Joe, you said "even a reputable organization like the Pew trust, seems to emphasize information as a necessary aspect of religious faith". The point of that "religious knowledge" survey was to look at just that -- knowledge of information among U.S. adults -- without any judgement as to what's necessary to faith. Stephen Prothero's book, "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn't" does argue that such literacy is important in American life. He found there was no good data, however, and that's what the Pew survey was meant to correct. I don't think either Pew or Prothero judged it as a "necessary aspect of religious faith".
From the Preface to the report:
"...we also decided that, no matter what the results, we would not give the public an 'A,' an 'F' or any other grade because we have no objective way of determining how much the public should know about religion. Moreover, we could have designed harder questions, or easier ones. As it happens, through a combination of good survey design and good luck, the results were an almost perfect bell curve in which the average score was exactly half of the 32 possible correct answers, and very few people got all questions right or all questions wrong. Readers can decide for themselves whether this justifies Prothero's conclusion or not."