Elissa Lerner: If you’re reading this you a) are likely aware of Laurie Goodstein’s hot-button column yesterday digesting the Pew Forum’s recent survey about America’s religious ignorance and b) probably scored abnormally highly on the 6-question pop quiz. (Overachievers, here is the Pew’s 15-question quiz.) Congratulations! As frightening (and unsurprising) as these findings may be, there are some other issues to address here. Are we really still referring to “Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism” as “world religions” and neatly separating them from Christianity? Could Pew really not find enough statistical significance of Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist American responses to this survey? After all, there are somewhere between 5-7 million Muslims in the US these days, which is certainly as large as the Jewish population, if not larger. The upshot? If you’re dissatisfied with this poll, Pew likes to come out with something groundbreaking about religion every so often (see 2007 Pew Report), so just sit tight. Or, check out Stephen Prothero’s book Religious Literacy and its quiz. He’s been on top of how religiously ignorant Americans are since at least 2006.
