It would be interesting see the actual study questions and the demographics of the respondents.
Is the data out there somewhere?
It makes perfect sense, at least to me, that atheists / agnostics would have more general knowledge about a wide variety of religions than member of a specific religious group.
I wouldn’t expect most Catholics, for example, to have familiarity with anything beyond Catholic beliefs. i.e. I would have had no idea what a “Calvinist” believed for example until I was in my 30s, much less what various other world religions teach.
So if you asked me a list of 30 question and only 10 of them pertained to the Catholic faith, I would have gotten probably no more than 15 or so correct.
It seems more likely to me that an atheist would have investigated a wider body of religions before rejecting them.
Then again maybe I’m giving the average atheist too much credit?
Chuck
There are a lot of variables. . .age could be one. I’m over 50 --and I scored 100% on the test (the 32-question one). And I’m a 100% faithful-to-the-Magesterium cradle Catholic.
But --what other factors could have affected my score?
In addition to age there’s socio-economic group.
How about family and friends? If you have a large group of one or both, you’re likely to know more people with different faith beliefs.
Location? You are more likely to have some exposure to ‘diversity’ in larger cities, the U.S. coast areas, college towns, etc. than in some rural areas or very ethnically homogenous groups.
“Internet” and/or library savvy? If you read a lot, you’ll probably have a broader knowledge base.
Participation in your own faith tradition?
As a subset to the ‘family and friends’, if you’re from a less traditional Catholic group (Vietnamese Catholics, African Catholics, East European Catholics, etc.) you’ll probably have more knowledge of the ‘dominant’ faith in your area as well as knowledge of Catholicism.
I imagine it would work the same with say atheists.
Aren’t a fairly large number of atheists and agnostics ‘former’ Christians? Even if they slept through their Christian formation, they probably still show up at mom and dad’s and thus get some basic Christian traditions ‘reinforced.’
Here’s another possibility too.
Suppose you’re a college student and you’ve just gone through comparative religions, you’re friends with everybody from Muslims to Wiccans, and (as part of your college experience) **you talk about it. All the time. Preferably (in my day) over pizza and Coke. **
You’ve had lots of the basics ‘reinforced’ on a daily basis so this is very familiar to you.
Now fast forward 10-15 years. You’re long out of college, you’re married, have young children, live in a small town, and work. Hard. You probably still remember ‘some’ of your college diversity but you might have to think a little longer or harder to remember and some of the memories might have blurred so you’re no longer sure whether a given practice is from Hinduism, Buddhism or Shinto, say.
You’d have aced the test at 22 but might not do so well at 42.
OR : the other scenario. Say you DIDN’T go to college, and at 22 YOU lived in white bread small town ville and were a card-carrying member of the "If you’re not like us I don’t wanna know you’ crowd.
At 22, you’d fail that test.
But suppose you go out ‘on the road’, you realize 5, 10, 15 years later that you need an education to get ahead. So you go back to school in your 30s, 40s, or even later.
And you learn. So while you’d have failed at 22, years later you’d score extremely well.
We don’t know where the people who took this test fell.
And that’s just ‘one’ facet of many that could influence the results.
