“Religious Literacy” and the Importance of Education

I recently finished reading “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t” by Stephen Prothero. The book was primarily about the downfall of religious education in the United States, mostly over the past century and especially among self-proclaimed evangelical Christians. In it, he states that religion has become more about “feeling” and that the basic knowledge of doctrine that leads to civil debate among the different religions has been de-emphasized. The beginning of the book lays out his argument for why the nation needs basic religious literacy, the middle traces the downfall of religious literacy over the past four centuries, and the book closes with a basic dictionary of religious terms that everyone should know. I went into the book expecting to bolster my basic religious literacy, but, alas, that was not really the focus of the book — only a bit at the end. For that, I will have to wait until “God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter” becomes available at the library.

However, Stephen Prothero made two points within the first ten pages that I thought enlightening — specifically about religious literacy but I think they are relevant to literacy in general — so I wanted to repeat them here. On page 4, he writes

In my world religions classes I told my students that before we could discuss in any detail the great religious traditions of the world, we would need to have some shared vocabulary in each, some basic religious literacy. In this way, I became, like [E. D.] Hirsch, a traditionalist about content, not because I had come to see facts as the end of education but because I had come to see them as necessary means to understanding.

This comment aligns with the books I have been reading by Susan Wise Bauer (“The Well-Trained Mind” and “The Well-Educated Mind”) about Classical Education. The classical education movement splits education into three phases called the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In each of the three stages, one studies the same types of topics, but at different levels. In the grammar level, the student is gaining basic facts — a shared vocabulary that the student can use when she learns how to reason during the logic stage and debate during the rhetoric stage. Following the trivium, you must strictly move from one stage to the next in order and, without that basic foundation, you cannot reason and debate intelligently on topics. While Prothero aimed his comment toward religious literacy, it holds for education in general.

On page 10, he writes

[Religious] ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).

Once again, Prothero is talking about religious ignorance but I believe that the quote holds for ignorance in general. Recently, I listened to an episode of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense called “To Dum Two Vowt”. In this episode, Carlin made explored what would happen if the United States was too require literacy tests for voting — he was not seriously suggesting it, just exploring it from a hypothetical standpoint. Carlin makes the same type of arguments as Prothero. Basically, he says that an ignorant electorate is a dangerous electorate, although he ultimately comes to the conclusion that requiring a basic literacy exam is too reminiscent of Jim Crow laws to be workable.

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