Americans — not just liberals — have a religious literacy problem

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.