Religious Literacy
Mar. 16th, 2009 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineReligious Literacy- Stephen Prothero
This was good- he presents an overwhelming amount of evidence of the bizarre and insane lack of the very most basic factual religious knowledge in America, combined with the incredibly high rate of religiosity. He takes a pretty good stab at explaining why religious literacy should be a civic and secular concern. Most interesting of all, though, is that he completely rejects the argument that it's all the fault of the Supreme Court of the 60s, and instead traces the history of non-denominational and inter-denominational movements since the Second Great Awakening early in the nineteenth century, coming to the really very persuasive conclusion that religious illiteracy in this country is mostly the fault of religious organizations attempting to strengthen their hold on American politics and policy without inter-denominational conflict. He just rips into the idiocies of "all the great religions are basically the same" and "we all worship the same god" and "it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe" and the ridiculousness of "religious equals values equals sex" in modern politics and so forth, and it's extremely satisfying.
Naturally, I don't really agree with his inherent assumptions about religion as a good thing on its own merits, or his conviction that a religiously-inflected public discourse would be an inherently good thing provided everybody knew what the hell they were talking about, but his history of the phenomenon is good.
The interview here says some interesting things, among them an observation of how the religiosity of America seems to actually lessen the more religiosity becomes seen as a political statement (that is, the more "being Christian" comes to equal "being republican" in the young generation's mind). Anyway. Most definetely worth a read.
This was good- he presents an overwhelming amount of evidence of the bizarre and insane lack of the very most basic factual religious knowledge in America, combined with the incredibly high rate of religiosity. He takes a pretty good stab at explaining why religious literacy should be a civic and secular concern. Most interesting of all, though, is that he completely rejects the argument that it's all the fault of the Supreme Court of the 60s, and instead traces the history of non-denominational and inter-denominational movements since the Second Great Awakening early in the nineteenth century, coming to the really very persuasive conclusion that religious illiteracy in this country is mostly the fault of religious organizations attempting to strengthen their hold on American politics and policy without inter-denominational conflict. He just rips into the idiocies of "all the great religions are basically the same" and "we all worship the same god" and "it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe" and the ridiculousness of "religious equals values equals sex" in modern politics and so forth, and it's extremely satisfying.
Naturally, I don't really agree with his inherent assumptions about religion as a good thing on its own merits, or his conviction that a religiously-inflected public discourse would be an inherently good thing provided everybody knew what the hell they were talking about, but his history of the phenomenon is good.
The interview here says some interesting things, among them an observation of how the religiosity of America seems to actually lessen the more religiosity becomes seen as a political statement (that is, the more "being Christian" comes to equal "being republican" in the young generation's mind). Anyway. Most definetely worth a read.