I am convinced that one　 needs to know something about the world’s religions in order to be truly educated. And I will admit to a sneaking suspicion, likely rooted in my Episcopal upbringing, that faith without knowledge is dead. However, argument of this book is neither that liberal education needs religious studies nor that real faith requires knowledge. The argument is that you need religious literacy in order to be an effective citizen.

When antebellum Americans weighed the pros and cons of slavery—almost exclusively on the basis of the Bible—most citizens could make sense of that debate’s references to the runaway slaves in the New Testament book of Philemon and to the year of the Jubilee (when slaves could be freed) in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. When the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 put female suffrage on the national agenda, most citizens knew that suffragettes would have to contend with the injunctions in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians (two new Testament letters attributed to the apostle Paul) that women should keep silent in the churches and submit to male authority. Today it is rare American who can follow with any degree of confidence biblically inflected debates about abortion or gay marriage. Or, for that matter, about the economy, since the most widely quoted Bible verse in the United States—"God helps those who help themselves"—is not actually in the Bible.

Religious illiteracy makes it difficult for Americans to make sense of a world in which people kill and make peace in the name of Christ or Allah. How are we to understand protests against the Vietnam War, which compelled Catholic priests to burn draft records in Maryland and Buddhist monks to set fire to themselves in Vietnam, without knowing something about Catholic just war theory and the Buddhist principles of no-self and compassion? How are we to understand international conflicts in the Middle East and Sri Lanka without reckoning with the role of Jerusalem in the sacred geography of the Abrahamic faiths and with the differences between Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast Asia? Closer to home, how are we to understand faith-based electioneering if the "reds" on the Religious Right and the "blues" on the Secular Left continue to stereotype one　 another as distinct specifies? Is it possible to weigh the merits of Supreme Court rulings on religious liberty if we are unaware of legacies of anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-Mormonism, and anti-fundamentalism in American life?

From the time of the nation’s founding, the success of the American experiment in republican government was rightly understood to rest on an educated citizenry. If suffrage was to be extended first to white males with property and eventually to men and women of all races, then it would be essential for all Americans to understand the issues on which they were voting. How could we act responsibly as citizens if we did not know how to read, if we did not know something about politics and history and science and economics?

Today, when religion is implicated in virtually every issue of national and international import (not least the nomination of Supreme Court justices), US citizens need to know something about religion too. In an era in which the public square is, rightly or wrongly, awash in religious reasons, can one　 really participate fully in public life without knowing something about Christianity and the world’s religions? Without basic religious literacy? How to decide whether intelligent design is "religious" or "scientific" without some knowledge of both science and religion? How to determine whether the effort to yoke Christianity and "family values" makes sense without knowing what sort of "family man" Jesus was? How to adjudicate the debate between President Bush’s description of Islam as a religion of peace and the conviction of many televangelists that Islam is a religion of war without some basic information about Muhammad and the Quran? How to determine whether the current Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence discriminates against minority religions without knowing what Sikhs and Buddhists hold dear?

Unfortunately, US citizens today lack this religious literacy. As a result, they are too easily swayed by demagogues on the left or the right. Few Americans are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam’s place in the war on terrorism or what the Bible says about homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).


SOURCE:
Stephen Prothero
Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t
HarperCollins 2007