Pew: Americans know bupkes about religion (and test yourself)

In a poll of Americans’ religious knowledge reported this week by Pew, two things were revealed. First, most Americans don’t know much about religion—either theirs or that of other believers. Second, it is the atheists, agnostics, and Jews who rank highest on religious knowledge.

You can read the long report, which gives the 32 questions, by clicking on the first screenshot below. But before you do that, take a 15-question quiz (apparently an abbreviated version of what Pew asked people) by clicking on the second screenshot. Do it! You know you want to!

Pew asked 10,971 people, selected, as usual, from landline and cellphone numbers dialed randomly, and state that the “margin of sampling error” (presumably the standard error of the mean) is “plus or minus 1.5 percentage points”. Now, click on the second screenshot that says “Before you read the report”, and then on the brown “next” bar to see how much you know about religion.

 

THE QUIZ:

First, some braggadocio: I aced the test. Here are my results:

But is that surprising? After all, among all respondents, Jews answered the most questions correctly (18.7 out of 32) and atheists the next most (17.9/32); see below. As an atheist Jew, I was ideally positioned to know about religion—and I wrote a book about science and faith that involved reading a lot about religion, including plowing through the Bible and the Qur’an (the Book of Mormon defeated me). Report your results below, and be honest!

Now, you’re allowed to go back to the first link and see all the questions, and how people did.

As you see from the mini-quiz above, the average number of questions answered by Americans was about half: 7.4 out of 15. In the overall survey, the mean number of questions answered was 14 out of 32. Here’s how the different groups did. Note that “nothing in particular” (which I suppose are the “nones” who don’t say they are atheists are agnostics, scored below the mean, as did the “historically black Protestants,” who got fewer than a third of the questions right:

FiveThirtyEight has a useful summary of the main results (this is a direct quote):

1. Many Americans know some basic facts about major religions and belief systems — and not just Christianity. Seventy-nine percent of respondents knew that, in Christianity, the Trinity is one God in three persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) and that Moses led the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt, a tenet of both Christianity and Judaism. Sixty-two percent of respondents knew that Mecca is Islam’s holiest city and a place of pilgrimage, while 60 percent knew that Ramadan is an Islamic holy month. Atheism (87 percent correctly described it as not believing in God) is better understood than agnosticism (61 percent answered correctly that it means being unsure of the existence of God).
2. It gets murky for people outside of the basics. Respondents really struggled with some questions. For example, only 24 percent answered correctly that Rosh Hashanah celebrates the Jewish New Year, similar to the number (26 percent) who knew that Islam is the religion of most people in Indonesia. Even some Christian doctrines and facts are not that well-known — despite it being the faith of about 70 percent of Americans. Only 51 percent correctly said that Jesus is the person known for giving the “Sermon on the Mount,” a number I thought was low considering that’s a fairly important event in Christianity. (The other possible answers were Peter, Paul and John.) And just 22 percent of Americans could describe the “prosperity gospel,” which is generally associated with evangelical Christians. (Pew defined it as the tenet that “those of strong faith will be blessed by God with financial success and good health.”)
3. Americans really don’t know the number of Jewish and Muslim people living in the U.S. According to Pew Research estimates, about 2 percent of American adults are Jewish and 1 percent are Muslim. But only 26 percent of respondents answered correctly that Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the population in the U.S. And only 19 percent knew that the share of Jewish Americans is also below 5 percent. Most either thought the Muslim American and Jewish populations were each larger than 5 percent or didn’t know. But I suspect that the explanation for these inaccurate responses might not totally be about how much Americans know about these two religions but may instead be related to broader issues of innumeracy. Other research has shown that Americans have inaccurate views about the size of many demographic groups and may be particularly likely to overstate the size of groups of which they are not a part. For example, Republicans vastly overestimate the number of Democrats who are black.
4. Some groups answered more questions correctly than others. On average, respondents answered 14 of the 32 questions correctly. But people who are Jewish (19 correct responses on average), atheist (18) and agnostic (17) scored the best.

I’ll add to that a few more tidbits:

a.) The amount of education you have is strongly associated with how well you answered the questions. That’s not surprising, as general education, even if not religious, exposes you to what different faiths believe. And if you’ve taken a world religions class, you do better than if you didn’t, though not as well as general college graduates. Here are the Pew figures:

b.) Catholics don’t know important dictates of their own faiths.  Pew says this:

Half of Catholics in the United States (50%) correctly answer a question about official church teachings on transubstantiation – that during Communion, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ. The other half of Catholics incorrectly say the church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion are just symbols of the body and blood of Christ (45%) or say they are not sure (4%).

Lordy, isn’t that something that all of us know? It’s not a damn metaphor! (But DNA and protein tests can’t be used to test it.)

c.) Only 1/5 of Americans know about that the doctrine of sola fide (described by Pew as “salvation comes through faith alone”) is characteristic of Protestantism and not Catholicism (the latter faith maintains that salvation comes through works, deeds, and acts, like baptism).  As Pew reports:

Just one-in-five Americans (20%) know that Protestantism traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone, a key theological issue in the Protestant Reformation.  One-in-ten incorrectly believe that Catholicism teaches that salvation comes through faith alone, while the remainder of adults declined to offer a response in the survey (38%) or wrongly state that both Protestantism and Catholicism teach this (23%) or that neither Christian tradition teaches this (8%). Evangelical Protestants are more likely than other groups to know the traditional Protestant teaching, though even among evangelicals, far fewer than half (37%) answer the question correctly.

Well, I’m sure some of you will be thinking that atheists did well because they really knew about the doctrines of the faiths they rejected. But that can’t be the whole story, as the questions are about many beliefs: those of Catholics, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. I suspect that atheists are generally better educated than the average American, though that may be wishful thinking. Also, the Jews did better than the atheists, though I suspect that most American Jews (like me) really are atheists, despite the claims of people like Dave Silverman that atheists can’t say they’re Jews. (Of course many of us do.) Again, I suspect that Jews are better educated than the general population.

But here’s hoping that you readers will take the 15-question quiz and report your scores below. I’ll take an average and standard error after people weigh in. And then be sure to look at all 32 questions given in the long-form Pew report.

Go to it! Who can resist a quiz, especially one on religion?

h/t: Dave