The Growing Need of Religious Education in American Culture
Based on Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn't by Stephen Prothero 2007)
and
On a lecture delivered to The Foundation for Contemporary Theology by Dr. Keith Jenkins, President
of Houston Graduate School of Theology.
As delivered to the Madison-Mayodan Rotary Club on January 27th 2009
by
Rev. Charles P. McGathy
I. The religious I.Q. in North America is dropping.
A. A religious literacy test. Take the test.
B. Examples of religious illiteracy.
1. Only half of American adults can name even one of the four Gospels.
2. Most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible.
3. Only one-third know that Jesus (no, not Billy Graham) delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
4. A majority of Americans wrongly believe the Bible says that Jesus was born in Jerusalem.
5. When asked whether the New Testament book of Acts is in the Old Testament, one quarter
of Americans say yes. More than a third say they don't know.
6. Most Americans don't know that Jonah is a book in the Bible.
7. Ten percent of Americans believed that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.
8. 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
II. Religious ignorance is both expensive and dangerous.
A. Does religion matter? (Chapter two of Religious Literacy)
B. Current examples of why religious education matters.
1. Murder of Sikh following 9/11 attack (a case of "mistaken identity").
2. The reestablishment of Iraqi government/society using religious leadership.
3. Understanding our history, literature, current events:
Prothero argues, and rightly so, that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core
beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths. In a commentary for the Los Angeles Times,
titled “We Live in the Land of Biblical Idiots,” Prothero (who grew up Episcopalian and now calls
himself a spiritually “confused Christian”) maintains that biblical illiteracy is not just a religious
problem. It is a civic problem with political consequences. “How can citizens participate in biblically
inflected debates on abortion, capital punishment or the environment without knowing something
about the Bible?… an entire generation of Americans is growing up almost entirely ignorant of the
most influential book in world history, unable to understand the 1,300 biblical allusions in
Shakespeare, [or] the scriptural oratory of President Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr..”
C. Martin Marty on religious ignorance:
Historian Martin Marty tells a story about a heated debate at an early Methodist convention
concerning whether Methodists should build seminaries to educate clergy. Rising to oppose the idea,
one bishop said that faith was strongest in a soul unfettered by book learning. If pressed, the bishop
added, he would opt any day for a preacher without education over a preacher without passion. A
critic then asked the bishop whether he was thankful for his own ignorance, to which the bishop
unabashedly answered yes. "Whereupon, " Marty writes, that the convention sing a Te Deum, since
the good bishop had so much for which to be thankful." (Martin Marty, "Blessed Ignorance," Christian
Century 119.5 (February 27, 2002): 417.)
D. Prothero focuses in on the problem of religious illiteracy.
Prothero then adds:
This story encapsulates the nineteenth-century debate inside American Christianity between piety and
learning -- a battle that learning lost. In Marty's telling the bishop plays the fool. But for many
American Christians, then and today, willingness to be a fool for Christ is a mark of true faith.
Christianity is about loving Jesus; it does not require knowing much of anything at all. How did this
happen? How did religious ignorance become a sign--perhaps the sign--of genuine piety? And what
lessons might this fall into religious illiteracy hold for Americans today? (Prothero, 87)
III. In order to combat religious illiteracy we must understand its causes.
A. Not as a result of the 1963 Supreme Court decisions (popular and wildly inaccurate mythology). The
actual reason is a bit more complex.
B. Prothero argues that a replacement “religion” based on morality helped produce our current situation:
…how households and churches, schools and Sunday schools, spellers and primers, voluntary
associations and colleges conspired to plant religious knowledge in Americans, we see both
the flowering of religious literacy and its demise. Children who read, memorized, and
recited passages in the New England Primer, Webster's spellers, and the McGuffey readers
learned much about the basic beliefs and practices, stories and heroes of Protestant Christianity. But
by the early nineteenth century the acids of nondenominationalism were starting to erode religious
content. Sectarian Protestantism (most conspicuously of the Calvinist variety) was starting to give
way to nonsectarian Protestantism. With this shift came a tendency to emphasize morality since it was
in the domain of ethics that Protestants of different denominations could agree. As it became
imperative to get along (at least with other Protestants), theology started giving ground to morality. If
the point of the New England Primer was to teach children that they were sinners and that Jesus died
to save them from their sins, the point, of the later McGuffey readers was to teach children that God
wanted them to work hard, save their money, tell the truth, and avoid alcohol. Their core text was not
Paul's "for by grace are ye saved through faith" (Ephesians 2:8) but the Ten Commandments. Already
Americans were inaugurating a new form of religion -- less sectarian, less doctrinal, more emotional,
and more moralistic. "Little children, you must seek," one reader put it, "rather to be good than wise."
In other words, we had already taken one giant step toward the contemporary era in which morality is
the essence of religion and the term Christian connotes opposition to abortion and gay marriage
rather than faith in the incarnation and the redemption -- an era in which having a relationship with
Jesus is more important than knowing what he actually did, in which believing in the Bible matters more
than knowing what the Bible has to say. More than the forces of secularism, it was this sort of religion
that would do religious literacy in (from pages 85-86, the emphasis is mine ).
IV. We should use appropriate means and methods to religiously educate a new generation.
A. Dr. Keith Jenkins of HGST in a lecture to The Foundation for Contemporary Theology:
Judeo- Christian culture. Faith in faith. A devotion to religion for its own sake; very little concerned
with content. Until you get what we have today, a spiritually based, anti-intellectual faith that
encourages the professional clergy to give their members what they want, short personal
entertaining sermons, light on exegesis and doctrine, heavy on personal illustration and
entertainment. You even get the phenomenon of the megachurch today which does not identify itself
in any way with religious symbols, they are more about entertainment value than helping people seek
and grow in their faith.
B. Religious institutions must do a better job. (Not just any religious education, but good quality
education).
C. Educational institutions must find ways to communicate the story of religion without bias. (Beware of
agenda driven organizations who may skew for or against religion).
D. Individuals must reject ignorance and prejudice and choose to understand and respect other faiths.
(read, study, get to know other faiths as well as your own).