Newspapers are publishing The Year in Review. Because I was on the Camino, I missed the stories about the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey that came out in September.
45% of Catholics believe the Eucharist is merely symbolic, and not the real body and blood of Christ.
Of Catholics 40% could name the four Gospels; of Hispanic Catholics, only 15% could name them.
After Vatican II, factual catechesis and memorization disappeared from the Catholic Church and was replaced with a lot of felt banners, gushiness, and social action
Although Catholics win the booby prize for religious illiteracy, Protestants don’t do badly either.
45% of Protestants do not know that Martin Luther set the Reformation going and only 19% knew that Protestantism teaches salvation through faith alone (although I admit this is a tricky point, you would think that most Protestants would at least recognize it as distinctively Protestant).
We are not talking about technical definitions of the hypostatic union; we are talking about the religious equivalent of 2+2=4.
I would have liked to see questions about the Trinity – on second thought, I am glad they didn’t ask them, the results would have been too depressing. Nestorius and Arius probably have won their battles posthumously.
Mormons and Jews do better than Christians in general religious and atheists do best of all – know thy opponent seems to explain this result. Also, Catholics and Protestants seem to be surprisingly well informed about Mormonism – those Mormon missionaries are having an impact.
When I was at the University of Virginia all professors and graduate students had to teach the freshman writing course. All the instructors met to discuss approaches. We agreed the freshman couldn’t write, and the consensus was that they couldn’t write because they couldn’t read. They could read the words on the page but they had no clue to what allusions and cultural references meant. Students from Virginia – Virginia! – did not get the reference to Appomattox.
E. D. Hirsch, one of my professors, developed this writing discussion into a cottage industry to promote cultural literacy: What Every First Grader Needs to Know, What Every Second Grader Needs to Know etc.
In the 1980s my wife was on a charitable donations committee and was occasionally able to direct money to worthwhile causes. We had developed a simple test of Catholic literacy for our parish’s Sunday School program to give the teachers an idea of what the students knew. Again, this was not atomic physics. The multiple choice questions were things like: Who was the mother of Jesus? What do we celebrate on Easter? And so on.
We approached the education department of the Archdiocese of Baltimore to see whether they would like to develop a pilot program to test religious literacy among Catholic students, again to give teachers an idea of what students knew and needed to know. The archdiocese was NOT INTERESTED – even if money was offered to pay for the program.
Why does the baloney fear the grinder?
Explicit verbal instruction, although fitting for rational beings, is not the only way of conveying doctrines.
I also saw a poll some years ago that showed that more Catholics than Lutherans chose a Zwinglian, purely symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist. I doubt that Lutheran catechesis is any better than Catholic, but in the Lutheran churches I have been to there has been a far stronger sense of decorum and reverence in administering the sacrament. Too often in Catholic churches I have had to receive communion from a mini-skirted young woman while people are strolling up and down the aisles and chatting to one another. At least in the Lutheran services I have been too, the elements have been administered by ordained ministers to kneeling recipients.
Outward gestures can also to some extent teach doctrine, especially if the doctrine is embodied in propositions that no one has ever learned.
I don’t know what could change the situation. Catholic schools are vanishing, and religious instruction outside of them is almost nonexistent. So the Catholic Church in the U.S. has managed to do away with the best methods of transmitting its doctrines: religious schools and a liturgy that conveys a sense of sacred realities. The vernacular and wordiness of the new liturgy may have been intended to instruct in doctrine, but the new liturgy fails to do so because the atmosphere too often contradicts the words on the page. Lex orandi, lex credendi. Sloppiness and informality at the Eucharist = weak sense of the Real Presence.
(PS: Title of this blog refers to Right Ho, Jeeves, Chapter 19 and the Scripture knowledge award fiasco)
It’s not surprising that “atheists do best of all” on such tests, and “know thy opponent” isn’t the only reason. Many atheists, especially among the younger generation, are former Christians who were driven out of their churches because they refused to accept falsehood or heresy or irrational nonsense as a condition of remaining in communion. Often it is the most serious and the best informed who suffer this fate–and in my experience this is as true in “conservative” churches as it is in “liberal” ones.
When i was teaching catechism i use the old ‘Baltimore catechism’ cause the one provider by the Brooklyn diócesis was pure NON-SENSE.
I ‘force’ then to memorize and i gave them test, they like it. One of the mother who had two kids one of them with another teacher ask me to have the other in my class beacuse he was learning nothing about the faith.
I have always been under the impression that the Catholic hierarchy cares more about obedience than about knowledge, so it doesn’t surprise me that Catholics don’t know so much.
It does surprise me a little that Protestants are so ignorant. But perhaps the simplest explanation is the best — that this is simply an age of indifference about religious distinctions.
Re: the whole “do atheists know more about religion” thing, I blogged it here —
http://crowhill.net/blog/?p=8660
Yes, the hierarchy does care more about obedience than it does about knowledge. In fact, at least in my experience, the clergy really don’t want the laity to have any substantive knowledge at all, because knowledge is a threat to the clergy’s authority. If no one knows the scriptures, the clergy can interpret them any way they want. If no one knows canon law, the clergy can run the parish or the diocese any way they want. If no one knows the liturgical rules, the clergy can celebrate the sacraments any way they want. No matter what the issue, ignorant sheep are far more easily controlled than educated ones, and the clergy very much want to keep it that way. This is the one thing that left-wing clergy and right-wing clergy agree on; they may fight like cats and dogs on other issues, but they are almost all clericalists–and the few that aren’t clericalists are distrusted and marginalized by both sides, if not driven out altogether.
Sardath, what you’re saying reinforces my idea that the Church began to lose its divine calling centuries ago when it embraced a monarchistic structure and regal pretensions. As a result, the preservation and maintenance of power — whether on the diocesan or the parish level — becomes the primary concern.
Power not only corrupts, it isolates.
Not for nothing did St. John Chrysostom say, “The floor of Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.”
Not for nothing did Lord Action — commenting on Vatican I — say, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
If one can list all the doctrines and explain them correctly and truthfully say that one believes them to be true one has what I hear referred to as “the faith”. And yet does such a person necessarily have faith? Or conversely, can one have faith and yet be unclear about many of the rather long list of things we have to believe?
Acquiring knowledge about one’s religion is good but it ought not to be the end goal of religious instruction.
Caroline, you’ve underscored a fundamental problem within Catholicism. To many, especially the professional apologists, Catholicism is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, an ascent to certain theological principles. It has *nothing* to do with having a relationship with God through Christ, as the Evangelicals teach. It has *nothing* to do with embracing Christ’s redemptive sacrifice as one’s own, as the Evangelicals teach. It has *nothing* to do with viewing oneself as an adopted son or daughter of a God Who loves His children profoundly and cares about their every concern. That last point is stated throughout the Scriptures but is given short shrift throughout Christianity, especially in the more liturgical denominations, let alone in Catholicism itself.
Faith, ultimately, is not a matter of subscribing to a confessional statement or a set of theological principles. It’s a matter of having a pervasive, fundamental sense of confidence in God’s character and integrity.
Thanks Joe.
Joe, I wonder what Augustine and Thomas Aquinas would say about that.