Will predictions about the diappearance of religion ever disappear?

I imagine the BBC must have time on its hands.  How else can one explain its decision to post, last Tuesday, yet another article on the question of whether religion is about to disappear?  The BBC's reporter, Rachel Nuwer, attempts to make the issue appear new by citing a recent Gallup International Survey showing a decline in the number of believers over the past few years.  Worldwide, Gallup claims, the number of people claiming to be "religious" declined from 77 percent in 2005 to 68 percent in 2011, while the number of avowed atheists has increased from 10 to 13 percent.

Nuwer and the BBC do deserve some credit for not coming to the conclusion that religion's demise is imminent.  But the Gallup surveys on which they rely for their claim that people have become less religious all around the world in recent years are problematic.  Gallup subcontracted much of the actual surveying work out--which makes one wonder how good a job subcontractors in each country did of getting representative samples of the population. 

There is also the question of method of contact.  Gallup notes that the survey was conducted using a mix of face-to-face, telephone, and e-mail interviews--but only one method was used in each country.  Given the decline of the landline over the past decade, and the concern it had caused the CDC in gathering information on Americans' health, one wonders whether surveys conducted through only one mode of contact can any longer be reliable.  The Economist notes that in United States, homes without landlines tend to be disproportionately young, poor, and Hispanic; the United States Census has noted that homes without internet access are disproportionately poor.  The latter fact alone would call into question the survey's results concerning Americans' religiosity.

Then there is the whole question of what it means to be "religious" in the first place.  The word does not have an easy equivalent in all languages; even Biblical Hebrew itself contains no word that would exactly translate as religious, describing characters only as people who "fear the LORD".  One wonders if, say, Saudi and Irish respondents to this type of survey are operating with the same definition of what it means to be a "religious" person.  Add to this the influence religious repressive governments--whether officially Islamist governments such as Oman or officially atheistic ones such as China--can have on people's willingness to self-report their own religiosity, and it becomes even harder to trust such a survey.

But more to the point, Nuwer never mentions how often the question of religion's eventual disappearance has been raised before.  Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire predicted the demise of religion; in the 1960s, noted sociologist Peter Berger made a prediction that religion would be gone by the year 2000, a position he was later forced to admit was premature.

A little research might have stood Nuwer and the BBC in good stead.  But that assumes their purpose was to analyze recent events in the news rather than simply to be sensationalistic.

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.