that minuscule portion of the population that owes its livelihood and celebrity to biased bickering. No one wants to revive the Bible wars of 19th-century public schools, yet the vast majority of Americans want their children to learn more about religion. To take one example, a required world-religions course for ninth graders in the highly diverse school district of Modesto, Calif., has caused little controversy and won districtwide support not only from teachers and administrators but also from parents. Only two or three students out of 3,000 assigned to the course each year choose to opt out of the requirement.

Progress on this score will take compromise, too. The secular left will need to yield on the dogma that religion has no place in the public square. The religious right will need to give up its desire to use our nation's classrooms for proselytizing purposes. The middle path here is instruction that takes believers seriously but refuses to plump either for or against what they believe, that leaves responsibility for inculcating faith where it rightly belongs: in homes and religious congregations. But this middle path is not complicit in the conspiracy of silence that has kept Americans religiously illiterate for generations. It gives both religion and American undergraduates their due.

Stephen Prothero is chairman of the religion department at Boston University and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, published this month by HarperSanFrancisco.