Title: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t

Author: Stephen Prothero

Completed: September 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: This is one of the only books I’ve reread and now that I have, I realized it wasn’t really the book I wanted to read either time. I first read it around 2010 in hopes of learning more about different world religions. I enjoyed it, but didn’t retain most of what was in it. When I read it this time, I was reminded that it is a wonderful overview of religion in America from pre-revolution through the mid 20th century. This is certainly interesting, but both time I was looking for a better understanding of world religions. Luckily he had a recommendation for that, The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. So I’ve added that to my list. I found many of the stories in this book to be interesting, but hope I look back at these notes before considering reading this book for a third time.

Highlights:

• In Cultural Literacy, Hirsch, a University of Virginia English professor, argued that much of our common cultural coin had been drastically devalued. (“Remember the Alamo”? Um, not really.) Hirsch traced this problem to John Dewey and other Progressive-era education reformers, who gave up in the early twentieth century on content-based learning in favor of a skills-based strategy that scorned “the piling up of information.” This new educational model produced, according to Hirsch, “a gradual disintegration of cultural memory,” which caused in turn “a gradual decline in our ability to communicate.” Hirsch rightly understood that there are civic implications of this descent into cultural ignorance, particularly in a democracy that assumes an informed citizenry.
• Today far too many thinkers, on both the left and the right, cling to the illusion that we live in a “post-Christian” country and a secular world. But evidence of the public power of religion is overwhelming, particularly in the United States. As Boston University law professor Jay Wexler has observed, “A great many Americans rely on religious reasons when thinking and talking about public issues. Ninety percent of the members of Congress, by one report, consult their religious beliefs when voting on legislation. A majority of Americans believe that religious organizations should publicly express their views on political issues, and an even stronger majority believe it is important for a President to have strong religious beliefs.”
• Evangelical pollsters have lamented for some time the disparity between Americans’ veneration of the Bible and their understanding of it, painting a picture of a nation that believes God has spoken in scripture but can’t be bothered to listen to what God has to say. The Democratic presidential aspirant Howard Dean, when asked to name his favorite New Testament book, mistakenly cited an Old Testament text (Job) instead. But such confusion is not restricted to Dean’s home state of Vermont. According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name one of the four Gospels, and many high school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.
• 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 a 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.
• The United States is by law a secular country. God is not mentioned in the Constitution, and the First Amendment’s establishment clause forbids the state from getting into the church business. However, that same amendment also includes a free exercise clause safeguarding religious liberty, and Americans have long exercised this liberty by praying to God, donating to religious congregations, and hoping for heaven. So there is logic not only to President John Adams’s affirmation in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” but also to the Supreme Court’s 1892 observation that “this is a Christian nation.”
• Some surveys show that the portion of “Nones” (those who claim no religious preference) is rising in the United States—doubling by one account over the course of the 1990s from 7 percent to 14 percent. But those who have distanced themselves from organized religion have done nothing of the sort when it comes to God or spirituality. In a recent survey of US adolescents, sociologist Christian Smith found that, of the teenagers who claimed “no religion,” fewer than one out of five rejected the possibility of life after death. In a recent study of American adults, nine out of ten of the “no religion” respondents told researchers that they pray. These “Nones,” in short, are about as irreligious as your average nun. Few are Euro-style atheists or agnostics; the vast majority are “unchurched believers”—spiritual people who for one reason or another avoid religious congregations.
• Of America’s religions, the most popular of course is Christianity. Half of Americans describe themselves as Protestants, one-quarter as Catholics, and 10 percent as Christians of some other stripe. This makes the US population more Christian than Israel is Jewish or Utah is Mormon.
• The Gospel of John instructs Christians to “search the scriptures” (John 5:39), but little searching, and even less finding, is being done.
• When religion is mentioned in US history schoolbooks, it is all too often an afterthought or an embarrassment (or both) and clearly a diversion from what is presumed throughout to be a secular story. Historian Jon Butler has called this the jack-in-the-box approach: Religious characters pop up here and there, typically with all of the color and substance of a circus clown, but their appearances—prosecuting witches in Salem in the 1690s or making monkeys of themselves at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in the 1920s—are always a surprise (or a scare), and, happily, they go back into hiding as quickly as they emerge. Readers of American history textbooks might learn something about the religious bigotry of the Puritans and the quaint customs of Native Americans of bygone days.
• none of the classic events in American history—the Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution—can be understood without some knowledge of the religious motivations of the generals, soldiers, thinkers, politicians, and voters who made them happen.
• When the war ended, both sides saw it as an Armageddon of sorts. Southerners fastened onto the Myth of the Lost Cause, which embraced Confederate soldiers as martyrs and the South as something of a resurrected Christ, while Northerners anointed Lincoln, who was assassinated on Good Friday, as a Christ of their own who shed his blood to atone for the sins of the nation.
• Progressive proponents of the Social Gospel, by contrast, saw capitalism as a sin. The novel In His Steps (1897) by the Congregationalist minister Charles M. Sheldon is remembered today for bequeathing to us the query “What would Jesus do?” but its original purpose was to drive home the point that if Jesus were out and about in Victorian America he would be caring for slum dwellers, not selling steel.
• Partisans of “muscular Christianity,” recalling that Jesus “came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), contended that their “manly Redeemer” would want them to fight for what is right. Christian pacifists, who worshipped a “sweet Savior,” countered with the story of Jesus rebuking followers after they drew blood from his captors in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:51–52).
• also affects Indian tourism (since some high-caste Hindus consider traveling outside of India polluting), AIDS in Africa (where the Roman Catholic Church forbids artificial birth control), and banking throughout the Muslim world (since Islamic law prohibits the giving and receiving of interest).
• As a series of recent Supreme Court rulings has made plain, the First Amendment requires that the public schools be neutral with respect to religion. That means not taking sides among the religions, not favoring Christianity over Buddhism, for example, or the Baptists over the Lutherans. But it also means not taking sides between religion and irreligion. As Justice Tom Clark wrote in Abington v. Schempp (1963), public schools may not preach the “religion of secularism.”
• As Nord noted, “For some time now, people have rightly argued that ignoring black history and women’s literature (as texts and curricula have traditionally done) has been anything but neutral. Rather, it betrays a prejudice; it is discriminatory. And so it is with religion.”
• the Court has repeatedly and explicitly given a constitutional seal of approval to teaching about religion “when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.”
• With the American Revolution came a new rationale for basic literacy, and a new aim. Whereas the revolution of Luther and Calvin had provided a theological justification for reading, the revolution of Washington and Adams provided a civic one. Now children needed to read not only to be good Protestants but also to be good citizens—to free themselves from the tyranny of popes as well as kings. The theory here was simple, and it was rooted in a shared sense of the fragility of democratic government. Unlike European monarchies, which saw educated citizens as a bother at best, the American experiment in republican government, which vested sovereignty in the people and, by the 1820s, extended suffrage without regard to economic means (though, it must be noted, still in regard to race and sex), depended for its survival on an informed citizenry. Or, as James Madison put it, “A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”96 And so two potent justifications for literacy developed side by side. Children would learn to read both to free themselves from sin and to liberate themselves from monarchs—both to save their souls and to save the republic.
• One of the myths of American education is that once upon a time (that is, before the Religious Right started to muck around in the public schools) public education was secular. This is simply not so. From their early-nineteenth-century beginnings, common schools were very much a part of an unofficial yet powerful Protestant establishment, which included the leading Protestant denominations and a “Benevolent Empire” of nondenominational voluntary associations dedicated to improving the world through peace, temperance, abolitionism, and other social reforms.
• This famine was particularly worrying in light of the feast of secular novels and other “vicious literature” available on the frontier. Pioneers seemed to expend the limited reading skills they possessed on literature that amused rather than edified. As a result, the masses on the frontier were left “in the grossest darkness and spiritual ignorance,” “destitute”
• historians Jon Roberts and James Turner have observed, state institutions were if anything more explicitly theological than their private counterparts “since they answered to electorates deeply suspicious even of Catholics, much more of outright unbelievers.” As late as 1905 a study of religion at state universities would conclude that these institutions were “more intensely and genuinely Christian than the average community.”
• revivalism made Christians. In fact, it made converts by the millions. Church membership rates more than doubled from roughly 17 percent of Americans at the start of the Revolution to 34 percent in 1850.
• The key figure behind the nondenominational or nonsectarian solution to the problem of religion in public education was Horace Mann, the education reformer (and, not coincidentally, Unitarian) who served as the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from its founding in 1837 until 1848. More than anyone else, Mann determined the role religion would play in the nation’s public schools.
• the focus of education shifted from teaching religious doctrines to inculcating moral character. The great exodus of religion from the minds of American citizens was under way.181 The effects of this exodus remain with us today, notably in our collapsing of religion into “values” and “values” into sexual morality, which in turn functions via an odd sort of circular reasoning as a proxy for religiosity. At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus’ divinity or Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion.
• “Religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt.” Once upon a time, the sermon had educated parishioners about such Christian staples as the Trinity and the Ten Commandments, and the stories ministers told from the pulpit were restricted to the grand biblical narratives of Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Jesus, and Mary. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the sermon descended, as Hofstadter put it, “from the vernacular to the vulgar”; the pew became a place where you could hear the likes of Moody fuming that “an educated rascal is the meanest kind of rascal”
• What made you a Christian, both conservatives and liberal Protestants argued, was not affirming a particular catechism or knowing certain Bible stories; rather, what made you a Christian was having a relationship with an astonishingly malleable Jesus—an American Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the nation’s social and cultural preoccupations.
• 4 Gospels. The four narratives of the life of Jesus included in the New Testament of the Christian churches. They are: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• 5 Ks. Symbols that identify male members of a Sikh order called the Khalsa, so called because each begins in Punjabi with the letter k. They are: kes, uncut hair; kangha, comb; kirpan, ceremonial sword; kara, steel wrist bangle; kachh, short pants.
• 5 Pillars of Islam. The key practices of Islam, obligatory for all Muslims. They are: Shahadah, or witnessing that “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God”; salat, or prayer in the direction of Mecca five times a day (dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening); sawm, or fasting (from sunrise to sunset) during the lunar month of Ramadan; zakat, or almsgiving to the poor (via an asset tax); hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, once in a lifetime for all who are physically and financially able.
• ahimsa. Term in Hinduism, Buddhism, and especially Jainism, often translated as nonviolence, referring to not harming or wishing to harm. Described by Jains as the highest moral duty,
• Jesus repeatedly told his followers that he had come not to strengthen families but to set family members against one another: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,” he said, “he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
• just-war theory. Catholic tradition, dating to Thomas Aquinas, describing both what makes a war just (jus ad bellum) and what conduct is justifiable during such a war (jus in bello). Concerning how to conduct a war, just war theorists often cite such principles as “discrimination” (which says that combatants should direct their aggression against other combatants rather than innocent civilians) and “proportionality” (which says that force cannot be out of proportion to the injury suffered). Just war theory also prohibits torture and mandates proper care for prisoners of war.
• Mormons recognize four scriptures: the Bible (“as far as it is translated correctly”), the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants.
• The best way for newcomers to read the Quran is not from front to back but from back to front. Start with the Fatihah, but then skip to the shorter, more theological suras in the back. Then read the narratives of the prophets (toward the middle) before concluding with the legalistic content of the long suras at the front.
• Like Muslims, Sikhs are strict monotheists who emphasize divine sovereignty. They reject the view that God incarnates in human form, believing instead in a formless God that can be known through singing and meditation. Sikhs too have a sacred center, in this case the Golden Temple of Amritsar, India. Like Hindus, Sikhs believe in karma and reincarnation.