Americans Get an 'F' in Religion

[Guest guest]

March 7, 2007: Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans

can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school

seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

 

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston

University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world

religions — their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq,

Darfur or Kashmir — is dangerous, he says.

 

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know —

and Doesn't, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well

as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

 

Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian

and now says he's a spiritually " confused Christian. " He says his

argument is for empowered citizenship.

 

" More and more of our national and international questions are

religiously inflected, " he says, citing President Bush's speeches

laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim

member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas

Jefferson's Quran.

 

" If you think Sunni and Shia 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. If you get into an argument about gay rights or

capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran,

do you know it's so?

 

" If you want to be involved, you need to know what they're 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. "

 

THE PRICE OF IGNORANCE

 

Scholars and theologians who agree with him say 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, " says Philip Goff of the

Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana

University in Indianapolis.

 

Goff cites a widely circulated claim on the Internet that the Quran

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. "

 

" We're impoverished by ignorance, " says the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell,

former general secretary of the National Council of Churches. " You

can't draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional

understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings. "

 

But if people don't know Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities destroyed

for their sinful ways, Campbell blames Sunday schools that

" trivialized religious education. If we want people to have serious

knowledge, we have to get serious about teaching our own faith. "

 

Prothero's solution is to require middle-schoolers to take a course in

world religions and high schoolers to take one on the Bible. Biblical

knowledge also should be melded into history and literature courses

where relevant. He wants all college undergrads to take at least one

course in religious studies.

 

He calls for time-pressed adults to sample holy books and history

texts. His book includes a 90-page dictionary of key words and

concepts from Abraham to Zen. There's also a 15-question quiz — which

his students fail every year.

 

THE ROLE OF SCHOOLS

 

But it's the controversial, though constitutional, push into schools

that draws the most attention.

 

In theory, everyone favors children knowing more. The National

Education Association handbook says religious instruction " in

doctrines and practices belongs at home or religious institutions, "

while schools should teach world religions' history, heritage,

diversity and influence.

 

Only 8% of public high schools offer an elective Bible course,

according to a study in 2005 by the Bible Literacy Project, which

promotes academic Bible study in public schools. The project is

supported by Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, a Washington,

D.C., non-profit that promotes free speech.

 

The study surveyed 1,000 high schoolers and found that just 36% know

Ramadan is the Islamic holy month; 17% said it was the Jewish day of

atonement.

 

Goff says schools are not wholly to blame for religious illiteracy.

" There are simply more groups, more players. Students didn't know

Ramadan any better in 1965, but now there are as many Muslims as Jews

in America. It's more important to know who's who. "

 

Also today, " there is more emphasis on religious experience as a mark

of true religion and less emphasis on doctrine and knowledge of the

faith. "

 

Still, it's the widely misunderstood 1963 decision by the U.S. Supreme

Court that may have been the tipping point: It removed devotional

Bible reading from the schools but spelled out that it should not have

been removed from literature and history.

 

" The decision clearly states you can't be educated without it, but it

scared schools so much they dropped it all, " Goff says.

 

" Schools are terrified of this, " says Joy Hakim, author of several

U.S. history textbooks. She's in her 70s but remembers well as a

Jewish child how she felt like an outsider in schools that pushed

Christianity in the curriculum.

 

But she says the backlash went too far. " Now, you can't use biblical

characters or narrative in anything. We've stopped teaching stories.

We teach facts, and the characters are lost. "

 

RELIGION AS AFTERTHOUGHT?

 

Religion, like the arts, has become an afterthought in an education

climate driven by " the fixation on literacy and numeracy — math and

reading, " says Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open

Testing, a group critical of the standards-based education movement.

" If the ways schools, teachers, principals and superintendents are

judged all depend on math and reading scores, that's what you're going

to teach, " he says.

 

Still, it's a tough tightrope to walk between those who say the Bible

can be just another book, albeit a valuable one, and those who say it

is inherently devotional.

 

The First Amendment Center also published a guide to " The Bible and

the Public Schools, " which praised a ninth-grade world religions

course in Modesto, Calif., and cited a study finding students were

able to learn about other faiths without altering their own beliefs.

But it also said the class may not be easily replicated and required

knowledgeable, unbiased teachers.

 

Leland Ryken, an English professor at evangelical Wheaton College in

Wheaton, Ill., tested a 2006 textbook, " The Bible and Its Influence, "

underwritten by the Bible Literacy Project. Ryken favors adding

classes in the Bible and literature and social studies. But he

cautions, " Religious literacy and world religions are not the same as

the Bible as literature. It's a much more loaded subject, and I really

question if high school students can get much knowledge beyond a sense

of the importance of religion. "

 

" The Bible and Its Influence " has been blasted by conservative

Christians such as the Rev. John Hagee, pastor of the 18,000-member

Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. Hagee calls it " a masterful work of

deception, distortion and outright falsehoods " planting " concepts in

the minds of children which are contrary to biblical teaching. "

 

Hagee wrote to the Alabama legislature opposing adoption of the text,

citing points such as discussion questions that could lead children

away from a belief in God. Example: Asking students to ponder if Adam

and Eve got " a fair deal as described in Genesis " would plant the seed

that " since God is the author of the deal, God is unfair. "

 

IN SEARCH OF A SOLUTION

 

Hagee prefers the Bible itself as a textbook for Bible classes, used

with a curriculum created by a group of conservative evangelicals, the

National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, based in

Greensboro, N.C. The council says its curriculum is being offered in

more than 300 schools.

 

Sheila Weber, a spokeswoman for The Bible Literacy project, says their

textbook has been revised in the second printing issued last month

with the examples cited by Hagee removed. The teachers' edition was

reissued in August. The first printing was approved by numerous

Christian scholars and seminaries and is already in use in 82 school

districts.

 

Mark Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist

University in Dallas, looked last year at how Texas public school

districts taught Bible classes. His two studies, sponsored by the

Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group, found only 25 of more

than 1,000 districts offered such a class.

 

" And 22 of them, including several using the Greensboro group's

curriculum, were clearly over the line, " teaching Christianity as the

norm, and the Bible as inspired by God, says Chancey. One teacher even

showed students a proselytizing Power Point titled, " God's road map

for your life " that was clearly unconstitutional, he says.

 

The controversies, costs and competing demands in the schools have

prompted many to turn instead to character education.

 

But classes promoting pluralism and tolerance fail on the religious

literacy front because they " reduce religion to morality, " Prothero

says, or they promote a call for universal compassion as if it were

the only value that matters.

 

" We are not all on the same one path to the same one God, " he says.

" Religions aren't all saying the same thing. That's presumptuous and

wrong. They start with different problems, solve the problems in

different ways, and they have different goals. "

 

SOURCE: USA TODAY. Americans get an 'F' in religion. By Cathy Lynn

Grossman, Contributing: Greg Toppo

URL:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-03-07-teaching-religion-cover_N.htm

[Guest guest]

Oh yeah, and let's not forget that over 50 percent of Americans spparently think

that evolution is some kind of Satanic lie. I guess the key phrase these days is

something like: " Well, we really don't know what the Bible says, we've never

read it, but we'll bomb you if you don't follow it, you hell-bound sinners! "

 

Thanks for the article, it makes me feel so proud to be an

American! U-S-A, U-S-A!

 

, " Devi Bhakta "

<devi_bhakta wrote:

>

> March 7, 2007: Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of

Americans

> can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school

> seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

>

> Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston

> University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world

> religions — their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq,

> Darfur or Kashmir — is dangerous, he says.

[Guest guest]

that not's even our worst subject....besides if they graded on the

curve it would have been a C

 

, " Erotic Ethel "

<retroprecursor wrote:

>

> Oh yeah, and let's not forget that over 50 percent of Americans

spparently think that evolution is some kind of Satanic lie. I guess

the key phrase these days is something like: " Well, we really don't

know what the Bible says, we've never read it, but we'll bomb you if

you don't follow it, you hell-bound sinners! "

>

> Thanks for the article, it makes me feel so proud to be an

> American! U-S-A, U-S-A!

>

> , " Devi Bhakta "

> <devi_bhakta@> wrote:

> >

> > March 7, 2007: Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of

> Americans

> > can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school

> > seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

> >

> > Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston

> > University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world

> > religions — their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq,

> > Darfur or Kashmir — is dangerous, he says.

>