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The Religiously Illiterate Faithful
13 January 2005Professor Steve Prothero, author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, finds the rub about those godless Europeans: they may be four times less inclined to believe in miracles, biblical inerrancy and hell, they know more about religion than Americans by a long-shot. Europeans study religion from elementary school on, but Americans have grown increasingly religiously illiterate since the late 1800s, when people of all classes could follow the biblical references being made on both sides of the slavery debate. But sounding foolish isn't the worst outcome, Prothero writes: "Such ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads." And who's to blame? The churches and synagogues themselves, which have traded religious instruction for reality religion stories "'ripped from the headlines,'" but mostly schools that have removed all study of comparative religion due to misunderstandings about the religion clauses of the Constitution. "Though the ACLU may rage," Prothero writes, "it is not un-American to bring religious reasoning into our public debates...What is un-American is to give those debates over to televangelists of either the secular or the religious variety, to absent ourselves from the discussion by ignorance."
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