You know the survey by now. It's the one your atheist Facebook friend linked you to with a note of triumph. That's because those in the category "Atheist/Agnostic" graded out as the most religiously literate of those tested.
Conversely, the findings set the dunce cap squarely on the lowered heads of White Evangelicals, White Mainliners, Black Protestants, as well as Hispanic and White Catholics. Those groups, suffice it to say, did not ace the test.
It's the survey whose conclusions America's religion reporters analyzed with their characteristic independence of thought. The New York Times, breathlessly sniffing the narrative sausage trail that Pew had laid out in front of them, proclaimed: "Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion."
It's the survey that reminds us, in the very body of the survey itself, that the United States Supreme Court permits the teaching of the Bible as literature and world religions in public schools.
Quite a coincidence, that question is. It just so happens that some of those who helped draft the survey have spent years advocating for (and implementing) that very policy prescription!
Pew's home page repeatedly--almost obsessively-- assures us that it "does not take any positions on the issues it covers." I do believe that this organization often provides us with valuable polling data.
But I do not believe that Pew has as little skin in the religion-and-public-life game as it claims. Nor does their study lack for significant flaws:
Misunderstanding Atheists and Agnostics:In an interview with CNN's John King, Pew researcher Greg Smith observed: "Well I think the thing that was most striking to me was the strong performance on the survey by atheists and agnostics. Of all the groups that we looked at atheists and agnostics are among the top performers."
His colleague, Professor Stephen Prothero, explained the unexpected scores of the nonbelievers as attributable to the fact that "atheists and agnostics spend a lot of time fighting with religious people about religion."
I don't think Pew gets atheists. Unlike, let's say, Catholics, atheists are usually not born and raised as atheists. America, after all, isn't the Soviet Union at mid century. There is no broad atheist culture in the United States that instills ungodly values in junior freethinkers.
The typical American atheist--let's leave aside agnostics for now--grows up absorbing his family's faith tradition. Rejects it. Explores other traditions. Rejects those as well. And then settles on some form of nonbelief.
Atheists are also unlike Catholics in that they lack a clear and well-formulated creed. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once noted that atheists tend to vary on the basis of the God that they are not believing in. That's why Jewish atheists and atheists who are escaping Pentecostalism see the world very differently. And perhaps that's why they have the damndest time forging meaningful political coalitions.
Why is this relevant to Pew's survey? Because we must stop seeing atheists as complete aliens to religious thought. We must stop conceptualizing "atheists" as a coherent polling category akin to "Jews" or "Catholics." We must stop assuming that atheists spend their days jacking up religious people--even though that is a stereotype that celebrity atheists have done everything in their power to perpetuate.
Dumbing Literacy Down: But are these atheists religiously knowledgeable? If we measure literacy in terms of Pew's factoids, then I guess the answer is "more so than anyone else." If we use the type of criteria familiar to educators, the answer is "data not available."
Take the case of the Hebrew Bible. By Pew's standards a person would be considered to have knowledge about this text if s/he knew that: 1) Genesis was the first biblical book, 2) Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, 3) Moses led the exodus out of Egypt, 4) Job was obedient to God, and, 5) "Do unto others" is not in the Ten Commandments.
Call me a stuffy gray beard, but I'm just not prepared to agree that this comprises any sort of serious knowledge about the Scriptures. I will, however, concede that the person who could answer all of those questions might make for a promising contestant on Jeopardy.
Atheist Literacy? Let's get back to atheists. My own view, contra PEW, is that that they lack general knowledge about religion and that this is a huge political liability. In my 2005 The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, I pointed to instances in which atheists were paralyzed by an inability to understand how the Bible was being used in policy debates.
They failed, for example, to neutralize, or even respond to, the Christian Right's dubious arguments concerning "what the Bible says" about homosexuality. Nor did they seem to understand that Mainline Protestants, progressive Catholics and so forth, may have shared their misgivings about Evangelical and Fundamentalist readings. To wit, they failed to understand who their allies were.
That type of knowledge required an understanding of how the Bible was composed thousands of years ago and how it has been interpreted across time and space. It required understanding why not all Christians interpret their Scriptures the same way.
That sort of knowledge doesn't come easy--but it strikes me as a lot closer to the definition of religious knowledge than knowing the name of the first book of the Bible.
Beware of Polling Organizations Bearing Rifts: Yet in terms of generating "click" Pew's decision to emphasize in their "Executive Summary" the finding that Atheist Gallant had outperformed Evangelical/Catholic Goofus was a masterstroke.
The media loves the genre of "New Atheist/Fundie Smackdown." It's entertaining. It generates page views. It doesn't require much thought or analysis.
And for these reasons many Americans receive the impression that debates between Dinesh D'Souza and Christopher Hitchens are of great national import.
Mark my words: this is but a (circus) sideshow. The real, hot, ideological action in the United States is taking place within religious traditions, sometimes even within a given house of worship. Those debates are raw and bitter and combustive and complex and their outcomes will shape our society for generations to come.
I speak of the pitched battles that set Evangelicals against Mainliners, Conservative Catholics against Progressive Catholics, Orthodox Jews against secular ones--those internal disagreements about homosexuality, abortion, foreign policy and so on, need to be watched very closely.
Pew did compare the scores of Evangelicals vs. Mainliners. But made little of the significance of those findings. Completely left out of their research design was the exploration of divisions within Catholicism (are the traditionalists more "literate" than the modernizers?) and within Judaism (Want to stir the pot? How about studying knowledge discrepancies between Orthodox and Reform Jews).
As for Islam--where the outcome of the rift between traditional and modern wings will determine all of our futures--Pew was not able to find enough Muslims to interview and hence left them out of their results.
Questions about the Questions: Which brings us to survey itself. At least eight questions of the thirty-two posed by Pew strike me as problematic.
One is flat out wrong. Pew begrudgingly admits on its website that the query about Buddhism permitted two possible answers.
Another prompt is not as much incorrect as it is truly bewildering. The survey asks: "Which of the following statements best describes what the U.S. Constitution says about religion?" Pew's correct answer is the puzzling paraphrase: "The government [(!)] shall neither establish a religion nor interfere [(!)] with the practice [(!)] of religion."
At first glance, I was sure this was a trick question. Like many Americans, the sixteen words of the religion clauses are emblazoned on my civic soul. Why Pew would want to re-word the Constitution on a test purporting to measure religious knowledge is beyond me.
By my count six other questions have little to do with what scholars of religion consider as their subject matter. The three questions on the religious majorities of Pakistan, India and Indonesia seem more like they belong on a geography or geo-politics survey.
Also tangential are the three prompts about United States Supreme Court decisions. Those seem more appropriate to a political science survey. I suspect the folks at Pew placed those questions as dots for dopey journos to connect.
The Passions of Fact Tanks. And connect the dots the dopey journos did!
Of course, after the survey went viral, the Pew team helped draw out the conclusion that the nation needed religious studies programs in public schools. All the better to alleviate the alarming crisis in literacy! (Buried in the report, however, was the intriguing nugget that those who attended religious private schools scored lower than those who attended nonreligious private schools).
My concern is that years before the survey went viral members of the Pew team were making exactly the same point. One of the drafters of the study was the aforementioned Stephen Prothero who has been advocating on behalf of this issue for a long time.
Another person who offered "insightful advice" to Pew was Charles Haynes. Haynes has spent years green-lighting, endorsing, and OP-EDing religious studies programs for public schools, all the while presenting himself as the staunchest of First Amendment defenders.
Professor Prothero certainly has a right to lobby for this cause. I certainly do not support his cause, but I applaud his willingness to bring his scholarly research to a wider audience. More power to him.
Yet I have to ask: why would a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank design a survey tool leading us to conclusions which its designers have passionately endorsed?
Sometimes we ask certain questions because we so much like certain answers.
(The author wishes to thank Mr. Sam Dinger for invaluable research assistance and evaluation of PEW's data.)
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
