Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Very much so. Religious literacy and basic literacy used to go hand in hand. The Bible was the first reader of the colonists and early Americans, so as they learned to read, they read the Bible. One important sign of this literacy was that Americans conducted many of their most important civic debates, including the debate over slavery, largely in Biblical terms.

The big links were churches, schools, households, Sunday schools, colleges, and Bible and tract societies. In schools, the chain of memory got broken not in the ’60s by secularists, as many conservative Christians claim, or by Supreme Court rulings that outlawed devotional Bible reading and prayers in public schools. Bible courses and the teaching of religion started to go away in the mid-19th century as a result of the debate over which Bible to read—and that was instigated by religious people, not secularists. Another change was in the churches themselves, when they started focusing on loving Jesus rather than on listening to him. The Bible slowly became a kind of ornament and a source of authority rather than a book you actually read or even—as many kids did in the colonial period—memorized.So it became something you talked about instead of something you read… Sermons became more about ordinary life and less about biblical narratives, while Sunday schools focused more on morality than on learning about your own particular denomination. The changes also had something to do with religious tolerance, as people increasingly focused on getting along rather than understanding their own traditions.

Evangelicalism became the dominant religious impulse in the early 19th century, replacing Puritanism. Puritans understood God through a combination of the head and the heart. They were keen on religious learning and reason. Evangelicals were not. In fact, they were suspicious of the mind. Focusing on experience and emotion, they slowly turned Americans away from religious learning, which increasingly was seen as secondary and maybe even dangerous.

The shift came after World War II in response, first, to the Holocaust and the Nazis’ uses of Christianity to advance their anti-Semitic program and, second, to the postwar threat of Communism. In order to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic fascists and to fight “godless” Communism, American Christians made common cause with Jews… and tried to mute their differences. Gradually the distinctive features of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism tended to fall away as we thought of ourselves as Judeo-Christians.

I don’t think so, largely because it’s too long. The term Abrahamic America is becoming pretty widespread, and it could replace Judeo-Christian. But right now, we’re in the midst of a debate over whether Islam can stand alongside Judaism and Christianity as one of the three great American faiths. Part of the argument of my book is that we’re having trouble with that conversation because we don’t know anything about Islam. Another problem of the Abrahamic model is that it excludes Hindus and Buddhists.

Fear of controversy—even allergy to controversy—is one big factor. Publishers are determined to make textbooks as unobjectionable as possible so they can be sold in every school district in the country. Another factor is that one of the pockets of secularity in the middle of this very religious country is [the] publishing [industry] and the media more broadly. A lot of the authors and publishers of these textbooks are secular, and they imagine that everybody else must be also. Finally, until recently, a lot of intellectuals thought religion was going away as societies became more modern, and that just hasn’t happened. A lot of historians and sociologists have been scrambling in the last few years to make sense of a world in which religion matters. I think they’re finally getting the message.

European countries do a much better job. They are at least trying to educate young people about religion and, to their credit, not just about the state religion, either. You don’t only learn about Lutheranism in Sweden or Anglicanism in Britain.

That’s a hard question. My proposal for having required courses on religion in public schools would foster better-informed debates about these questions… but I don’t think they bring an end to disagreements between creationists and evolutionists. Religious literacy should enable people to understand the debate better and might even make it possbile for the two sides to understand each other better. … Because most Americans don’t really know that much about religion, the debates currently tend to be carried forward by the extremists. If more of us were better informed, more of us could participate.

You could say that about many things. If Americans knew nothing about politics, then they wouldn’t get angry about politics. If they never went to movies, they’d never argue about movies. So while this is also true about religion, the cost of not knowing about religion is too high in a world in which religion is so volatile and so influential. Furthermore, religious tolerance is so deeply embedded in American culture that I think we can tolerate a lot more knowledge. We’re a long way away from worrying about religious warfare in this country. Some people want to make the claim that if we knew more about other religions, we would get along better. I don’t believe that, actually. But I don’t believe the opposite either. Knowledge can lead in either direction—or in neither. The understanding is important given how important religion is in the world.

I think we need to have courses about the Bible and world religions in middle schools and high schools, and I think they should be mandatory—with an opt-out provision. One course would cover the five or seven great religions, however you count them. The other would be about the Bible and its afterlife. Students would read the Gospel of Matthew and Genesis to learn the basic stories and characters, but they would also learn about the uses of the Bible in world and American history, in literature, and in politics—how it was used, for example, by Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr. By the way, I think few students would opt out of these courses.