Religious education in the USA

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Having read another thread, I visited the Pew Research Center website to read the report What Americans Know About Religion.

www.pewforum.org

What Americans Know About Religion

Before you read the reportTest your religious knowledge by taking an interactive quiz. The short quiz includes some questions recently asked in the
www.pewforum.org www.pewforum.org

I also tried this quiz:

www.pewresearch.org

U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz

How much do you know about religion? And how do you compare with the average American? Here’s your chance to find out.
www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org

It asks 15 questions. I scored 15 out of 15. The questions are very basic! The thing that got me thinking was that after I’d completed the quiz it told me that I scored more than twice as highly as the average American. It’s only 15 questions, but the quiz will have been designed very carefully. What it made me wonder was how much religious education, and what kind of religious education, most Americans receive at school.

I went to school in the UK, and I think I can say that all the areas covered in the Pew quiz are covered in compulsory religious education in UK schools following the national curriculum. Some of it will be duplicated in history too. Religious education covers Christianity (mainly Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Protestant nonconformism), Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, humanism, and prehistoric and pagan religions.

Some teaching is methodological, introducing different approaches to the study of religion (history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc.) and some focuses on acquiring an understanding, however basic, of world religions. At an introductory level a thematic and comparative approach is often used. E.g., a topic of rites of passage would cover ceremonies marking birth, puberty, marriage, and death in six major world religions as well as non-religious alternatives and perhaps examples drawn from other sources, e.g. traditional African religions. A topic of places of worship would often involve visiting a church, synagogue, mosque, gurdwara, and Hindu and Buddhist temples. The main festivals in different religions would be another commonly covered topic. At a more advanced level, ethics and philosophy of religion are probably the most popular options, while others typically include the study of religions, more detailed study of one or more world religions, and the New Testament. When I was at school it was possible to take a module on mysticism, particularly focusing on the work of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, leading to a study of Freud’s papers on religion.

Something that struck me in the Pew report was that they noted that people who had taken a class in world religions typically scored higher. This interested me because in the UK everybody who has followed the national curriculum will probably have studied world religions for the best part of 11 years in compulsory religious education courses. The wording of the report seemed to suggest that in the USA the study of world religions was something unusual. Then it occurred to me that on these forums I read a lot about catechesis but never anything about the teaching of religious studies purely as an academic discipline.

It would certainly be interesting to hear other people’s experiences, especially as so many people on here are Americans.
 
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This Yank scored 15 of 15.
Londoner said:
Then it occurred to me that on these forums I read a lot about catechesis but never anything about the teaching of religious studies purely as an academic discipline.
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It is not taught, as a matter of routine, in public schools, which most Americans attend.
 
I got 15/15 too. Wasn’t even hard and there was only one question I even had to think about (the four noble truths of Buddhism; it’s been a long time, probably 30 years, since I thought about Buddhism). Also I guarantee I would not have gotten the Sikh question except that I went to college with a Sikh guy.

We don’t have “compulsory religious education” in the public school, and thank God for that, heaven knows what they would mess up/ get wrong/ force kids to learn. I know a lot of parents, including my own and including a lot of non-Catholic parents, would not want their kids visiting other faiths’ places of worship while still minors, and would be very concerned that the school was presenting all the different religions as if one were just as good as another. I could also see a lot of complaints happening from members of one or another religion or no religion that their particular faith was not adequately covered or represented, and complaints from atheists that their kids would have to learn about religions at all.

If somebody in USA learns about world religions, it’s usually because either (a) they are interested in the subject and read up or do research on their own, or (b) they have attended school in some multi-cultural area such as a large diverse city or a college with a national/ international student body. Many areas of US are pretty religiously homogenous.

I can see the UK having more interest in world religions since the UK used to have a worldwide empire and now has all kinds of immigration from countries with very diverse religions, all living in close proximity on a densely populated island. In USA we care a lot less about learning about “world” anything as a country. Those who are interested in learning about global cultures are free to pursue that interest, but there’s a whole lot of people who couldn’t care less and who might not ever meet a Muslim or a Sikh or a Buddhist or even a Jewish person.

I did notice that the factor for that test that seemed to produce the highest number of correct answers was whether the person responding had a college education. Makes sense, since those who attend college probably will be exposed to a wider range of people with a wider range of religious beliefs and also probably have more curiosity about the practices of other people in general.
 
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15 for me, too. Like @Tis_Bearself, I had to stop and think carefully about the Buddhism question, but that was the only one. The Sikh miniature sword or dagger, so they say, is (symbolically) to fight back against encroaching Islam.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
I can see the UK having more interest in world religions since the UK used to have a worldwide empire and now has all kinds of immigration from countries with very diverse religions, all living in close proximity on a densely populated island. In USA we care a lot less about learning about “world” anything as a country.
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Big country, small country. The old “World-Wide” column on the front page of the Wall Street Journal used to carry news items from remote places at the ends of the earth, such as San Diego, Calif., or Peoria, Ill.
 
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I scored 15/15. It helps one my closest friends in Muslim, I used to be a Buddhist, and my high school in Freshman year had a lot of Sikhs.
 
15/15 and I’m old (almost 63). Mom, who will be 90, got 15/15 as well.
 
Got 15/15, though I did guess on the Kabbalah one. I also had to stop and think about the Muslim pilgrimage one.

As for how much my K-12 education (mostly Protestant) helped:
  • The Christian ones I got through education and other related sources (e.g. church and family).
  • The one about the Jewish Sabbath I got largely because of my upbringing.
  • The one about the Muslim pilgrimage was taught wrong when I was growing up.
  • The questions about Kabbalah, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism were never touched on in school.
  • I’m pretty sure I learned about Ramadan outside of school.
 
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15/15…not too shabby for a former lifelong atheist. Growing up in NY and then going into the Army exposed me to a lot of different people…throw in a love of reading, and well, you pick this stuff up.
 
Lots of great posts here! Perhaps it’s not surprising that people who frequent a religious website know roughly twice as much as the average American does about religion.

@Tis_Bearself, that’s very informative and an interesting analysis. It’s interesting that two countries that have a lot in common should be so culturally different on this issue. I think the difference is that the way we learn about religion is no different to the way we learn about history, geography, or chemistry. It’s not even quite the case that every religion is presented as being as good as every other religion. It’s more that religion is studied empirically. At a basic level this would mean asking questions such as, ‘What do cave paintings tell us about the religious worldview of Stone Age humans?’, ‘Why is Uluru sacred to Aboriginal Australians?’, ‘What does Passover commemorate and how do Jews celebrate it?’, and, ‘What kinds of buildings do Christians worship in?’

One of my modules that I particularly remember from GCSE religious studies was ‘Christian Perspectives on Contemporary Issues’. This looked at different Christian perspectives on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, divorce, capital punishment, and gambling. For each topic we’d typically begin with some relevant Bible references and look at how different scholars had used them to argue for different points of view. Then there would be a selection of documents from different Christian denominations (with the Catholic Church and the Church of England typically heavily represented) and extracts from texts by important Christian writers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Similar modules taught at A-level took a similar approach, but also introduced more complex ways of considering problems, such as Kant’s categorical imperative, situational ethics, and different formulations of utilitarianism. Similarly, modules on the New Testament would focus not on the New Testament as a source for religious dogma, but on more abstract topics such as the context of Second Temple Judaism, the synoptic problem, and historical-critical methodologies such as source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism.

So I suppose it requires a willingness to regard religion as simply another area of intellectual enquiry while making no claims for the objective truth of any one system of beliefs.
 
Interesting that you mention the army. It ties in with what @Tis_Bearself says about the legacy of the British Empire. I’m sure that my grandfather, who was at most notionally Anglican, would have been entirely unsurprised to find British state schools teaching world religions, as he spent quite a few years in India with the army (which was fairly common for British people of his generation). It’s funny to think that for somebody like my grandfather Calcutta must have seemed considerably less exotic than Calais.
 
I’m a Yank. But I did have something comparable to a “world religions” education in high school. New York is an extremely diverse area so it’s good to get at least a quick run down on what people believe around you.
 
Quite by coincidence I was listening to the well known British Catholic broadcaster James O’Brien the other day talking about religion and education. He was himself educated at Ampleforth, which as you may know is by far the best Catholic school in the UK (and at the equivalent of around US$45,000 per year it had better be). He said that when he was at school they studied all the world religions, but there was an underlying presumption that Catholicism was the one true faith. O’Brien himself remains a Catholic and often talks about the importance of his faith and how much he values his Catholic upbringing and education.

I think it’s just a very different culture. Here there is an expectation that every child can study world religions in the same way that there is an expectation that every child can study Shakespeare or trigonometry. It’s just considered normal that we want to learn about the beliefs and practices of other peoples. As you say, probably very much rooted in our history. It may also be more generally a European thing. Germans always seem to be very well represented among scholars of Indian religions.
 
14 out of 15

Missed the one about Buddhism’s four “noble truths”

The rest were easy.

It’s actually very scary to look at the % of the General public - esp when it comes to the Christian questions.
 
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Just as an FYI, many atheists are in favor of a secular religious education as the Brits do it. It makes more atheists.
 
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