If you can name the four Gospels, the religion of the Dalai Lama or the day that the Jewish Sabbath begins, you know more about religion — or at least, you know more religious facts — than most Americans. Bonus points if you know that most Indonesians are Muslim or that Jonathan Edwards, not Billy Graham, preached during the First Great Awakening. And if you can identify Maimonides as Jewish, count yourself among the elites: Fewer than one in 10 Americans recently queried by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life could do the same.

Since its release last week, the Pew survey on American religious literacy has generated a flurry of commentary about our collective ignorance in matters of religion. Protestant and Catholic pastors in our overwhelmingly Christian nation found particular reason to lament the results of this multiple-choice test. More than half of Protestants cannot identify Martin Luther as the leader of the Reformation and 45 percent of Catholics do not know that their church teaches that Jesus Christ is truly present, not merely symbolized, in the Eucharist.

Jews outperformed Christians on the religious knowledge quiz, but fewer than half can identify medieval philosopher and physician Maimonides as Jewish or Job as the figure in the Hebrew Scriptures most closely associated with obedience to God amid suffering. Read the rest of this entry »