Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Stephen Prothero . May 18, 2007

Read more of Bob Abernethy's May 1, 2007 interview with Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero, author of RELIGIOUS LITERACY: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW -- AND DOESN'T (Harper San Francisco, 2007):

Q: Let's begin a definition of exactly what the problem is.

A: The problem is that America is probably the most religious country in the world -- or one of them -- and Americans just don't know much about religion, their own religions or the religions of other people. They certainly don't know anything about the great religions of the world like Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism. And it is a personal issue for people who are Christians or Jews or Muslims who want to feel like they're good Christians or Jews or Muslims and who might think, "I need to know something more to be good at my faith." But the book really focuses on the civic side of the problem, which is that if we don't know enough about the Bible, we can't follow the biblical arguments that politicians are making. Or if we don't know about Sunnis and Shiites, we can't make sense of what's going on in Iraq. There's just a huge gap between what we affirm as believers, and then what we know as citizens. That's the basic idea.

Q: What would be some examples of religious illiteracy?

Photo of Prothero

A: I give a quiz every year to my students, and I'll ask them very, very basic questions, like name the four gospels or what's the first book of the Bible? And my students don't do well on that quiz. There's broader national data on this. For example, most Americans can't name the first book of the Bible as Genesis. Most Americans can name only one of the four gospels. They'll say Mark, they'll say Matthew, they'll say Luke, they'll say John, but they won't say them all together. They are confused about Bible stories. They're confused about Noah. Was that the guy with the ark, or was that the guy with the binding of Isaac, or was that the guy parting the Red Sea? They're not really sure how these Bible characters match up with Bible stories. You can ask Americans who was Noah's wife, and ten percent will tell you, "Well, it was Joan of Arc." So, very basic information -- I'm not talking about knowing who the 23rd pope is, or some arcane history. I'm talking about following basic stuff. When the president talks about the Good Samaritan story, do we understand what that story is?

Q: So what? I mean, why is it such a problem? I can understand if you want to be educated you need to know the biblical references and things like that. But as a matter of practical, everyday life, so what that we don't know all those things?

A: The "so what" is a big question, and it matters a lot. I talk to people about this, and they will say to me, once the topic of religion comes up, "You know what? When I get in a conversation with my friends and religion comes up, I just shut down, because I have faith but I know that I don't really know what's going on with my own tradition." Or, "I don't know what's going on when it comes to, say, an argument about gay marriage and somebody says, "Oh, the Bible says gay marriage is wrong, or the Bible says, you know, Roe v. Wade is a good thing or a bad thing. I feel like I need to check out, because I don't have enough information." So for me, it's the knowledge is power thing. You need to know enough about religion, particularly in the United States about Christianity and the Bible, in order to be able to engage in the political process. This is about participatory democracy. Since especially the 2004 election, Democrats have discovered religion. Now it's not just the Republicans who invoke Jesus and invoke the Bible and talk about Christian theories. It's the Democrats, too, and if you want to follow that, if you want to be part of the conversation, you need to know something about religion.

Q: But there's a downside. There's a danger too of not knowing, isn't there?

A: What do you mean -- the danger of not knowing?

Q: Well, religion is a very powerful force, and if people get it wrong they can do a lot of damage.

A: That's exactly my point. Religion is a really, really powerful force. If religion didn't matter in the world, if the secularization theory people were right and religion is just going away and people are stopping to believe in God and religion isn't motivating them to do anything, then of course you don't need to know anything about religion. But religion's the most powerful force in the world, in world history and in contemporary life. It's the most powerful force for evil, and it's the most powerful force for good. And we are, in America, pretending in some ways as if it doesn't matter. In our private lives, we're saying it matters: "I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to synagogue." Americans are overwhelmingly religious. But in our public lives we don't really know anything about it. There's a real, real disconnect. Look at this situation in Iraq. There are a lot of complaints about how we went in there because we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. Another reason we went in there is because we didn't know what the heck was going on religiously. We didn't know enough about Sunnis and Shiites. We didn't know enough about Islam. We didn't know enough about the distinctive Islamic features of Iraq or of Afghanistan. On that issue, it's a matter of life and death. Are we going to rumble into Kashmir next, because we're imagining that religion doesn't matter there? That we don't have Hindus going at Muslims over Kashmir? That, to me, is the issue.

Q: And here at home there is a danger of extremists having their way, perhaps, if people don't know enough about what they're talking about?

A: Right. The big issue for me on the home front is now that religion is so much out in the public space we have people on tv all the time who are telling us what to think: Islam is a religion of peace; Islam is a religion of war; the Bible says such and so about gay marriage; the Bible says such and so about stem cell research. Often these people aren't talking the truth. Often these people don't know what they're talking about, but we as citizens, what are we supposed to do? Unless we can say, you know, "I read the Bible. I don't think the Bible is opposed to stem cell research" or "I read the Bible. I agree it is opposed to�," we can't engage in the conversation. We are more susceptible to demagoguery. We're more susceptible to deference. And in a democracy the citizens are supposed to be empowered. They're supposed to be empowered to engage things. I'm not talking about, you know, we should learn about religion so the right wing's going to win or we learn about religion so the left wing's going to win. That's not my point at all. It's whether you're on the right, whether you're on the left, whether you're a Republican, whether you're a Democrat you'll do better. You'll be more engaged as a citizen if you know about religion so you can engage the religious reasons people are bringing into the public space.

Q: So what do you propose as a remedy?

A: I propose as a remedy that we learn something about religion, each of us individually. I propose that we should read the Gospel of Matthew, and we should read the Koran, and we should know something about Christianity, and we should know something about Islam. But more specifically, in terms of public policy, I think we need courses about religion in the public schools. I think that we need to stop ignoring religion. The public schools have a history, since the '60s, of treating religion like it's the third rail, of trying to run around religion, teaching around it instead of teaching about it. I think that should stop. I think we need to teach about religion in the public schools.

Q: Required courses?

A: I think the courses should be required. I think it's a scandal that you can get out of high school, and you can get a diploma that says you're somehow an educated person, and you've never heard of Islam. You don't know that there's a religion called Islam. I think that's scandalous. I think it's scandalous that you can get out and not know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Forgetting for a minute about world history and international affairs, how can you make sense of American literature without knowing something about the Bible? How can you make sense of American political speechmaking, of Bill Clinton's speeches, or Martin Luther King's speeches, or Abraham Lincoln's speeches? You can't make sense of them without knowing about the Bible.

Q: To many people, I think, required courses in high school sounds like a violation of the separation between church and state, a violation of the Constitution. Why do you think it is constitutional?

A: The first thing to say about courses in public schools is that there's a distinction between preaching religion and teaching about religion. This is the most basic stumbling point for people who are in disagreement that you have to understand. There are two ways to talk about religion. You can talk about religion in a pious way, or even in an atheistic way, where it's a matter of the truth of the religion, and that's the way that most of us have come to talk about religion. That's the way you talk about it in a Sunday school. And there's another way of talking about religion, which is as a factual thing out there in the world, something that people do -- in a detached, nondevotional, we can even say secular way. There's a secular way to talk about religion. That's what I'm talking about, and that's the only thing that can be allowed in the public schools. You can't be telling kids, accept Jesus as your savior and lord or, you know, Mohammad is the last prophet. That's absolutely, totally unconstitutional. Talking about religion, teaching about religion is totally constitutional. There's no debate about this. If you look at the Supreme Court rulings, they've ruled repeatedly on the relationship between public education and religion, and repeatedly they say the same thing. They say you can't preach religion, but you can teach about it, and they don't just say you can teach about it as long as you do it academically. They say you should. It's really interesting to look at the Supreme Court cases, because they say you should. They say you can't understand American literature, Western music, American political history without knowing something about the Bible, and you can't understand the world without knowing something about religion. So the Supreme Court isn't just telling us don't teach about religion. They're saying you should teach about religion.

Q: But if you require in the high schools a course in the Bible, which is the holy book of Christians and Jews, isn't that favoring one religion over another, and doesn't the court say you can't do that?

A: No, the court doesn't. And, in fact, it explicitly takes up this question where it says teaching about the Bible is okay and talks about Bible in literature courses. It's totally fine to teach about the Bible. It's not fine to teach about the Bible and say this is the one true scripture in the world. You can't do that. This is partly why I think we should have two courses. We should have a course about the Bible, and we should have a course about the world's religions. If you only have a course about the Bible, there can be a sense that a reasonable person might say this school district is teaching about the Bible, but it's not teaching about the Koran, and therefore it's favoring the Bible. I think students should learn about both of them. But I do think there should be a Bible course, and the reason there should be a course dedicated to the Bible is because the Bible, for good or for ill, whether you love the Bible or hate the Bible, is a scripture of American politics. The Bible is the book that politicians draw from when they're making their speeches. And if you want to understand politicians, and we have to understand that if we're going to vote, if we're going to make our decisions, we have to understand what they're saying. When Hillary Clinton says this new immigration law is wrong because of the Good Samaritan story, because it's not being a Good Samaritan if somebody goes over the border and you feel that you have to turn them in to the police, and you're violating the Good Samaritan story, we should know what she's talking about. It's as basic as that. If you look at the Congressional Record, for example, and you look at the language that's used on the floor of the House and the Senate, the language from scripture they use is the Bible. Ninety-nine percent of the scripture language is the Bible, and that's what students need to know. They don't need to know the Zend-Avesta from the Zoroastrians, however wonderful that scripture may be. They need to know something about the Bible.

Q: Why lay it off on the public schools? Why not let families and houses of worship do that job?

A: Well, they're not doing a good job, are they? For one, if in theory families started teaching about Christianity, Islam, and other religions, and if houses of worships started doing that, religious literacy would go up. But it would only be of a particular sort. You would learn about Shiite Islam from your Shiite Muslim community. You would learn about Methodist Protestant Christianity from your Methodist church. That's not the religious literacy I'm talking about. We need something more robust than that. We don't simply need to know what it is to be a Methodist or to be a Shiite Muslim. We need to know something about Hinduism. We need to know something about Buddhism. That's not something families are going to do -- and they're not even doing a good job teaching about their own religions. They're doing a horrible job of that, too.

Q: Some people argue that if we don't teach about religion, if there are no courses about religion in the public schools, it sends a message, and the message is that religion is not very important.

A: Avoiding the topic of religion in public schools, which is done in a lot of public schools, sends the message that either religion doesn't matter or that religion really didn't happen. There will be a discussion of Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims and Indians -- it was New England and they're eating food. And then the hand goes up: What are they giving thanks for? Oh, they're giving thanks to the Indians. They're giving thanks to nature. No, they're giving thanks to God. Now, whether there's a God, who knows? Whether that's a good thing to give thanks to God, who knows? But if you're going to teach students about Thanksgiving, you know, you need to use the God word. That doesn't mean you believe God exists. It doesn't mean God's a good idea. It doesn't mean God doesn't say horrible things in the Bible, if maybe God does do that. It just means that is the way you understand Thanksgiving. [It is the] same with the civil rights movement. How are you going to understand that without talking about the black church? Without talking about the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible that Martin Luther King is drawing on? There's a sort of false consciousness going on in the schools, where there's a pretense, often, that you can make sense of things. You can make sense of a field trip to the museum where you are looking at Renaissance art. What are you supposed to think about this art? I mean, it is about Jesus, it is about the Old Testament. What are you supposed to say? You've got to tell me the story -- that's David and Bathsheba, that's David and Goliath, you know, that's Jesus on the cross. That doesn't mean you're trying to get them to accept Jesus as their savior. It means you're trying to get them to understand the tradition of Western art.

Q: Let me ask you some practical questions. How many teachers would have to be trained in order to teach about the Bible and world religions in the schools? How big is that job?

A: It's a big job, if we're going to take this seriously, and I'd say thousands of teachers need to be trained. I would also say we shouldn't have these courses unless we have trained teachers. I mean, this ought to go without saying. You shouldn't have people teaching math who don't know how to add two plus two. You shouldn't have people teaching about Islam who don't know something about Islam.

Q: I don't know how many school districts there are in this country, but I would bet you it would be more than a thousand teachers or thousands of teachers who would have to be trained. I would bet it would be a much larger number than that.

A: We'd obviously need to train a lot of teachers. There are teachers already teaching some of these courses. In about one out of every 12 school districts in the country, we have Bible as literature courses. This isn't a revolutionary thing I'm talking about. It's an incremental thing. People have figured out how to teach these courses. In many school districts they're teaching them well. They're figuring out how to do it. We do have schools of education that increasingly, happily, are teaching teachers-to-be about the world's religions instead of pretending you can teach world history without knowing anything about Islam. I hope we are beyond that point. We are at a point, especially since 9/11, where we finally as a society are realizing that religion matters, and we need to account for that in the public schools.

Q: There would be a cost to the taxpayers in every school district, wouldn't there be, to add this to the curriculum?

A: Yes and no. There are costs associated with training any teacher, and the question is, what are they going to be trained to do? I think some teaching needs to shift from other subjects over to religion. I'm not saying we should add to the school day and pay for another hour of heat and another bunch of teachers. You redirect resources into things that are most important.

Q: We also hear that students need to know more math, more science. There are demands for this all the time. What courses would you omit from the curriculum to make room for the Bible and world religions?

A: I think it's possible we could make room in math. I don't want to get into micromanaging what school districts should do. In the United States, we have locally controlled schools. I don't want to come up with a solution that's going to work everywhere. But we have 12 years of math in schools. We have zero years of religious studies. Is that a good distribution? How many of us use calculus in our jobs? I would guess you don't use calculus that much in your job. I know I don't use calculus in mine. Most business people I know don't use calculus. I'm not saying we should get rid of calculus. I took calculus. It was a great class. But there are things that we can get rid of. If you look at the history of American education, we didn't used to teach home economics. We didn't use to teach the so called practical things. We didn't used to teach vocational education. We used to teach Latin and Greek, and we decided at a certain point in American history that we didn't need to do Latin and Greek any more and that we needed to teach home economics. We needed to have sports. We needed to do music. This is a moment as a society that we need to be asking, do we want to continue to ignore religious studies? Do we want to continue to march in our troops, 150,000 of them, to a country whose religion we don't know, and be happy that our future presidents are going to know nothing about religion and make equally silly decisions? Is that what we want to do, or do we want to change the course? I think we need to change the course. I think we need to start teaching people about this most powerful constituent of culture.

Q: Would you let parents choose whether or not their children would go to one of these courses in the Bible or in world religions? Would you let them opt out?

A: I think we should have an opt-out provision, and part of why I think so is that hardly any people will do it. This is not a violation of our rights, to talk about another religion. I think there is a good argument for not having an opt-out provision. I think it would be constitutional to "force" people to learn about Hinduism and Buddhism. I don't think it is a violation of the rights of an evangelical student or an Orthodox Jew to be taught about Hinduism. I don't think it is. But that said, as a practical matter I think it makes more sense, it is easier to get these courses into schools, if you allow people to opt out. There was a study done in Modesto, California. They created a ninth-grade mandatory world religions course, and they found about two to three out of 3000 per year opt out. It was mandatory. Two to three students opted out. So very, very small numbers will choose to do that.

Q: It sounds like a terrific idea, but even with all the safeguards one can think of, can it really be done? I am thinking, for instance, about a very devout, sincere, evangelical Christian teaching in schools some place in a community that is just as evangelical, just as devout. I find it very difficult to think that person, despite all his or her other characteristics and training, could be as objective as I think you want that person to be.

A: Well, we have the same problem with science now, don't we? I mean, there is an argument that we should not have evangelical Christians teaching a science course because evolution is going to come up, and maybe they don't believe in evolution. If you look at polling data, most Americans don't believe in evolution, really, quite the way it is taught in public schools. Does that mean that those teachers are unqualified? Similarly, we have a problem with evangelicals teaching courses about literature, because in literature religion comes up all the time. So are we saying they are not capable of teaching literature, they are not capable of teaching science? No, and I don't see a difference between teaching about religion. I really don't. It requires the same sensibility, which is fairness. Can we trust people to be fair? Yes, I think we can.

Q: I am not talking about just an evangelical Christian. I am talking about a sincere mainline Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, anyone -- anyone who really believes in the "Truth," big T truth, of their religion. I find it difficult to think that person could do other than favor that religion when he or she was teaching it.

A: That is where I disagree with you. I think there will be people who do that, and the other group we should add to the list is atheists, because we should be skeptical about the ability of atheists to fairly talk about all sorts of issues that impinge on religious history or the religious interpretation of art or just the interpretation of art. My point is we do this all the time. Objectivity and taking away your bias is a hard human thing. We are all biased about all sorts of things. You can teach students about politics in the schools. Do we say if you are a right-wing Republican you are not allowed to teach political history because we don't trust you to be turning all the kids to Republicans? No. We say that you should try to bracket out your own personal biases, and I think that teachers can do that. Some teachers can't. Some teachers won't. There will be people who will be assigned to teach a Bible course, and they are good at teaching it as an atheist, and they are going to say this Bible is a pack of fables, and it is stupid, and if you believe in any of this stuff you are an idiot. Or it is going to be a fundamentalist Christian who says the Bible is the truth and at the end of this class I want you to accept Jesus as your savior and lord. In those circumstances we need to get rid of those teachers. We need to take them out of the classroom. We need to have a lawsuit. The ACLU needs to come in, and I will join them and I will say that is not appropriate. We have to have checks and balances, and I think we can do that. We can do that through parents, we can do that through administrators, and we can do that through the courts.

Q: We are all familiar with law suits in school districts for one reason or another. I suggest to you that if this were to go through, there would be law suit after law suit. There would be hundreds of them, thousands of them all over the country.

A: I totally disagree. I know why you think that, which is reasonable, but it is not true. The mind set there is the culture wars mind set. It is overestimating how much tension there is in America about religion. It is overestimating how strong the religious right is and how powerful the secular left is. I don't think either of those groups is that strong.

They publish a lot of books, and they get on tv. But most of us are in the middle. The overwhelming majority of Americans are in the middle on these questions. We already have Bible courses in one out of every 12 school districts, and they are not erupting with lawsuits. They are not erupting with evil-style religious warfare. They are doing this. They're getting along. They are doing okay. They are being pragmatists. They are being tolerant. They are being Americans. They are figuring out how to do it. I have faith in Americans to do this, and I don't think the culture wars are as powerful and strong as we imagine. There is some polling on this. We asked people, would you like to see this happen? Would you like the courses? The majority of Americans say yes. It is not as controversial as you think. It's controversial in the minds of people who have a certain thought about separation of church and state, maybe, or a certain thought about how powerful the culture wars are.

Q: Could it be that if all major religions were taught in the schools, and we all learn much more about them, we would become less tolerant?

A: I am not sure which way it goes, to be honest. Some people make the argument that you should teach about the world's religions because then we are all going to get along together. I am not so sure that is true. I am not so sure the opposite is true either. My approach is not to confuse religious studies with moral education. I think there is good reason to do character education. I think there are good reasons to try to create citizens who are moral. But I don't know if religious studies is the place to do that. I would want kids to learn about the Ten Commandments. I would want them to learn what they are. I am not sure the point is to say go out and follow the Ten Commandments because they're true and they've come from God. That can't be the point in public school. I suspect that learning about other religions will make us more tolerant, but I don't want that to be the reason we are doing it, nor should it be the focus of why we are doing it. The reason should be we need to understand world religions to make sense of the world, to make sense of the United States, and to talk to our neighbors.

Q: If I believe that the Bible is divinely given and that every word in it is true, and if the teacher of my child in a public school is saying here is what the Ten Commandments are but I am not telling you whether they are true or not, wouldn't that upset me, and wouldn't I want to change your job?

A: I don't know why it should upset you, because what the teacher should say is, well, what do students here think about the Ten Commandments? Johnny can raise his hand and say I am a born-again Christian, and I think they're all true. And the atheist can raise his hand and say this is a pack of lies. That's an interesting conversation to have. I am not afraid of that conversation. And you know what? Evangelicals are not afraid of that conversation, and neither are atheists. This is the really interesting thing to me about the proposal that I have put forward. Some of my strongest supporters are evangelicals and also atheists, because those are two groups that believe they are right about this stuff: If people can just start to examine religion, then they will come around to the truth. That isn't my position - that we are going to create a bunch of evangelicals [or] we are going to create a bunch of atheists. But it isn't just religious people who think this is a good idea or who think this is a problem.

Q: We were speaking about the political climate, the social climate in which these things are taught. It's my understanding that many, many public school teachers are very frightened about getting into the business of teaching religion primarily because they fear the reaction of people in the community. For one reason or another, one side or another doesn't like it.

A: I think there is some concern about public school teachers, and I think there are a few sources of it. One is a lack of information and understanding about the First Amendment. There's a sense that the Supreme Court said in the early '60s we should get religion out of the public schools. I think we need administrators in public schools and the teachers to say that's not what they said. You just have to read some of these cases. It's very clear that the Supreme Court is not chasing the study of religion out of the public schools. It's chasing the practice of religion out. That's one issue. Another is definitely fear of controversy. I think that the message there needs to be this is not so horribly controversial. This is a subject we can talk about. What we need to do is talk about it in an academic way, and that, to me, is the education process, this way to talk about religion that isn't Jerry Falwell screaming on tv at Sam Harris. It isn't the religious right yacking at the secular left. There's a way to talk about religion like we're talking about it now -- that there are great religions in the world that have influenced a lot of people. They have histories. They do good and bad things, and we ought to know what it is. Once that message is there, it's a lot easier to talk about teaching that.

Q: But a lot of teachers are just plain afraid of their jobs. If they get into religion, if that provokes a controversy, and the school board has to take action as a result...

A: There definitely has to be leadership from the school boards. The school boards need to say we're not going to put up with avoiding religion anymore. That's wrong for us to do. We're not educating our students. We want our teachers to teach about this subject. And, sure, if the school districts are saying, you know, avoid religion, then the teacher's going to be afraid. But if school districts are saying if you keep avoiding religion we're going to fire you because you can't talk about the civil rights movement in an honest and historical way without mentioning Christianity -- I think there needs to be a change in the way we think about these things.

Q: Give us a brief history of the teaching of religion in American public schools.

A: In the early national period in the United States, literacy about Christianity and the Bible grew up with basic literacy. In other words, you learned to read at the same time you learned about religion. They were totally intertwined. If you knew how to read and you knew how to write, then you knew basic stuff about the Bible. You knew the Sermon on the Mount. You knew the Ten Commandments. You read Genesis. You read Matthew. So there wasn't religious literacy of the kind I'm arguing for early on in America. Nobody knew anything about Islam. Nobody knew anything about Buddhism. The word Buddhism wasn't even around, and certainly nothing about Hinduism. But we did have religious literacy when it came to Protestant Christianity and the Bible. It was quite widespread across gender, across race, across economic group.

Q: And then what happened?

A: It goes away not in the '60s, when the Supreme Court starts messing around. There's that religious right story about when it goes away, that the secular people in the Supreme Court do it. No. It really starts in the 19th century, and oddly enough it starts with religious people. It starts because religious people can't agree on which Bible to teach in the public schools. The Catholics want the Catholic Bible. The evangelicals want the King James Version. And some secularists don't want any Bible. But it's really about religious people not being able to agree, and they finally agreed that we're not going to teach the Bible at all, and that happens in the middle of the 19th century. Then religious literacy just sort of fades away, and it becomes an old memory, and it becomes vestigial, and we don't really know what's going on. The process really begins in the middle of the 19th century, not in the middle of the 20th.

Q: But it faded away because of controversy and fear of more controversy.

A: That's right. It fades away because of controversy and fear of more controversy.

Q: So if you bring it back, then what do you have?

A: I'm not saying you won't have any controversy. Obviously you will, because people will make a stink about it. But the people who make a stink about it are very, very small groups. We can't be held hostage to either the secular left or the religious right on this question. Most of us are in the middle. Most of us want our kids to know something about religions. Most of us want our kids to make sense of what's going on in Iraq. I want to make sense of what's going on in Iraq, and I don't want our politicians to be able to just mouth off about "the Bible says" this or that. I think they should be held accountable. If they're going to use religion for political purposes, we should be able to hold them accountable, and we can't hold them accountable unless we know something about it. It's as simple as that.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your own personal experience, if you would, with these very same issues. You were raised what?

A: I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and I was pretty active in the Episcopal Church when I was young. I was on the vestry of my church when I was 16 years old, so I was able to see how a church operates. I learned, I think, a fair amount about the Bible and about Episcopal views of Christianity. And then I was a born-again Christian for a little while in college. That didn't last for very long. I found it hard to feel like I had to press my religion on my friends who were Jewish, who were atheists, who were Muslims, and so I sort of fell out of that. And then I fell into kind of a more general confusion about religion, which I think I share with a lot of people in the United States.

Q: But you learned a lot about religions. You learned so much about different religions that you now can teach about all these things.

A: What happened for me is that it was my religious upbringing that made me feel religious questions really mattered, and when my faith went away I found a way to hang in with those questions. For me, that was religious studies. I could get into a PhD program, and I could study American religious history, and I could ask all these great questions without the assumption that I knew all the answers, because I knew by then I didn't have the answers. What I love about both my research and my writing and my teaching is saying these are really, really great questions. There are great questions framed inside the Buddhism tradition, inside the Muslim tradition, inside the Christian tradition. It's a wonderful education to learn what those questions are and to learn the answers that are given inside each of these faiths.

Q: What happened to you was a gradual loss of faith. I don't know whether that had anything to do with learning more about religion, but I can imagine somebody who is a very faithful believer would say, "I don't want to have the same thing happen to my child."

A: It actually is the opposite of that for me. It wasn't that I learned so much about other religions that I lost my faith. It was that I lost my faith, and I was curious about these questions, and I wanted to find answers to them. I looked around not only in one tradition but in multiple traditions. It wasn't that all this knowledge caused me to lose my faith. It was that my loss of faith caused me to seek out knowledge. There's the study I referred to earlier in Modesto, California. One question they ask there is, are these ninth graders who are learning about world religions losing their faith? Are they shifting? And what they found is no shifting -- that people don't take religion classes and then go from being a Christian to being an atheist. They don't go from being a Methodist to being a Buddhist. They're able to take in this information as information about the world and about other people. It doesn't cause crises of faith all across these students.

Q: Do you think it blunts the emotional impact of religion, to become very knowledgeable about many religions?

A: I don't know. I can see it either way. I mean, I certainly know religious people who are Christian who have learned about Hinduism, and they see the way Hindi devotionalism works, which has a lot of parallels with both evangelical Christianity and devotional Catholicism. And they say, "Isn't it interesting how the image of the divine is treated in Hinduism? That's kind of like what I do," or "It's kind of different from what I do, and that makes me understand what I'm doing with Jesus better." These are other religions, but they're also other human beings, so another way to frame it is, does learning more about human beings destroy your faith, or does it deepen your faith? I think most people of faith are going to say my faith is strong enough to --. I mean, do Christians think their faith is so weak they can't read the Koran? After 9/11, this is a good example. After 9/11, people were buying the Koran like crazy. Were they buying the Koran because they were all running out and saying I want to be a Muslim? No, they understood this basic distinction I'm talking about, between learning about religion and preaching about religion. They were curious. And did reading about the Koran make them lose their faith, make them stop being evangelicals, make them stop being liberal Catholics, make them stop being Lutherans? I don't think so. I think it's a different thing.

Q: Lots of people claim that the more they learn about some other religion, the more they learn about their own, or the more aware they are of truths within their own.

A: I think learning about another religion does very much help you understand your own. Some people argue that all the religions are basically the same. You know, they're all different paths up the same mountain [to the] same top. I don't think that's true. I think if there's a mountain image, you know, all the religions are climbing different mountains, and they have different evaluations of the key human problem. In Christianity, it's sin. In Buddhism, it's suffering. In Hinduism, it's the fact that we're born over and over again -- life, death, and rebirth, the cycle of life. Because they attack different problems, they come up with different solutions. If you are a Jew, you learn that Christians are really interested in doctrine and you seem to be more interested in law and in doing what's right in the world, both morally and ritually. That makes you realize that's interesting, that to be a Jew is to care about the law. Having conversations about religions, not in terms of interfaith dialogue but in terms of what is the core problem, what's the core solution, who are the exemplars in a religion -- that can make you realize that your religion is distinctive, and it makes you realize what it is about your faith that makes it your faith.

Q: How do you achieve the understanding and respect necessary to have good relations with other religions, without in some way belittling your own religion?

A: We have a very strong commitment to respect and tolerance of other religions in the United States. But how can you tolerate another religion or respect another religion if you don't know anything about it? [It] doesn't make any sense to me. If I have Muslim neighbors and I meet them and say, "Nice to meet you, I tolerate you, I respect you, but I don't know anything about you," that's empty. That's an empty virtue. The only way you can really respect another person is to know something about them. The only way you can disagree with another person is to know something about them. If you want to say, "As a Christian, I disagree with Islam," that's all well and good. But you should know something about Islam to know how to disagree with it. And similarly, Muslims should know something about Christianity if they want to criticize Christianity. How do you do that? I don't see how you either criticize or belittle or tolerate or respect -- how you do any of that without some basic knowledge.

Q: Please go back and elaborate a little more on the history of religious literacy in the U.S.

A: One thing that happens in the middle of the 19th century, when revivalism takes hold and evangelicalism becomes the dominant religious form in the United States, is that we move from a kind of head-and-heart religion of Puritan colonialism, where it's really important to know what's going on in Christianity, to this heartfelt religion, where what really matters is experience, where the focus is really having a relationship with Jesus instead of knowing what Jesus has to say. In the early national period, the dominant form of American religion was Puritanism. One of the key ideas in Puritanism is that religion is about the heart, but it's also about the head -- that God speaks to our brains as well as to our emotions, and so we need to study the Bible. We need to understand the Bible, and we need to be literate in order to be able to study the Bible. There's this connection between basic literacy, which is very high in the New World compared to Europe, precisely because of the power of Puritan Protestant Christianity. Religious literacy is high, basic literacy is high, and there's a high value put on knowing things about Jesus, about God, about the Bible, and about Christianity.

What happened in the early 19th century, when revivalism takes hold and evangelicalism displaces Puritanism as the dominant religious form, is that religion starts to migrate from the head down into the heart. That synthesis between the head and the heart starts to go away, and we start to think about religion as experiential, something that happens to our emotions and increasingly what we care about is the relationship with Jesus, which we think about as the hallmark of born-again Christianity. It's more and more important to love him, to walk with him, than it is to know what he has to say. It's more important to have him in your heart than to know the Sermon on the Mount. And it's certainly more important to love Jesus than it is to know, say, the Ten Commandments. There's a real shift that happens from Puritanism to evangelicalism.

Another thing that happens in the early 19th century is the rise of the nondenominational associations that are going to attack slavery. They're going to attack the problem of drunkenness through the solution of temperance. They're going to agitate for women's rights. There are all these new kinds of voluntary associations, and in these voluntary associations the denominations want to help each other. They don't want to be fighting about who's a Lutheran and who's a Methodist. And so it becomes very functional to have a kind of cross-denominational tolerance, where there's a sort of a gentleman's and gentlewoman's agreement: We're not going to argue about theology. And so when these groups get together and they say let's have a tract society, let's have a Bible society, where we can put out the message, the message that they put out is nondenominational. It's sort of watered down. It's kind of like a basic Christianity that doesn't even really say much about Christianity. And so increasingly the way people start talking about religion is in moral terms. Religion is about moral values. This is how we get, by the way, the legacy in the late 20th, early 21st century [that] religion is about moral values. That's a construction of the mid-19th century. As increasingly you focus on "religion is about morality," you move away from religion as doctrine, religion as narrative, story-telling, and you start to forget the Bible stories. You start to forget the creeds, because they're not functional. They're not going to help you get rid of slavery, say. They're not going to help you join together in a volunteer association. There's a way in which tolerance across denominations really pushes religious literacy out of our minds. And the parallels happen in the 1950s to what happens in the 1850s. Increasingly we say we're Jews, we're Catholics, we're Protestants. We shouldn't be fighting about that. We should be fighting these atheistic Communists over there. They're the trouble. In the 19th century, some of the trouble was the Catholics. The Protestants had to band together and agree. Now it's the Judeo-Christian tradition, and as the Judeo-Christian tradition arises as an important feature in America, it becomes less and less important to know what's distinctive about a Jew, what's distinctive about a Protestant, what's distinctive about a Catholic. There are actually some interesting, good, moral reasons that have to do with tolerance for why we forget so much, for why religious literacy goes away.

Q: How would things be different if there were a revival of religious literacy?

A: If religious literacy really picks up in the United States, I do think things will be different. I'm not precisely sure how they will be different except to say that I think we will have a more enlightened public conversation about our politics, and I think frankly we will have a more civil conversation. One of the problems now is that because we know so little about Christianity, the Bible, and the world's religions we're dominated in our discussions by the rabid folks on one side or the other. The more Americans there are who can talk about religion, the more civil, I think, the conversation can be. One hope that I have for this book project is that it can raise the level of conversation. It can raise the sophistication of the way we talk about religion instead of just saying, is Islam a religion of peace or war? That was the conversation we had for two years after 9/11. But that's not a useful conversation. Or is the Bible opposed to gay marriage or not? That's a pretty blunt instrument in terms of a question, and I would hope we could be more sophisticated in the way we talk about things, if more Americans are more religiously literate.

Q: And if we became more sophisticated, then what would be the questions we would ask instead of the ones you said don't help?

A: I think we would be saying things like, what are the resources inside Islam that we can support as Americans so that Islam will be less dangerous in the world? What are the resources inside Christianity that are dangerous, that we should be pushing away from so the world can be safer? I think those would be the sorts of questions that would make more sense.

Q: What happened to the old animosity between Christians and Jews? Was it the Holocaust that took it away?

A: I think the animosity between Christians and Jews really goes away with a combination of the Holocaust and the rise of communism. There's a sort of push-pull there. Christians realize the Holocaust on one level really was something that Christians perpetrated against Jews, and we don't want that to happen anymore. And then the other was we Jews and Christians have common cause here with these atheistic communists who are trying to take over the world. That's when the Judeo-Christian tradition arises, and we're in an interesting moment now, where the Judeo-Christian tradition is giving rise to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, or the Abrahamic tradition, for very similar reasons. Now the danger is terrorism. The danger is not atheistic communism any more, and the sense is that we Abrahamic faiths have common cause here. We all believe in God. We all think God works in history. We all think there are scriptures that God has inspired. We all think we should pray to God. We all think there's a judgment at the end of time that keeps us somehow accountable. We think we should care about justice. That tradition is emergent, and what that's challenging is the more multi-religious America tradition, that this is a place of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, yes, but also a place of Hindus, of Buddhists and Muslims. I think that's one of the interesting questions going forward now, as we think about the religious character of America: Do we think about it in Judeo-Christian terms? Do we think about it in Judeo-Christian-Islamic terms? Or do we think about it in multi-religious terms?