Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are the high-scoring on a new survey of religious knowledge

[jack]

Several people recently linked to a study in America comparing different demographics on religious knowledge.

Quiz: http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/
Analysis: http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
...
On questions about Christianity – including a battery of questions about the Bible – Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge.
...
What factors seem to contribute to religious knowledge? Data from the survey indicate that educational attainment – how much schooling an individual has completed – is the single best predictor of religious knowledge. Having taken a religion course in college is also strongly associated with higher religious knowledge. Other factors linked with religious knowledge include reading Scripture at least once a week and talking about religion with friends and family.

Basically, there are no great surprises. Intelligent and knowledgeable people knew stuff. Average people typically knew little or didn't take the survey seriously. Being religious didn't lead to knowing basic facts about your religion as much as you'd expect (which is probably true of most groups, and not terribly surprising, but is a point many news articles seized on, and still somewhat disappointing).

I expected most well-educted people to score 14 or 15 out of 15. Most of the questions were to me extremely obvious ("Was Mother Theresa (a) Catholic...") and fairly well phrased ("Which Bible figure is most closely associated with..." rather than "Who did..."). The questions apparently varied a little, so what you see may not be what everyone answered.

There was one I didn't know at all, that Jonathan Edwards participated in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Great_Awakening.

And one that I nearly got wrong. "When does the Jewish Sabbath begin?" It said when does the sabbath _start_ which strongly hinted to me that they were looking for "Friday" rather than "Saturday", even though if I didn't know many Jewish people in person I would probably have forgotten that.

But then, it occurred to me, according to the tradition which makes the Jewish sabbath start at sundown, shouldn't it also make the Jewish _Saturday_ start at sundown? And hence, in an extremely technical fashion, make the sabbath start on saturday? But I decided that would be too subtle for the quiz (and I think Jews I know do NOT refer to Friday night as Saturday).

Comments

[naath]

I'd not expect most non-USians to know what the US constitution says about school prayer... although I guess the survey was done in the US.

[ptc24]

11. According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature, or not? correct Answer Yes, permitted Yes, permitted 23

(23% of respondents get a simple yes/no question right, that is. I guessed correctly, partly by metagaming the test)

[naath]

Presumably they are trying to guess what the constitution says based on some prior understanding of the constitution then... not just going "dunno" and guessing wildly.

[forestofglory]

The Great Awakening question seems way harder then the other ones.

I got the bible as lit question right in part thanks to the bible as lit unit I did in high school. (Based on the assumption that my school wasn't doing anything unconstitutional)

[jack]

Ah, that's interesting. They did say the questions were a deliberate spread, and that some of them were harder in order to better differentiate knowledge at the upper end of the scale.

I'd not heard of it AT ALL, not even in a "oh, I vaguely remember" way. I assumed it was a lot more known in America, but just hadn't made it onto popular TV and political messageboards, so it had never made its way to me, but apparently it was actually more obscure even in America.