The More You Know…

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released the results of a survey that looks at how knowledgeable Americans are about their religion. The results would probably surprise many Christians, but probably not many skeptics.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

One of the most interesting findings was how many people got questions about the essentials of their own faiths wrong. For example:

Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.

Really? Transubstantiation was certainly one of those things about Catholicism that, even at a very early age, led me to start to doubt the religion I was born into. I remember clearly that I learned about transubstantiation (though certainly not by that name) at right about the age where I’d begun to doubt Santa Claus. Neither made very much sense to me based on what little I knew about the world. On one hand, my experience (and my mom) was telling me that magic wasn’t real. On the other, the church was telling me that somehow a wafer of cardboard-like “bread” magically tranformed into human flesh (which we then ate). Anyone who’s ever eaten a pork chop knows that there is a huge difference between flesh and the Eucharist.

But, then, I don’t find this lack of knowledge shocking at all. It fits. In my personal experience, when you discuss Evolution with most people who don’t “believe” in it, you quickly see that they really don’t understand the concept or the evidence behind it at all. As Dave Silverman, the president of the American Athiests advocacy group, said in the NYT article:

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

And so it goes. The uneducated are easily bamboozled. The more you know about the magic space-man myth, the more you begin to doubt its basic premise. The same could be said of essentially all belief systems not based on evidence.