Why are Religious Americans More Ignorant of Religion than Atheists/Agnostics?
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Food for Thought
Jamelle BouieAtheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.
Ilya SominLet me speculate a bit. To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.
In some ways, ignorance about religion may be rational, just like the equally widespread political ignorance. For most voters, it is rational to be ignorant about politics because most people aren’t much interested in politics, political knowledge is rarely useful for everyday life, and the chance of any individual vote determining the outcome of an election is infinitesmal. Of course, individually rational decisions not to spend much time acquiring political knowledge may lead to bad collective outcomes, such as poor electoral decisions and terrible public policies.
In the case of religion, theological knowledge has little utility for everyday life, most people have only limited interest in religious doctrine, and any one individual’s ignorance about religion probably has very little effect on society. Thus, it’s possible that most people are ignorant about religion for much the same reason that they are ignorant about politics.