America, Religion, the Donkey, and the LA Times

Mad props to NewDonkey.com for this fascinating post, “The Real Secularists,” which in turn feasts off this op-ed piece from yesterday’s LA Times: “A Nation of Faith and Religious Illiterates.” In short, it highlights the fundamental problem with the recent merger of evangelical zealotry and the machinations of the state: few Americans know enough about their own religion, much less others, to make intelligent political decisions based upon faith and faith alone.

Because additional commentary of my own would only add clutter to the discussion, I will simply extract some of the more significant statements from each:

From the original Times article:

Although Americans are far more religious than Europeans, they know far less about religion.
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In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can't be bothered to read what he has to say.
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When Americans debated slavery, almost exclusively on the basis of the Bible, people of all races and classes could follow the debate…Today it is a rare American who can engage with any sophistication in biblically inflected arguments about gay marriage, abortion or stem cell research.
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Since 9/11, President Bush has been telling us that "Islam is a religion of peace," while evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy's son) has insisted otherwise. Who is right? Americans have no way to tell because they know virtually nothing about Islam. Such ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads.
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A few days after 9/11, a turbaned Indian American man was shot and killed in Arizona by a bigot who believed the man's dress marked him as a Muslim. But what killed Balbir Singh Sodhi (who was not a Muslim but a Sikh) was not so much bigotry as ignorance. The moral of his story is not just that we need more tolerance. It is that Americans — of both the religious and the secular variety — need to understand religion. Resolving in 2005 to read for yourself either the Bible or the Koran (or both) might not be a bad place to start.

Additional commentary from the donkey:

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This indifference to history and doctrine definitely extends to Protestants. How many Southern Baptists know that their Convention endorsed liberalized abortion laws prior to Roe v. Wade? Or even that an ACLU-style absolutism about separation of church and state was long the most distinctive trait of their community, dating back to Roger Williams and to the early English Separatists? How many contemporary Presbyterians know that John Knox opposed the celebration of Christmas? And how many American Congregationalists really understand that the same tradition that made their community so notably progressive on issues like slavery and civil rights also made them for many decades the very fountainhead of nativist and anti-labor sentiment?
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This is not an accident, and is not the fault of the religious rank-and-file, who are not historians or theologians, and have complicated lives to lead. But the rampant secularization of much of the American faith tradition in the not-so-sacred cause of cultural and political conservatism must be laid at the parsonage door of those religious leaders who have abused the prophetic function of their ministry to acquire a "seat at the table" of secular power.
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In particular, Christian Right leaders in every denomination who abet and exploit the doctrinal and historical indifference of The Faithful to promote an agenda of intolerance and self-righteousness are the true Secularists of contemporary American society, and far more dangerous to the integrity of our faith communities than all the honest unbelievers in our midst or in Europe or Asia.

If you have time, read the whole article (it’s not long) and the NewDonkey’s entire post. I suppose this phenomenon of willful ignorance is one of the reasons I am drawn to writing about this topic. Makes me proud to be a member of the reality-based community.

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