Stephen Prothero is Professor of Religion at Boston University and author of the 2007 book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t. The central message of that helpful book is that despite being a very religious people, most Americans are woefully ignorant of the content of the particular religion(s) they embrace.
As one who has opined here before about how important it is for faithful churches to understand that we live in a post-Christian culture, perhaps I should not be so astonished to learn that only half of the population can name even one of the four gospels. Also, the givenness of religious pluralism in 21st century North American life is simply a reality that mature, discerning Christians must learn to accept. But a distinctive feature of today’s religious pluralism is that many people pick and choose various bits of one religion or another for personal spiritual consumption without truly understanding what beliefs they are embracing or what they may be jettisoning from their earlier religious identity.
These are the realities that Prothero engages in his scholarly work, and in a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal he laments not only rampant religious illiteracy but the cultural loss caused by growing detachment from clearly defined religious faith traditions. Citing new data from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Prothero writes
… the truths of one religion often clash with those of others, or contradict each other outright. Even Protestantism has carried inside its various denominations strikingly different visions of the good life, both here and in the hereafter. Absent a chain of memory that ties us to these religions' ancient truths, these visions are lost, and we are left to our own devices, searching for God with as much confusion as we search, in love, for the next new thing. (WSJ, Dec. 11, 2009 issue)