History's Effect on Religion in Contemporary America -- Some odds and ends:
With roughly 9 in 10 of its citizens claiming to believe in God or a Supreme Being, America is widely acknowledged to be the most religious of modern industrial nations. Yet when it comes to knowledge about religion, it ranks among the most ill-informed. While close to two thirds of all Americans regard the Bible as a source of answers to life's questions, only half can name even one of the New Testament Gospels. Similarly, in a land of growing religious diversity, only 10 percent of U.S. teenagers can name the world's five major religions. Stephen Prothero, the head of the department of religion at Boston University, calls this condition a "major civic problem." His new book, Religious Literacy, tells how we got here--and how we might do better.
You point out the fascinating irony that the "United States became a nation of forgetters at the same time it became a nation of evangelicals." Could you explain?
Evangelicalism became the dominant religious impulse in the early 19th century, replacing Puritanism. Puritans understood God through a combination of the head and the heart. They were keen on religious learning and reason. Evangelicals were not. In fact, they were suspicious of the mind. Focusing on experience and emotion, they slowly turned Americans away from religious learning, which increasingly was seen as secondary and maybe even dangerous.
How did many Americans go from describing their civic religion as Christian to calling it Judeo-Christian?
The shift came after World War II in response, first, to the Holocaust and the Nazis' uses of Christianity to advance their anti-Semitic program and, second, to the postwar threat of Communism. In order to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic fascists and to fight "godless" Communism, American Christians made common cause with Jews ... and tried to mute their differences. Gradually the distinctive features of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism tended to fall away as we thought of ourselves as Judeo-Christians.
What accounts for the shocking neglect of religion in most U.S. and world history textbooks?
Fear of controversy--even allergy to controversy--is one big factor. Publishers are determined to make textbooks as unobjectionable as possible so they can be sold in every school district in the country. Another factor is that one of the pockets of secularity in the middle of this very religious country is [the] publishing [industry] and the media more broadly. A lot of the authors and publishers of these textbooks are secular, and they imagine that everybody else must be also. Finally, until recently, a lot of intellectuals thought religion was going away as societies became more modern, and that just hasn't happened. A lot of historians and sociologists have been scrambling in the last few years to make sense of a world in which religion matters. I think they're finally getting the message. |
