In the Beginning, Blog Created the Heavens and the Earth

Okay, that title may be an exaggeration, but I wanted to get your attention and I did, didn't I?

The book of Genesis begins at the Beginning, and so must I.  For me, that means explaining the purpose of this blog, as I don't want anyone out there in Cyberspace to have the wrong idea.  A blog called "Faith Matters" might sound like the musings of a minister or rabbi, delivering wisdom that might have been in his or her homily or d'var Torah. But this blog serves a very different purpose: to spotlight the ways in which religious illiteracy affects the news media's coverage of world affairs.

Which leads to a very pressing question: what exactly is religious illiteracy?  This term has come to be used in recent years by a small coterie of scholars who are attempting to assess, and perhaps correct, how knowledgeable (or, more often, the contrary) the public is about religion.  The term was most prominently used by Professor Stephen Prothero of Boston University, in a book of the same name. Prothero's book details a supposed decline in Americans' level of knowledge about religious subjects from the time of the Pilgrims to the present, a decline he blames not on the usual suspects of "secular education" but on the unintended consequences of choices made by religious Americans themselves.  The term has also been taken up by scholars at Harvard Divinity School, who have created a Religious Literacy Project.

The aim of improving the public's religious literacy is not the same as the aim of increasing its level of religious belief. A person may have a high level of knowledge of religion--by being able to correctly identify such Biblical figures as Methuselah or Theophilus, or being able to name the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or the Five Pillars of Islam, but not necessarily believe in any of these ideas himself or herself.  I feel that an educated person needs to be able to understand such religiously-based references as "as old as Methuselah"; it is a matter of indifference to me whether he or she believes that Methuselah actually lived to be 969 years old, as most versions of the Bible would assert.

Before I begin this blogging project, however, I feel obligated to inform the reader of my own personal biases and experience in the field.  No one who writes about religion is free from bias; it is not a subject that can be analyzed as objectively as mold in a petri dish. I consider myself a Jew, and am fairly involved in a Conservative synagogue as well as a havurah. I first came to a religious consciousness while an undergraduate at Columbia University, where I majored in religion.  My aim in this blog, however, is not to proselytize my own form of Judaism (setting aside for the moment that Judaism doesn't proselytize) but simply to point out where the media get facts about any religion, or religion in general, wrong.