Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know-And Doesn't

Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know-And Doesn't Stephen Prothero. New York: Harper Collins/ Harper San Francisco, 2007. A spring 2007 seminar marking the seventyfifth anniversary of the Folger Institute in Washington, DC, celebrated "Shakespeare in American Education" from 1607 to (nearly) the present, and a very strong case was made by conference participants for the centrality of Shakespeare for educators. But an even stronger case could be made for the historical influence of the Bible in American education. According to Prothero's book, "America's first three colleges-Harvard (established 1636), William and Mary (1693) and Yale (1701)-were all founded primarily to educate clergy" (84). So much for the separation of church and state in "the land of the free" early on. But over the years, as historian Henry Steele Commager has explained, "Religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt," and, to quote Stephen Prothero, chair of the religion department at Boston University, the "battle inside American Christianity between piety and learning [was] a battle that learning lost. " If there is a problem today with religious ignorance in America-and there is, as Prothero clearly demonstrates-education is surely the solution, and this book deserves to be in the corrective vanguard. Prothero's Religious Literacy, following the example of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987), leaves no doubt that religious illiteracy is shamefully rampant in America today. A Jay Leno audience could name all of the Beatles, for example, but could not name one of the twelve apostles. Examples of stupid answers abound in this book: a majority of youngsters polled, for example, thought that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife and that Thomas Edison spoke the Lordly words of Genesis: "Let there be light. " These spectacularly wrong answers involve America's most dominant religion, Christianity. Those who could not name the four gospels or the Ten Commandments would certainly do no better with the Five Pillars of Islam. Can America be a nation of believers if a majority of Americans do not really know what they supposedly believe? In a war-torn world of paranoia and religious fanaticism, citizens need to be well-informed about distinctions that motivate fanatics who may threaten security. This could be simplified by the ignorant to a simple formula, such as "Know your enemy, Islam," but Islam itself, a religion historically known for its tolerance, is not the problem. Ignorance is the problem. Key concepts of more than passing relevance to the wars in the Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan notably, so far) are defined in Prothero's eighty-page "Dictionary of Religious Literacy": "Sunni Islam," for example, is the majority branch in the Moslem world, except in Iraq and Iran, where "Shiite Islam" is the majority (at issue here is an ancient schism that developed after the death of the Prophet); the current conflict was influenced by "Wahhabism," a faction of ultraconservative Sunnis, and by the "Taliban," Islamic militants disguised as "students" of religion and the radical core of Al-Qaida, blamed for the attacks of 9/11 and driven by force out of Afghanistan by our avenging army. …