I debated whether to add this to one of the current threads, but in the hope of starting a rational discussion without a pre-loaded thread title, here's a new thread.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released (apparently at a religion newswriters conference) the results of a new survey: the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.

As reported in the New York Times:

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

"Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey," said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

...There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked.

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The L.A. Times notes "For comparison purposes, the survey also asked some questions about general knowledge, which yielded the scariest finding: 4% of Americans believe that Stephen King, not Herman Melville, wrote "Moby Dick."

The direct link to the survey and its results is here, but I haven't been able to look at it yet -- I'll bet their server is overloaded this evening.

You can read some other reports on the report, though:

Reuters

Huffington Post

PBS NewsHour which refers to several other reports on the report

the Religion News Service (at Belief.net)

Nicole Neroulias's "Belief Beat" blog at Belief.net

I, a never-believing non-believer (one theory on the results is that many atheists & agnostics have left a church after great thought), got 5 out of 6 correct in the NY Times's small sample of questions from the survey. (And if I hadn't second-guessed myself on one question, it would have been 6 out of 6.) However, at least a couple of those questions were addressed in the article...

I might have felt more confident overall if I had done the Bible reading homework in my high school Humanities class in the semester that I was rebelling against school hypocrisy (not just a problem with that class). My son is taking an A.P. World History Class and is just finishing up the section on comparative religion. So, no problem knowing that it is allowable to read the Bible as literature in U.S. public schools.

~ Becky in Long Beach