Quick: Name the Four Gospels. How about the Ten Commandments? The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? Seven Catholic Sacraments? Hello? Anybody? America purports to be a religious nation, yet what we know about religion is, well, sinful. Stephen Prothero, head of Boston University's religion department, says it's time to teach religion in America - not devotion but religion.
Prothero and others have found a shocking lack of knowledge about the religions to which Americans purport to belong, bested only by their ignorance of religions to which they don't belong. Surveys say only half of America's adults can name any of the four Gospels. Most Americans can't name the first book of the Bible. Only a third know that Jesus (not Billy Graham) delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Yet, writes Prothero: "World events have been shaped by Confucian ritual, Jewish law, Christian love and Buddhist compassion." In this country, Christianity, in particular, has migrated from doctrinal and narrative components to a focus on religious experience that doesn't appear to require a knowledge of the Scriptures.
"Being a Christian has become synonymous with having a born-again experience or opposing abortion and stem-cell research," he said. "American Christians focus on loving Jesus rather than learning what he taught." In his research, Prothero said he was surprised to learn that the U.S. government pays little attention to religion when forming foreign policy.
That observation got a big laugh earlier this year, when Prothero appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. For example, Prothero said, "U.S. ambassadors to Muslim-majority countries are typically political cronies who have no training in Islam. And there is no policy of having our ambassador to India, say, know something about Hinduism. This is a scandal."
"It's as though the people controlling the agenda are disconnected from the overwhelming majority of reasonable Americans," said Stewart, to the delight of the audience.
"Jon," said Prothero, "I actually think that that's true." The problem is not hypocrisy, says Prothero, so much as ignorance.
"When I give my students the religious-literacy quiz that's in my book, I find Catholics who don't know the Seven Sacraments, Protestants who can't name any of the four Gospels and Jews who can't name the first book of their Bible. That doesn't make them pseudo-religious. It just makes them believers who don't really know what they are believing in," he said.
