This I Believe
The Pew Forum just put out the results of a quiz about religion. The top scores went to non-believers. Atheists and agnostics averaged 20.9 out of 32 questions correct. Jews and Mormons scored almost as well, with 20.5 and 20.3, respectively. Protestants were far behind with 16 and Catholics even lower with 14.7. (They interviewed thousands of Americans, and there weren't enough Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists to give them group rankings.)
This isn't too surprising when you think of it, since it's really a general knowledge quiz. I'd guess atheists and agnostics would on average do better than religious people in many other sorts of quizzes. And maybe they had to think about religion before they rejected (or ignored) it, while many religious people are simply raised in a tradition and don't necessarily know that much about other faiths. Another way to look at it is that everyone in America has a reasonable knowledge of Christianity--the majority religion--while minority religions are better understood by their adherents. As you might expect, groups scored best when asked questions about their own religion.
Still, it's a bit of a surprise when most Protestants don't know what Martin Luther did, and a lot of Catholics don't know about transubstantiation. On the other hand, I'm not surprised at all that so many people believe the golden rule is part of the Ten Commandments.
If you want to take the quiz go here. That's a short version, however. The full list of questions are here.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
7 Comments:
The easy headline- those who know themost aren't taken in by the malarkey
100 percent, baby.
To be honest, though, I was guessing. The whole thing sounded like a political quiz. It kept asking about Jobs.
I got 15/15, though I admit I took a 50/50 guess on the last one (I knew the Great Awakening was well before Billy Graham, but I didn't recognize the preachers named).
I would say that Jews and Mormons are groups (small fractions of the American populous) more invested in education than the average American, so you would expect them to do better on any quiz (they probably can find Iraq on a map better than most too).
The default religious catagorization of most people in the US is protestant, followed by Catholic. So, unless the quizes were adminsitered at Churches, I would bet more of the Protestants and Catholics were loosely Christians than the Jews and Mormons were loosely affiliated with their faith tradition. I find it hard to believe many practicing Catholics don't know about Transsubstantiation, or that many weekly protestants don't know who Martin Luther was.
14/15. Same explanation as Denver Guy, except I missed the last 50-50 guess.
The 15 questions actually varied a bit in the telephone survey. You can see the details in this pdf (see questions 35-50 and 55-63). For example, it asks you "what is the majority religion in country X", but X rotates between India, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
I have some nitpicks with some of the questions. Does the Jewish sabbath really begin on Friday (the "correct" answer)? Certainly the Jewish sabbath begins on what is considered Friday in the Western week, but in fact if you follow the Jewish calendar, than the Sabbath is coextensive with Saturday, by definition.
More problematic is to say that Joseph Smith's religion was "Mormon". After decades of being called "Mormons", members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints threw up their hands and accepted that moniker. But Smith himself would probably have been surprised if someone had called him a Mormon. Imagine if a history quiz asked, "George Washington was the founder of what people?" and the answer was "Yankees".
Also, there are certainly members of Zwinglian, Anglican, and Calvinist churches who would bristle at the claim that Luther caused the Reformation.
But these are all quibbles. In every case it's clear what answer the writer thinks is correct, so a good score still has meaning.
It would be interesting (although it would require a much larger sample size) to adjust for education levels.
I think it's safe to say that the average education levels of American atheists and Jews is higher than the average education level of American Catholics and probably also Protestants. Does this alone account for the differences? Or do atheists with master's degrees still do better than Catholics with master's degrees?
(One could also imagine equalizing for race, but that would probably upset a lot of people. And sadly, that would correlate pretty highly with equalizing for education levels anyway. I have met very few uneducated atheists and very few non-white atheists.)
LA Guy wrote: Still, it's a bit of a surprise when most Protestants don't know what Martin Luther did, and a lot of Catholics don't know about transubstantiation.
Yes, these two points in particular are pretty scary.
Another question that is in the full survey (it alternates with the question about communion, and I didn't see it when I took the 15-question web version) is "Which of these religious groups traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone?". The multiple choice options are (a) only Protestants; (b) only Catholics; (c) Both; (d) Neither. The "correct" answer is "a" (although traditionally, Methodists would be very unhappy with this claim, and in the twentieth century both groups experienced wild diversity on this issue). Nonetheless, I would have hoped that most people would say "a" -- and it only got 16%.
But I'm not surprised by any of it. Religious education in the American Catholic church imploded in the 1970s. My CCD teachers and high school religion teachers had us make cute dioramas ("Hey kids, here is some felt -- cut it in the shape of a heart and write I Love You Mom And Dad on it!") and digressed into random topics of their own choosing. When I got involved in adult education at my parish ten years ago, I discovered that for many adult Catholics, religious education has to start from scratch.
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