Does Anyone Still Go to Sunday School?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently wrote about the lack of religious knowledge in America today and argued that a person cannot understand the world without knowing something about the world’s religions, including Pentecostals and Evangelicals. Kristof admitted that when he was covering the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, he was surprised at how the candidate connected with Americans because of his evangelical faith; more surprisingly, Kristof admitted that he had “only the vaguest idea at the time what an evangelical was.” Kristof’s column includes a four-paragraph litany of Biblical “facts” and asks readers to find the mistakes — 20 of them — that “reflect the general muddling in our society about religious knowledge.” Kristof notes that it’s not just secular Americans, but a large swath of those Americans who profess a belief in God are “largely ignorant about religion.”

Kristof is not alone in the observation. Stephen Prothero notes in his book, Religious Literacy, America is a “nation of religious illiterates.” Because this ignorance is a “major civic problem,” Prothero advocates returning to teaching religion in the public schools. In addition to “reading, writing and arithmetic,” religion, he says, “ought to become the ‘Fourth R’ of American education.” Given what he sees as a widespread “lack of basic knowledge,” Prothero questions how politicians and pundits continue to “root public policy arguments in religious rhetoric” not understanding that most of the public either misses or misinterprets those Biblical references. For instance, Prothero notes: