Slag, I hope you'll join the thread I'll likely start when the PBS program comes on (God in America from American Experience and Frontline).

People do things according to their values (mostly!). How their values are shaped and what the outcomes of their actions are is what history is about.

A few days out from the survey report's release, now, there is more response, as opposed to straight reportage, visible online:

The Washington Post: On Faith section had fifteen panelists respond here.

They're an interesting assortment.

The response of several is the same as Joe's: religion is not about facts. Churches might worry about this, but apparently believers may not -- the ARIS study shows that over time more U.S. Christians are becoming dissociated from identifying with any particular denomination, and a Pew study on young people reinforces this.

I'd say, yeah a deeper understanding is required. It's hard to survey that on the phone. This obviously scratches the surface, but it does give some glimpse of what people are paying attention to. Or not paying attention to. For what that's worth...

Half-empty or half-full? In any well-designed test of general knowledge, 50% of respondents will have below average performance. :-) It's not hard to be shocked at what Americans don't know. Jay Leno has a good time with it. Stephen Prothero, whose book, "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't", in part inspired this survey, is one (among many) who finds the results confirm his premise.

On the other hand, in the Huffington Post: Bruce Feiler in an essay entitled, "God in the U.S.A.: Americans Know More About Religion Than Most Other Subjects" focuses on the positives in the results: "Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic." (This from comparing answers to the "general knowledge" questions on the survey.) Also, he says, "Americans know as much about other religions as they know about their own."

It is a challenge, both here on Mudcat and elsewhere, to get people to understand what the data say and what they don't. Among the Washington Post panelists, Aseem Shukla says, "...what to make of a dispiriting testament to another discipline where we Americans fall short?" but this study says nothing about how Americans compare to any other nation on this topic.

Also in the Washington Post collection, John Mark Reynolds says "religious Americans must reject the temptation to retreat into a comforting anti-intellectualism. For Christians at least, we are called to live by faith and faith is intellectual. It is not merely intellectual, it is driven by love, but head and heart can never be separated." I'd agree with that, if I wasn't made suspicious by having had to clench my teeth to get through his preceding comments about "elite education" and the "secular elite".

I had to grit my teeth for quite a while, but his points are good:

"we must demand that our government schools teach religion, not just the "facts" but with understanding. Wisdom will only come when we recognize why billions of the world's people believe what they do. This means that majority Christians must also accept charitable expositions of other faiths. When the state of Texas demands less coverage of Islam this is a bad step.

"We must do unto others as we would have them do to us. We must allow students to read books that come from different traditions, from atheism to paganism. The intellectual growth that will result will not be the sort that can be captured in a fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice exam. Instead, we are going to have to support government school budgets that to allow for small discussion classes that can produce a deeper understanding of important ideas.

"Ignorance about things vital to our fellow citizens is harmful to the Republic."

I can't argue with that.

Many folks who posted their reviews on Amazon.com of Prothero's "Religious Literacy" book, complained that it described the issue, but did nothing to solve it. He's got a new book: "God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter." I think I'm going to get hold of that one.

And on a procedural note: Apparently the Pew Forum does post its full datasets, usually within six months, so this one is not available yet but will be. Others (like the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey) can be found for download here.

~ Becky in Long Beach