Enlarge By Web Bryant, USA TODAY USA TODAY OPINION USA TODAY OPINION On Religion Faith. Religion. Spirituality. Meaning. In our ever-shrinking world, the tentacles of religion touch everything from governmental policy to individual morality to our basic social constructs. It affects the lives of people of great faith — or no faith at all. This series of weekly columns — launched in 2005 — seeks to illuminate the national conversation. I know it's uncouth to say, "I told you so," but in this case I did. Three years ago, in my book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn't, I described the United States as a nation of religious illiterates. Though Americans are deeply religious, I argued, they know very little about their own religions, and even less about the religions of others. I based this conclusion on scattershot data — a Gallup question here, an anecdote there, and a quiz I gave to my Boston University students — because there was no comprehensive national survey of U.S. religious literacy. Last week, however, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the first nationwide survey of American religious knowledge, based on interviews with 3,412 adults who answered 32 questions on the Bible and the world's religions. Not surprisingly, the nation as a whole flunked. Respondents got only 16 out of 32 questions right on average, for a score of 50%. The release of this study has been catnip for atheists and agnostics, who rose to the top of the class on this survey. Non-believers answered, on average, 21 questions correctly, or five above the national average. Their score — 66%, or a D in my book — isn't much to write home about, but it does show that people who think religion is poison know more about it than people who think it is the antidote to our ills. If atheists and agnostics are in heaven over these results, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth among Roman Catholics, who finished in the back of the class on this survey, with only 15 questions right on average. Prior studies have shown that Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) classes are doing little to educate American Catholic children about their faith, and this study confirms that Catholic religious education is badly broken. Fewer than half of the Catholics surveyed (42%) were able to name Genesis as the first book in the Bible. Is the pope Catholic? I worked as a consultant to this "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey," and I pushed the people at Pew Forum for a challenging test. In the end, the questions were pretty easy. Pew didn't ask whether the pope is Catholic, but it did ask whether the Dalai Lama is Buddhist — a question only 47% of respondents were able to handle. American adults also did poorly on questions about Islam. Only the slimmest of majorities correctly identified the Quran as the Islamic holy book (54%), and only about a quarter (27%) knew that most of the population of the Southeast Asian country of Indonesia are Muslims. These dispiriting results did not surprise me, and they won't be news to anyone who teaches the Bible in Sunday school or the world's religions in college. But this first-of-its-kind survey did offer some surprises. The victory of atheists and agnostics in America's first ever Religion Bowl has gotten the most play. But the outperformance of Mormons, who along with Jews came in right behind atheists and agnostics, was another big surprise. Many evangelicals claim that Mormons are not really Christians on the theory that Mormon teachings stray too far from the traditional Christian creeds. But Mormons outperformed white evangelical Protestants on a battery of questions concerning Christianity and the Bible. The most important finding of this survey, however, concerns the vexed relationship between religion and public education. The overwhelming majority (89%) of the U.S. adults surveyed know that the Supreme Court has forbidden public school teachers from leading their students in prayer, but less than a quarter (23%) know that Supreme Court rulings allow teachers to read from the Bible as literature and just over a third (36%) know that public schools can lawfully teach comparative religion courses. In Religious Literacy, I argued that the religious ignorance of Americans is a civic problem of the first order. Even if religion doesn't make any sense to you, you can't make sense of the world without knowing something about the world's religions. So I proposed that we work to remedy our ignorance with a required public school course on the Bible as literature, and another required course on the world's religions. As I have traveled around the country speaking about the importance — for the godly and the godless alike — of religious literacy, I have been told repeatedly that my plan to ramp up religious studies in the public schools is unconstitutional. It is not. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that it is unconstitutional to preach religion in the public schools. Teachers cannot lead prayers, or read from the Bible in a devotional manner. But the nation's highest court has also repeatedly given its constitutional seal of approval to teaching about religion. In fact, it has described religious studies as a civic necessity. In McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), Justice Robert Jackson voted with the majority to outlaw Sunday-school-style religious instruction in public education, but he also took pains to emphasize that the study of religion in the public schools is not only constitutionally kosher but imperative. "Certainly a course in English literature that omitted the Bible and other powerful uses of our mother tongue for religious ends would be pretty barren," he wrote. "And I should suppose it is a proper, if not an indispensable, part of preparation for a worldly life to know the roles that religion and religions have played in the tragic story of mankind." In another case, Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), Justice Tom Clark wrote: "It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or of the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment." Yes, schools can teach religion Unfortunately, this jurisprudential thumbs-up to teaching about religion is not getting through to ordinary Americans, who continue to labor under the illusion that First Amendment guarantees of disestablishment somehow mandate that our public schools be religion-free zones where teachers and administrators conspire to pretend that there are no Muslims or Hindus in the world. The Catch-22 here is that our religious illiteracy is so profound that it extends to imagining (incorrectly) that our schools cannot do anything to remedy it. So we continue to raise children who are innocent of the good and evil that religion does, and in the process ensure that yet another generation of members of Congress and superintendents of schools will know little or nothing about the world's religions. This Pew survey will doubtless serve as a wake-up call for Jewish and Christian educators to pump up the quality of their Sunday and Sabbath school instruction, but it should also serve as a thorn in the side of those public school officials who continue to neglect a topic that, for better or for worse, affects elections in the United States and India, the economies of Brazil and China, and militaries in Kashmir and the Middle East. Stephen Prothero is a religion professor at Boston University and the author of the book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. 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