Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t by Stephen Prothero (PDF)

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The United States is one of the most religious places on earth, but it is also a nation of shocking religious illiteracy.Only 10 percent of American teenagers can name all five major world religions and 15 percent cannot name any.Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible holds the answers to all or most of life’s basic questions, yet only half of American adults can name even one of the four gospels and most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible.Despite this lack of basic knowledge, politicians and pundits continue to root public policy arguments in religious rhetoric whose meanings are missed—or misinterpreted—by the vast majority of Americans.”We have a major civic problem on our hands,” says religion scholar Stephen Prothero. He makes the provocative case that to remedy this problem, we should return to teaching religion in the public schools. Alongside “reading, writing, and arithmetic,” religion ought to become the “Fourth R” of American education.Many believe that America’s descent into religious illiteracy was the doing of activist judges and secularists hell-bent on banishing religion from the public square. Prothero reveals that this is a profound misunderstanding. “In one of the great ironies of American religious history,” Prothero writes, “it was the nation’s most fervent people of faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy. Just how that happened is one of the stories this book has to tell.”Prothero avoids the trap of religious relativism by addressing both the core tenets of the world’s major religions and the real differences among them. Complete with a dictionary of the key beliefs, characters, and stories of Christianity, Islam, and other religions, Religious Literacy reveals what every American needs to know in order to confront the domestic and foreign challenges facing this country today.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “This book is a must-read not only for educators, clergy and government officials, but for all adults.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Smart but gentle, loving but blunt, Prothero is uniquely qualified to guide us through the fraught fields of faith.” — Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and Where God Was Born“A compelling, provocative, wholly innovative historical interpretation of the place of learning in American religious life. I love this book!” — Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Real Sex“Provocative and timely . . . Combines a lively history with a set of proposed remedies.” — Washington Post Book World“Remarkable…an especially deft examination of the reasons for Americans’ religious literacy.” — Washington Monthly“Religious Literacy presents a compelling argument for Bible-literacy courses.” — Time magazine“Prothero makes you want to go back to college … a scholar with the soul of a late-night television comic.” — Newsweek“Compelling and persuasively presented . . . a critical addition to the debate about teaching religion in public school.” — San Francisco Chronicle“Prothero’s book can be recommended for its readability. It is constantly interesting, very well-written, and chock full of essential information about all religions…This could be one of the most important books to be published this year. It deserves serious attention.” — Journal of American Culture About the Author Stephen Prothero is the New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One and a professor of religion at Boston University. His work has been featured on the cover of TIME magazine, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, NPR, and other top national media outlets. He writes and reviews for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, and other publications. Visit the author at www.stephenprothero.com or follow his tweets @sprothero. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Religious LiteracyWhat Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’tBy Stephen ProtheroHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Copyright © 2008 Stephen ProtheroAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780060859527Chapter OneA Nation of Religious IlliteratesBoth the Religious Right and the Secular Left feel besieged. In the Left Behind novels popular in conservative Christian circles, true believers are “raptured” into heaven at the end of times; everyone else is “left behind.” Today secularists are attesting to a Last Days scenario of another sort, in which the old order of reason, rights, and the separation of church and state is being replaced by a new medievalism in which the president and his acolytes answer to God rather than to the American people. This disquiet can be heard in port cities across the country, but it is particularly palpable in Manhattan, the mecca of the Secular Left, where many report that their island is starting to feel, well, like an island again, cut off from the heartland by (among other things) its cosmopolitanism. At least for New Yorkers, it is as if the iconic Saul Steinberg cartoon of the United States according to Manhattan—an image that looks west across Ninth Avenue and the Hudson River and New Jersey to a Kansas City the size of a yellow cab and a Los Angeles no bigger than a courier’s bicycle—is eerily mutating into a Grant Wood landscape, its bucolic foreground anchored not by yellow cabs but by the corn rows and church spires of Kansas, with nary a skyscraper on the horizon. “I feel assaulted,” one New Yorker told me. “I feel like these Christians are hiding a crucifix in their shoe. Any minute they’ll pull it out and gut you.”28Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News feels assaulted too. Whereas secularists are sure that the Religious Right has taken over US politics, he is morally certain that “secular progressives” are winning the culture wars. Christmas is “under siege,” O’Reilly says. An “anti-Christian jihad” is banishing Christmas trees from holiday parades, Christmas carols from public school pageants, and Christmas greetings from department stores. In the world according to O’Reilly, the ultimate aim of these criminalizers of Christmas is nothing less than banishing religion from the public square and thereby clearing the way for “secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.” Televangelist Jerry Falwell also believes that “radical secularists” are “aggressively attempting to redefine America in their own Godless image,” and religious broadcaster Pat Buchanan complains about “hate crimes against Christianity.” The mission of the Secular Left, concludes Buchanan, is “to expunge from the public life of the West all reminders that ours was once a Christian civilization and America once a Christian country.”29The emotions on both sides of this question are understandable, though the irony of the situation—in which each camp sees itself as a victim and believes that the other is seizing control of the country—seems lost on everyone concerned. The fact of the matter is that, in the American marketplace of ideas, neither faith nor faithlessness is close to either bankruptcy or monopoly. Though O’Reilly may rage, Christmas (which remains a national holiday) is not fading into that good night. And theocracy—in the true sense of church-run government—is not even a twinkle in the Bush administration’s eye. Much ink has been spilled, and many megabytes expended, trying to pigeonhole the nation into either “secular America” or “Christian America.” It has always been both.The United States is by law a secular country. God is not mentioned in the Constitution, and the First Amendment’s establishment clause forbids the state from getting into the church business. However, that same amendment also includes a free exercise clause safeguarding religious liberty, and Americans have long exercised this liberty by praying to God, donating to religious congregations, and hoping for heaven. So there is logic not only to President John Adams’s affirmation in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” but also to the Supreme Court’s 1892 observation that “this is a Christian nation.” In short, the long-standing debate about whether the United States is secular or religious is fundamentally confused. Thanks to the establishment clause, the US government is secular by law; thanks to the free exercise clause, American society is religious by choice.30Ever since George Washington put his hand on a Bible and swore to uphold a godless Constitution, the United States has been both staunchly secular and resolutely religious. Church and state have never been completely separated in the United States; religion and politics were bedfellows from the start. Traditional liberals such as the political philosopher John Rawls insist that religion restrict itself to the individual heart, the pious home, and the religious congregation; religion is a private matter that will contaminate civil society if not quarantined from public life. Because religion is a “conversation stopper,” political discourse must be conducted entirely in terms of “public reason,” which by definition excludes religious reasons. According to this strict separationist perspective, the wall between church and state is supposed to form, as one nineteenth-century activist once put it, “a barrier high and eternal as the Andes.” The only alternative is “politics as holy war.”31George W. Bush caught a lot of flak for disrespecting this church-state divide at his 2001 inauguration, which included one prayer offered by the Reverend Franklin Graham (Billy’s son) in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” and another offered by the United Methodist minister Kirbyjon Caldwell “in the name that’s above all other names, Jesus, the Christ.” But Bush’s sin was also committed, in flagrante delicto, by Bill Clinton, whose inaugurations were unabashedly Christian affairs. Clinton’s 1997 fete included a trinitarian prayer by Billy Graham, a benediction by a black Baptist preacher, and songs by no fewer than three gospel groups (one called the Resurrection Choir). Plainly, the celebrated wall of separation between church and state has never been particularly wide or sturdy. Breached nearly as often as it has been respected, this wall resembles a rickety picket fence far more than the eternal Andes. Washington and Madison, Reagan and Clinton all declared national days of prayer or thanksgiving, and the Supreme Court still opens its sessions with “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” As G. K. Chesterton once put it, the United States has long been “a nation with the soul of a church.”32Continues…Excerpted from Religious Literacyby Stephen Prothero Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Prothero. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I was hoping to get a book that was more religious history and how the religions came to be etc. This is more of a book about why the author feels that the US is missing out by not teaching religion in school. He spends lots and lots of pages beating that same idea into different shapes but in the end it’s all one idea. Put religion back in the schools. Well, whatever, that is not what I was looking for. The only part I wanted was in the last chapter. Back to looking for a religion history type book. Oh well.

⭐I am not religious, but religions fascinate me for the effect they have on societies. Prothero’s book filled some holes in my knowledge, and provided some myth-busting that surprised me. For example, he tells how Bible verses were removed from public school textbooks in the pre-Civil War United States, primarily because of vehement, and even violent, disputes between Protestant denominations over which verses should be included, and Catholic objections to their tax dollars financing Protestant education. I have never heard that story from a Christian school-prayer advocate, and I suspect that nearly none of them know it.But, this is not an anti-Christian book by any means. In fact, it is neither pro nor con any religion or belief system. I recommend it to anybody who wants to know about religion in America.

⭐As a graduate student in literature, I chose to focus on Native American contemporary literature and did concurrent studies in religious studies to better understand the deep connections between the literature and the spiritual beliefs of the writers. Thus was born a serious interest in comparative religion. I ordered Prothero’s book expecting a survey of the various religions followed in America today. That’s not what this book is. While there is fruitful information about various religious thought in the appendixes, Prothero basically uses this text to talk about what Americans believe, what they THINK they know about other religions, and what knowledge they sorely lack, even about their own professed spiritual paths. I found it an interesting read. I followed it up with Catherine Albanese, America, Religion and Religions which approaches American religion through historical thought and change. That text helped clarify for me WHY Americans really don’t know much about the beliefs of their own religious paths, how they have changed over the years, why they are different from the paths following the same names of people in other parts of the world. The two books made a great deal of sense to me as companion texts.

⭐What a fantastic book! I am hoping someday to budget for copies on CD (audio) to give as gifts to friends in church and elsewhere who are also interested in American culture and education.This is not a comparative religions primer, nor does it claim to be. It is something more original, and much more needed. Without apparent bias, and with appropriate vocabulary, Prothero traces a history of American religious literacy. So many people learned to read by reading the Bible, and so many early primers were full of Bible stories and references. There didn’t used to be the vast amount of reading material that we take for granted today. There didn’t used to be the carefree approach to what we read, either.Thirty years ago, I remember feeling ignorant when my friends discussed their religious education (Jewish and Catholic – I am Protestant). Today, not only are we ignorant, but we don’t even realize how ignorant we are, nor why it is important. A culture needs, not just a shared language, but a shared set of stories, in order to communicate. There are so many references, in politics especially, to scriptural stories, but we are no longer a nation with a shared bank of tales.How did this happen and why is it important? That’s what this book is about. I think that the real value of his work here is in clarifying the situation itself. So I also think that some of the reviewers are missing the point when they nit-pick about Prothero missing this or that sect. Also, for me, this book also explains a lot of things that I have encountered, which are basically facets of the growing state of American anti-intellectualism, and now that I can see them explained and delineated, while they are still frustrating, at least I have a better sense of what is going on.Highly, highly recommended, and very readable.

⭐Excellent book. This should be required reading – especially for anyone standing for office, or voting, in the USA. It should certainly be compulsory for anyone claiming to be a Christian.Prothero explains the problem – near complete ignorance of the religion so many Americans claim to follow, and complete ignorance of any other – with great clarity.Lot’s of useful resources.I got a colleague – a regular church-attender (in fact, an ordained minister) – to take the religious knowledge test: he knew absolutely zero about any religion other than Christianity, and scored poorly on Christianity (he could name only four of the ten commandments!).

⭐First class bookBook is good if you are into or studying/teaching religious studies/thought. Some very interesting ideas, love it.

⭐Full disclosure up front – The following may take the form of a rebuttal, more than a review.Stephen Prothero is a professor of religious studies, and in the introduction to “Religious Literacy,” he makes very clear the difference between engaging in religious studies, and preaching. How strange then that a significant fraction of the book reads much like a sermon. It preaches the virtues of religious knowledge, laments its decline, and proffers a solution, while all the time being excessively selective in the enumeration of relevant facts and factors.The book is roughly a decade old, and a lot has happened since it was written. Yet, I don’t think that the most salient points discussed in the book have changed all that much. The opening chapters outline the author’s interpretation of the ‘problem.’ It seems that a great many US school-children cannot name the four (canonical) Christian gospels, or list the seven pillars of Islam, or recite the four noble truths of Buddhism. (I admit that the last one got me too – I knew they were about suffering, but couldn’t quote them in detail.) The author also throws in some factoids of questionable veracity, such as; “10 percent of American high-school students think that Noah’s wife was Joan… of Arc.” Frankly, I hypothesize that this only suggests that about 9.9 percent of American high-school students saw right through the question and were goading the questioner, but anyway…Following his selective enumeration of the things that young Americans do not know, (a section entitled “The Problem”), he continues by describing the way things used to be (in a chapter called “Eden”), then proceeds to offer his analysis as to how we got to where we are today; (“The Fall”). The ‘sermon’ is biased heavily toward Christianity – which is in no way the author’s fault. This is the way it was in the USA. Religion did indeed, and most unquestionably, play an enormous role in the past. Stephen Prothero is absolutely correct in his observation that in America, as well as Europe, and other nations which are the offspring of European colonialism, the group of faiths which had the greatest impact on history could be collectively referred to as Christianity. Where I do criticize the author is in his implication, not explicitly stated but not at all subtle, that the past religious ‘Eden’ in America represented some sort of a halcyon heritage, and that ‘The Fall’ from this supposed ideal is like another fall of man.From my own perspective (as admittedly defined by my own subjective prejudices), I argue that any individual human’s most persistent enemy is time. Whether we are children or adults, or, as I happen to be, “hoary with the hair of eld” (Google it), there are unmerciful constraints allotted upon the hours of our lives. We must prioritize everything, including the elements that make up the syllabus of our education. So very long ago in my formative years, I was instructed in the Christian faith. In those days, which the author refers to as the “Eden”, the Lord’s Prayer was recited every morning in my public school, and we were subjected to a carefully cherry-picked Bible reading over the crackling public address system. I truly cannot say that tales of any god, or threats of any hell, contributed manifestly to the successes or failures in my life, but I do freely admit, as the author correctly argues, that my understanding of history, literature and other media, has been positively enhanced by my religious literacy.Nevertheless, given the demands upon our all too finite hours, I am in general agreement with the admittedly difficult decisions that have relegated religious knowledge to a lesser importance in the modern age. Still, it is not all bleak for religion. That same modernity means that any individual wishing to learn more about any world religion can find libraries of information (and disinformation) no more remote than their nearest Internet-connected device. Usually, it is in their own pocket. I would not condone the dedication of valuable school time to the subject, especially in light of other deficiencies in education, many of which, (in my subjective evaluation at least,) appear significantly more dire. There is even a suggestion (in a later chapter) that the time to teach religion could be found at the expense of mathematics. This is the author quoting someone else, not speaking himself, but the fact that he would even include such a quote in his book is worrying.By way of illustration, there is apparently a recent study, (which various news sources choose not to link,) stating that 4 out of 5 students in Oklahoma City can’t tell time on an analog clock. Regardless of the doubtful veracity of this news, (one source was FOX), I have witnessed this specific ignorance several times myself – youth and young adults stating unashamedly that they “can’t tell time on old clocks”. I personally view the ability to read a clock in the classroom, or in the town square, as far more important than being able to recount the seven pillars of Islam. In similar dismay, I would wager that if one were to ask an average 60-something-year-old to bisect an angle with straightedge and compass, or to use a tape measure to ensure that two pieces of wood are joined squarely, one would be greeted with only blank stares from the vast majority. Why then, in light of this modern eschewing of knowledge in general, does the author expect that everyone will continue to be imbued with a journeyman’s knowledge of religion? Pythagoras will help people build square walls – Moses will not. While religion might indeed have been pivotal in the history of America, so have square walls. And square walls remain critical and relevant today.After defining his view of the problem, the author offers a solution. He points out, entirely correctly, that there is nothing unconstitutional in America about teaching about religion in public schools, so long as the lessons do not become vehicles for indoctrination. He also observes, quite correctly, that most teachers steer almost completely clear of religion. He then quotes a study suggesting that three-quarters of Americans would not object to the study of world religion in schools. Conversely, that means that one quarter would object. The parents of 25% of the students in any particular class would be opposed to this type of instruction. In a class of 30, the parents of 7 or 8 of them would be angered; some threatening lawsuits, some pulling their children out of school, etc. One can certainly understand why teachers don’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole. Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect a teacher with no specialized education in religious studies to be entirely objective on such a matter. Many – one might even estimate, the majority – of teachers will have personal beliefs and prejudices, and these will be brought into the classroom, either intentionally or subconsciously. I myself probably couldn’t teach such a course without eventually betraying my personal views. The author states that the fear of controversy over religious studies is overblown – I argue that it is understated.If an elementary- or high-school educator were to put together a basic course on religion – for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say a segment focusing on the Christian Bible – what parts would he/she be expected to teach? Would the syllabus include the story of Jephthah murdering his beloved daughter to please God? Or of Jesus telling slaves to obey their masters? Do we lecture on the rape of Tamar, and how she was thereafter forced to “remain desolate” for the rest of her days? What about how the world will end with seven-headed, ten-horned dragons? Do young kids learn about the law stating that those engaging in homosexual acts shall be put to death, or that a rape victim must marry her rapist? Or that only 144,000 will ever get into heaven, everyone else being doomed to burn for all eternity? Somehow, I think that in most schools, all of these subjects would be censored in favour of the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments. Of course, I know that most Christians do not believe in many of the dark tales in the Bible, but most do believe in, for example, the resurrection of Jesus. So, which stories are to be taught? Generally, the response to that question is that one should teach exactly as much of the Bible as, either, a) – the teacher, or course designer, personally believes in, or, b) – as portrays the Christian religion in a positive, peace-loving, charitable light, thereby offending no one. While the example of the Christian Bible is cited, the same could be stated for any religious text or concept. Sure, higher education at the university level might succeed at breaking through these constraints, but such fully-rounded teaching of religion is not going to occur in an elementary setting.Cherry-picking religion is surely worse than not teaching it at all. I argue that it better serves the duty of the pursuit of truth to offer no instruction on the subject of religion, rather than to spout misleading, out of context snippets designed to create a sugar-coated misunderstanding. (That’s what churches and other places of worship are for.) By way of analogy, most Americans received very little elementary-school instruction on, for example, the history of the City of Warsaw. Would we be right to simply describe the lovely parks and museums found there today and leave it at that, without mentioning WWII or the Communist era? That would be more dishonest than simply saying that there is no time to teach about the history of Warsaw.Those who have an interest in religion, either in an academic sense or a theological one, have a plethora of opportunities to find information, especially in our modern, connected world. Every child or adult with access to the Internet can have his or her own Bible, or any other holy book that may be desired. Their local library probably has a book or two about world religions, or even about the history of Warsaw.Later in the tome, there is a dictionary of religious terms and concepts. It is largely useless. Even in my youth, we had Encyclopædia Britannica, and now, we have Wikipedia. Either of these sources, along with many others, can offer simple summaries such as those presented therein. It is unworthy of a book authored by a distinguished professor of religious studies to reduce the complexity of religion to such banalities.Despite all said above, I do sympathize somewhat with of the author’s frustration over America’s lack of religious literacy. But I see this as one aspect of a broad illiteracy; one spanning a multitude of subjects. Not all learning is done in school. Today, with vast libraries at the fingertips, people of all ages can study any subject that interests them. I absolutely accept that religion is a perfectly valid subject for such independent study, but so are many other equally valid subjects.Perhaps a joy in learning, a reveling in knowledge, is an attitude we should strive to impart on young people. We could give them input on the the direction of their elective studies, with some sage guidance from their elders. I know that such a concept is pie-in-the-sky, but drilling facts into youthful brains by rote, simply to prepare them for the next test, is not a productive alternative. Even if we can’t obtain such a lofty ideal, would not future generations better served if we worked toward it, instead of away.Stephen Prothero’s book made me think, and any book that succeeds at doing this is not a terribly bad book. I’ve given it a middling rating since it is well written – neither condescending nor unnecessarily technical, and it does put forward some factual, and some controversial points. If the matters it touches upon are of interest to an individual, it is worth a read.

⭐Prothero’s book is a long complaint about the lack of religious literacy in America today. The author is particularly upset because of the supposed importance of religion in modern American society has not led to a better understanding of what people say they believe. The problem with the book is that it is, too a very large degree just saying the same thing over and over again.There are nevertheless two good reasons to read the book: (1) it shames you into wanting to understand all religions better and (2) it provides some real head-slapping examples of people’s total ignorance of the religion they feel strongly about. The book is worth reading for its collection of “bloopers” alone like the statement from students that the epistles were the wives of the apostles.

⭐Great book

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