The Real Surprise in the Pew Forum Survey

Last updated on: October 1, 2010 at 10:03 am by Guest Contributor

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The Real Surprise in the Pew Forum Survey 2010-10-01T10:03:40+00:00 Guest Contributor

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By Robert Hunt

The surprise in the recent Pew Survey on U.S. Religious Knowledge isn’t how little people know about their own religion and the religions of others around them, but that they know anything at all. After all, you cannot know what you are not taught, and most American Christians (which is to say most Americans) have gone out of the business of teaching children about religion; whether in school, in church, or at home.

The banishment of religion from schools has a public history that need not be recounted here save to say that since the 1960’s only a school board or textbook publisher in a litigious mood was likely to put anything in a text or curriculum that dealt with the specific beliefs and rituals of any religion. But then why should this have been necessary? Children had parents and churches who could have provided that which was deemed inappropriate for a publicly financed education. But would they?

In the early 19th century Stephen Girard founded a school for orphans with part of his fortune. The will explicitly stated that no clergy person of any sort was to be allowed on campus, nor any religious teaching to be made available to the students. He desired to “keep the tender minds of the orphans . . . free from the excitement which clashing doctrines and sectarian controversy are so apt to produce.” Instead students were to learn “pure moral teaching” and then make their own religious decisions when they were mature. Two generations earlier Samuel Adams had objected to a prayer at the opening of the Continental Congress since any single prayer could only represent a single “sectarian” viewpoint, and multiple prayers would be contentious. This idea that specificity of belief, practice, or expression was sectarian and thus divisive came to eventually inhabit liberal Protestantism and seemed proved by the divisions of historical churches into multiple denominations. Requiring church members to learn and abide by specific beliefs was seen in many churches as sectarian, even cultish. Too often Sunday schools focused on cultivating overarching liberal values and vague sentimentality toward the Divine. Too many parents wanted their children to “make their own decisions” when they were mature; willingly denying their children the guidance that had been denied orphans a century and a half earlier by cruel fate. And that was a generation before our own. The offspring of those days have nothing to offer their children and attend churches still afraid to be labeled exclusive and sectarian because they teach specific beliefs and practices.

And where were the conservatives; the evangelicals who supposedly possessed and passed on rock-solid beliefs? They did a bit better than mainline protestants in the Pew survey, but far from well. And this isn’t surprising. True fundamentalists believed that salvation depended on correct belief, and it thus delineated and taught beliefs clearly. But there are few of those left in America. Modern evangelicals are more inclined to a religion of personal and affective faith rather than specific beliefs; and frequently those beliefs that are preached relate to social ethics rather than Christian doctrine. Amy Grant’s now old song “Fat Little Baby” tells the story well of the new generations of evangelicals: “He knelt at the altar, and that was the end, he’s saved and that’s all that matters to him.”

In closing I think about a recent conversation with a Hindu leader that summed things up nicely. She said “we believe there are many paths to God, but you must choose one. You only get lost if you try to follow them all.” If Americans cannot realize that real respect for diversity is based on knowing and expressing your own religion well as well as recognizing real differences with others we will end up, as the Eagles sang; “like sheep without a shepherd, we don’t know how to be alone, so we wander round this desert, and wind up following the wrong gods home.” Or someplace other than home.

Dr. Robert A Hunt is the Director of Global Theological Education at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Visit his Expert Page at Patheos here.

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