Alan Levinovitz | Vox

Americans — not just liberals — have a religious literacy problem

2017-01-24T07:59:30-05:00

The idea that liberals and cultural elites suffer from religious illiteracy is now widely accepted, by both the accusers and the accused. New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet confessed to NPR’s Terry Gross that “media powerhouses don’t quite get religion.” Former Obama White House staffer and evangelical Christian Michael Wear went further, arguing that liberals are “disdainful” of religion and that there’s a “religious illiteracy problem in the Democratic Party.” Nicholas Kristof, also of the Times, suggested last May that universities, otherwise bastions of tolerance, are intolerant of religious diversity, choosing “liberal arrogance” over “fairness” to evangelical Christian perspectives.

Although this critique fits well with the anti-elitism of the right and the reflexive self-criticism of the left, it is false. Understanding why it’s false is an essential first step toward addressing the actual religious illiteracy that I encounter every semester as a professor of religious studies, which affects this nation as a whole — and, perhaps surprisingly, conservative Christians in particular.

The real definition of “religious literacy”: It’s about more than just familiarity with Christian practices

First, it’s important to recognize there’s a bait and switch being pulled with the term “religious.” Take the recent dustup over a Republican National Committee statement that praised this Christmas as good time to welcome a “new King.” Some liberal members of the media reacted strongly, taking the phrase as an allusion to Trump, when in fact the word King, capitalized, is routinely used in reference to Christ. Condemnation of liberal ignorance followed immediately. “Today in ‘religious illiteracy in the media,’” tweeted CNN political analyst and USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers about the controversy, a response widely echoed by conservative pundits.

However, what Powers and others mischaracterize as “religious illiteracy” is really the far narrower category of “unfamiliarity with the practices of certain present-day Christians in the United States.” Yes, many non-Christians have never heard “new King” in reference to Jesus — though, to be fair, some Christians also found it odd. And yes, our body politic would be well served if non-Christian liberals expanded their knowledge of Christian practice and vocabulary.

But that’s only a tiny fraction of religious literacy. True religious literacy requires engagement with the enormous variety of beliefs, practices, and motivations found in different religious traditions, and, for that matter, within a single tradition, or even a single church. Religious literacy requires awareness that religions have changed radically over time, and will continue to do so, often for nontheological reasons. And when it comes to politics, religious literacy requires thinking through the difficulties inherent to disputes over matters of faith in a religiously diverse community, and recognizing how our political system has developed in response to such difficulties.

Once you factor in these other categories of knowledge about religion — and how could you not? — the evidence shows that agnostics and atheists (followed closely by Jews and Mormons), as well as those who self-identify as liberal, are more religiously literate than their Christian and conservative counterparts.

In the 2010 Pew survey of religious knowledge, a battery of questions about the Bible and Christianity, world religions, and religion in public life, scores were appallingly low across the board, with respondents averaging around 50 percent. Only half, for instance, knew that the Quran is the holy book of Islam, or that the Golden Rule isn’t one of the Ten Commandments. Fewer than a third knew that most Indonesians are Muslim, and that public schoolteachers in the United States are allowed to read from the Bible as an example of literature in class. But when broken down by demographic, atheists and agnostics outscored other groups even after controlling for different levels of education.

It’s no objection to claim the Pew survey was biased against the sort of “religious literacy” valued by white evangelical Christians, who scored (only slightly) higher than their nonbelieving counterparts on questions about their own faith. Ahistorical familiarity with the practices of one’s church and some passages from the Christian Bible is not religious literacy, and in isolation may lead to myopia about religion. To understand humanity’s relationship with the divine, you have to apply critical thinking skills to facts about multiple faiths including your own, across cultures and throughout history.

What my students show me about the real problem with religious knowledge in America

Every year I teach students who are surprised to learn that Jesus and Mary appear in the Quran; that Buddhism is historically descended from Hinduism; that virgin birth narratives and flood myths appear in many traditions; that believers in the same religion will exhibit dramatic variation in their beliefs and practices depending on historical and cultural context. Most have never thought to analyze religiosity using psychology or economics.

Instead, the majority of my students — most of whom are white, Protestant Christians from Virginia and the East Coast — are familiar only with the thin slice of modern Christian religion they’ve been exposed to, and are often baffled by religious ways of life that differ from their own. Perhaps the best illustration of this happens when I invite a rabbi in to speak about Judaism. Without fail, the most perplexing aspect of Jewish faith proves to be its lack of a definitive teaching on heaven, and he always fields the same question: “Why would Jews be good if they don’t believe in heaven?”

Why would Jews — or Hindus, or Buddhists, or agnostics, or atheists — be good if they don’t believe in heaven? That’s the sort of religious illiteracy we should be worried about, not unfamiliarity with evangelical names for Christ — religious illiteracy that assumes features of one’s own tradition are essential to ethical behavior. It will never be eradicated if religious literacy is defined in terms of uncritical familiarity with a single tradition.

The Pew survey also provides sobering evidence that Christians, in general, are ignorant about their own tradition. Half of Protestants can’t identify Martin Luther; half of Catholics don’t understand the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is something I see reflected in my students: I teach students who, despite being practicing Christians, don’t know that Jesus harshly criticizes divorce and never speaks about homosexuality, or that the “Old Testament” was originally the Hebrew Bible, a collection of diverse texts compiled over time by ancient Israelites. For many believers it is the classroom, not church, that provides their first opportunity to reflect on the long history of Christian debate over whether Genesis should be taken literally, or the potential problems with having multiple translations of a divine revelation.

Other religious studies faculty have confirmed my own experiences, and if our students — bright, young, open-minded thinkers who elect to take courses on religion — are religiously illiterate, how much truer must that be of Americans unlucky enough to have a narrower vision of the world, and who are less motivated to broaden it. (In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance recounts how he explained to a fellow Marine that Catholics were a type of Christian.)

In light of all this, it should be unsurprising that high-quality education is the most important factor in fighting religious illiteracy. Holders of postgraduate degrees are by far the most knowledgeable about religion, an “elite” demographic that skews strongly Democratic (57 percent to 35 percent). Controlling for overall education, taking a college-level religion course increases scores 3 points over the national average.

Religious education is about understanding religious experience, not just facts

Though the Pew survey is a helpful reference, I’m afraid that using it to justify education about religion may actually sell that education short. My students learn much, much more than facts. Believers and nonbelievers alike are forced to think through the coherence and implications of their views, instead of merely reaffirming them with sympathetic friends and family. They discover that for some faithful, religion is about never doubting certain key beliefs, while for others belief is secondary to community and ritual. They challenge their peers’ presuppositions as well as their own.

Being educated about religion, in other words, is an experience, just like the experience of being religious. The two are not mutually exclusive. Classically liberal education does not dismiss individuals’ experiences, religious or otherwise, but rather seeks to avoid the moral and intellectual evils that result from failing to consider the experiences of others. True, certain beliefs are difficult to hold in the context of that educational experience — the sinfulness of homosexuality, say, or the “natural” subservience of women — but that’s an argument against the beliefs, not the education.

Religious illiteracy is not a liberal problem. It is a function of two key factors: insularity and lack of education. And though genuine religious literacy tends to complicate people’s confidence in the manifest superiority of their own faith, and tends to discourage less tolerant forms of religiosity that are often embraced by right-wing politicians, this does not mean higher education is “biased” or “anti-religious,” any more than biology is “biased” against creationism.

Nor, for that matter, is it liberal arrogance to point this out. It is simply a statement of fact that, like many statements of fact, makes some of us uncomfortable, but should not be avoided on that score, lest we allow courtesy to obscure reality for the sake of false balance. It would be the height of PC nonsense — the same nonsense derided by so many on the right — to deny the virtues of higher education in order to avoid offending those who don’t (yet!) have access to it, or because it produces people who challenge your sacred cows.

Disdain for those who do not hold one’s own religious beliefs is not exclusive to liberal elites

What liberal “elites” — believers and nonbelievers — find objectionable is not religion, but rather a partisan twist on religious literacy that privileges one tradition, excludes historical-critical study, and maintains, against all evidence, that education and exposure to multiple perspectives creates religious ignorance instead of dispelling it.

What liberals find objectionable is shameless propaganda that turns Christianity into a wedge issue — the war on Christmas! secular baby killers! destroying God’s vision of marriage! — as if there were no Christians who say, “Happy Holidays,” or believe God is fine with same-sex marriage, or think abortion should be legal.

What liberals find objectionable is a politicized vision of authentic faith that amounts to a simple set of core beliefs, best discovered by looking at a ballot or into a mirror. It is this dangerous and mistaken vision that explains why nearly half of Republicans think, incredibly, that if Obama doesn’t agree with them politically he must belong to a different religion.

Disdain for those who do not hold one’s own religious beliefs is certainly a problem, but as anyone who has taken a world religions class can tell you, it is not exclusive to liberal elites. Thinking otherwise, I’d say, is a much clearer sign of religious illiteracy than mistaking “new King” for a reference to Donald Trump.

Alan Levinovitz is an assistant professor of religion at James Madison University in Virginia. He is the author of The Gluten Lie and The Limits of Religious Tolerance and writes regularly on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and science. Find him on Twitter @alanlevinovitz.

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Melania Trump’s plagiarized Republican convention speech would get an F in my class

2016-07-19T15:01:28-04:00

I make it very clear on the first day of class: If a student uses more than four words in a row written by someone else, those words need to be cited. That goes for essays, online responses, PowerPoint presentations, group presentations, and, yes, even a speech.

The rule is simple, but I struggle with the proper punishment. Obviously there’s a question of proportion. An entire essay copied wholesale receives an automatic F, which might cost a student the class if it’s a midterm or a final. But in my four years of experience teaching undergraduates at James Madison University, that’s only happened once. More often, my plagiarism software detects a few sentences lifted from some online source, or I notice an unusual word choice and Google the phrase where it occurs, which turns up the original author.

This kind of cheating is incredibly easy to avoid. Like my students, Melania Trump and her speechwriters were welcome to use phrases and sentences from a speech by Michelle Obama, provided they were preceded with proper attribution, something like, “As Michelle Obama expressed in 2008…”

Without attribution, the use becomes plagiarism, and there isn’t a professor in this country who would allow it. I say “this country,” however, because one of the difficulties with punishing plagiarism is widely acknowledged cultural disparities regarding the nature and severity of the offense. When I taught in China, students were surprised by my strict rules against copying. Now, back in the United States, a disproportionate number of plagiarism violations in my classes (though far from all) are committed by international students.

As an educator, I have to balance fairness and empathy. I can’t apply different standards to different students, but I don’t want my standards to discriminate against those whose error is cultural, not ethical. Over the years, I’ve developed an approach that deals with these two concerns, and if Melania Trump — or, more accurately, her group — had been in my class, there’s no question that her speech at the Republican National Convention on Monday night would have received an F.

Here’s how it works when I discover a student has plagiarized. First, I bring the student to my office and ask if there’s anything they want to tell me. Is it possible they didn’t attribute a direct quote? Did they use key ideas from other sources and fail to cite them? Usually there’s an awkward silence followed by a mumbled confession. Excuses are common — college means new, higher standards, which can create unexpected pressure.

Sometimes students will ask me why plagiarism is such a big deal in the first place — but even if they don’t, it’s at this point that I explain why the rules are the way they are. Historically plagiarism hasn’t always been a big deal, and in some cultures it still isn’t considered a serious ethical violation. But in the modern West, and especially the United States, copying without attribution goes against our societal values and our economic principles, and it is these values and principles that rules against plagiarism are meant to safeguard.

When I grade students’ writing, I am also grading the work they put into mastering concepts, researching, generating original ideas, and revising. In my classes and in this culture as a whole, it is a fundamental principle that products cannot be evaluated without knowing who produced them and how. We want to know who wrote the hilarious joke, the brilliant observation, the pithy tweet. We want to know where something was made and under what circumstances.

These questions are crucial because they help us know how to allocate our trust and admiration. One of the central American myths, for better or for worse, is that of the self-made man — and so when we look at a real estate empire, listen to a speech, or read an essay, our reaction is determined, in large part, by who had a hand in it. Should we invest in the next building, listen to the next speech? Should I give this student a good grade? Well, that all depends on whether they really wrote the essay.

I think higher education — and our culture in general — benefits from the emphasis on the producer’s transparency. Students, individual students, deserve to be rewarded for virtues like industriousness and creativity, upon which many of this country’s great successes are predicated. For this reason, I explain to my students, it’s crucial to observe the implicit pact that they make when turning in a paper: that the work is their own, and therefore that it reveals something important about who they are as thinkers and as human beings.

Got it? Good. Now rewrite your paper.

In my entire career as a professor, this approach has only failed to work twice. The first time was with a student who simply denied having copied anything, even when confronted directly with the evidence. There was no question of cross-cultural confusion. It was a baldfaced lie, born of shoddy character and an inability to admit he’d done wrong. I failed him.

The second time, my student denied the importance of avoiding plagiarism. She insisted that I was blowing her offense out of proportion — after all, it was only a few sentences from a website. She told me all her classmates did the same thing. She came up with excuse after excuse, all of which blamed the vices of the system that was punishing her, instead of acknowledging her own. I failed her, too.

The Trump campaign and those who stand behind Melania Trump’s speech are guilty of both these responses. They have denied any wrongdoing, shifted the blame to Hillary Clinton, and claimed accusations of plagiarism imply that “Michelle Obama invented the English language.” They have evidenced lack of character and an inability to grasp one of the core values that makes America great. They invented what will, from now on, be known as the “My Little Pony” defense.

In other words: They cheated, they got caught, and now they’ve been called to office hours with the American people. If it were my office, I know what grade I’d give them.

Alan Levinovitz is an assistant professor of religion at James Madison University in Virginia. He is the author of The Gluten Lie and writes regularly on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and science. Follow him @alanlevinovitz.

Watch: Did Melania Trump plagiarize Michelle Obama?

I don’t have a cellphone. You probably don’t need one, either.

2017-12-14T11:42:26-05:00

Go ahead — throw your smartphone in a fishbowl. | (Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images)

Five years ago, people asked me why I didn’t have a cellphone. They thought I’d passed some kind of judgment, which, at the time, was not an unreasonable assumption. Grim intellectual hand-wringing over our devices had gone mainstream. Books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together cautioned that the internet was making us scatterbrained and withdrawn, incapable of living “in the moment.” My phonelessness was usually mistaken for tacit agreement with their theses.

That’s not me, I would explain. (It still isn’t.) I just don’t want a cellphone, the same way some people don’t want a gaming system. Gadgets have never been my thing, and I’m something of a minimalist — acoustic guitar over electric, jogging over biking. As friends and family continued to acquire phones I failed to see a phone’s place in my life, in the same way that I never felt attracted to Facebook and see no reason to monitor myself with a Fitbit. Eventually, having no phone, like my absence from Facebook, began to provoke curiosity, and I’ll admit that I’ve enjoyed feeling like a bit of a rebel without having to take any risks.

But these preferences have nothing to do with living in the moment or being deep. As I see it, history warns against scapegoating modernity for timeless problems. Starting with Socrates — a guy who thought the written word was bad for your brain — Luddites have been needlessly conservative about what it means to think deeply and live well. Not having a phone won’t make you better, smarter, or longer-lived. It’s like waking up early: Founding Fathers and faulty science aside, there’s no good reason to be holier-than-thou about it.

I experience my own life as perfectly normal — hassle-free, fully modern, and no more virtuous than anyone else’s

But recently people have started asking me a different question — not why, but how do I live without a phone? It’s as if they’ve met a monk or a child, lost and wandering in the big city. How do I find my way? What about my job, my wife, our 3-year-old daughter, Hazel? Smartphones, it seems, have gone from accessories to necessities, from sunglasses to shoes. Only monks leave home without them. And, as with monks and children, people are romanticizing my phone-free life. I wish I could do that, says one of my students. Good for you, says the incredulous restaurant host.

This is bizarre to me, since I experience my own life as perfectly normal — hassle-free, fully modern, and no more virtuous than anyone else’s. There are moments that throw my choice into sharp relief, but not the emergencies or inconveniences that people imagine. Rather, the airplane pilot makes an announcement, the subway doors open, and poof! — all around me smartphones bloom in perfect unison, a fleeting garden in which I am oddly barren.

Then the moment passes, and my decidedly un-monkish day resumes as professor, journalist, husband, father. I check email regularly at home and at work, meet people in agreed-upon locations at scheduled times, pick up my daughter from school, ask my wife about her day during dinner, watch Game of Thrones on Amazon, play a video game, scroll through Twitter. I catch planes without a hitch, get picked up when I arrive no problem, conduct interviews on Skype or my office line. How do I live without a phone? It’s hard for me to answer, like it might be if you asked non-coffee drinkers how they live without coffee. “Just like you do,” they’d reply, confused, “but minus the coffee.”

This is important. It means that for an average person like me, a phone is far from indispensable, even in situations that appear to demand one. I’m rarely lost, for instance, and never for long. I look up directions at home and memorize them or write them down. Occasionally I ask strangers to guide me. On long road trips I use a dedicated Garmin, which I would need even if I had a cellphone, in areas that don’t get a good signal.

Then there’s texting, which is not a way I communicate. I’ll admit this inconveniences members of my morning running group who have to email me separately with updates. (The genius of smartphones is how they magnify such tiny inconveniences into massive setbacks.) But overall I’m not impressed with texting’s efficiency. Instead of going back and forth countless times to work out a location and a time to meet, I prefer a short phone call, made ahead of time, live.

There are those, I know, who prefer texting to talking. That’s fine, as long as everyone remains aware that texting, like owning a phone, is a preference, not an objectively better way to communicate. The same is true for those who say that texting allows them to stay in touch. I prefer to hear my wife’s thoughts and experiences in person, not piecemeal, in texts, during the day. (Bonus: People can’t text me to say they’re running late, and I can’t text them either, which I find makes for timelier meetings.)

As for photographs, my iPod touch takes beautiful ones, and I bring it whenever I anticipate an event worth recording. (With wifi I can also use it to check email in a surprising number of public places.) For very special occasions or a beautiful scenic hike, I’ll take my digital camera. Between the two I end up with a seemingly endless number of photographs, and it’s hard for me to imagine wanting more. What would I do with them? I can barely justify the ones I’ve got, given how long they take to organize and how infrequently I revisit them.

Perhaps the most common reason people give for having a phone is safety. But here, too, I’m confused. If safety is really a concern, why do nearly half of all Americans text and drive? Personally I feel safer without a blinking, buzzing distraction. And others are safer too, since distracted driving kills more than 3,000 people per year and injures 400,000 more. (Texting is apparently the worst, but using phones to navigate is also a risk.)

For the vast majority of us there is no empirical foundation to the idea of phones as essential to our security. That myth depends on something psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call the “availability heuristic.” Our minds focus on unusual, dramatic possibilities: the broken-down car on a dark and lonely highway; a health emergency where immediate contact is essential. But in reality those scenarios are extremely rare — rarer, no doubt, than accidents while texting or muggers preying on distracted phone users. Focusing on them leads to biased assessment of risk, which, in turn, contributes to a biased assessment of smartphones’ utility.

I’m convinced that the necessity and advantageousness of phones is an illusion

And of course, let’s not forget that despite the perks, phones have serious downsides. At least, that’s what I gather from the explosion of concern about their use, more often than not from owners themselves. Popular phone addiction apps now allow you to check your phone to see whether you check your phone too much. There are nearly as many phone detoxes as juice cleanses. Experts have even coined a term for phone separation anxiety — nomophobia — and some propose including it in the DSM. That’s hardly surprising: The 68 percent of Americans who own smartphones (up a staggering 33 percent over only five years) check them an average of 221 times daily.

My friends confirm the existence of nomophobia. Some of it, they say, comes from the thought of facing big fears — criminals and car breakdowns — without a phone. But I’ve also been told about subtler anxieties, over “wasted” events that might go unphotographed, uncommunicated, unquantified, as if reality depended on digitization. There’s even a pathological aversion to plain old boredom. What if a few minutes waiting for a friend becomes insufferably dull? As one person put it to me: “I mostly use my phone to avoid being alone with my thoughts.”

None of this is meant to suggest that phones are bad for you. Owning one, like owning a video game system, has benefits and drawbacks, and I’m convinced there’s no clear advantage to being phoneless. It certainly isn’t the magical key to wisdom and happiness — trust me on that one — and a substantial minority of people require them to do their job or survive abroad. (I owned my one cellphone in 1999, while living in Spain for a year after high school.)

Nevertheless, I’m also convinced that the necessity and advantageousness of phones is an illusion. I know, firsthand, that living without one doesn’t mean constant inefficiency or imminent danger. Whatever time I lose asking strangers to reorient me, I gain back from not spending 4.7 hours per day on my phone. If my friends are running late I may occasionally get bored, but there’s also something nice about being alone with my thoughts. Perhaps I did waste $10 at Best Buy because I didn’t comparison shop on Amazon; that’s nothing compared to spending well over $1,000 a year on an iPhone, not to mention the extra purchases it probably facilitates. It’s true that I can’t check restaurants on Yelp while wandering a new city, but between instinct and a hotel concierge I do pretty well — and end up in places I might not otherwise visit.

How do I live without a phone? The question, I believe, is inspired by false premises: that life lived with a phone is more convenient, more fulfilling, easier, better; that closeness in marriage might genuinely depend on texting your spouse; that without access to Facebook, friendships will wither. It invokes a strange, pessimistic vision of reality, of broken-down cars and looming health emergencies, unfamiliar streets and unfriendly strangers, all confronted alone. In this terrifying fantasy, the phone becomes an indispensable talisman of safety. But it is just that, a talisman, no more effective at warding off imagined evils than a rabbit’s foot or a security blanket.

True, in the absence of pay phones you have to borrow phones once in a while. (These days, establishments and acquaintances are usually more than happy to help out. €”No phone? Cool! Good for you.) Occasionally you’ll be forced to depend on courage, resourcefulness, improvisation, and the kindness of others, and sometimes you’ll be waiting around, alone with your thoughts. But these are minor inconveniences — if they are inconveniences at all — not devastating deal-breakers.

If you’re suffering from nomophobia or feel uneasy about your phone habit; if, like my students, you want to go without, just give it a try. You’ll find, I think, that nightmare scenarios fail to materialize, that reality doesn’t depend on digital documentation nor relationships on texting. That is, your choice won’t turn you into a monk — just another perfectly normal person, like me, living life without a phone.

Alan Levinovitz is assistant professor of religion at James Madison University in Virginia, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He is the author of The Gluten Lie and writes regularly on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and science. Follow him @alanlevinovitz.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.