Je ne suis pas Charlie.
There. I said it. I imagine lightning bolts from liberals are likely to rain down on me, attacking my commitment to free expression.
But the fact remains, I am not Charlie Hebdo. Setting aside the obvious fact that Charlie Hebdo is not a person--and therefore not someone I could potentially be or not be--I find this modern trend of identifying with victims of violence by taking to the streets and claiming to be them as ineffective as it is offensive. I am sorry for Trayvon Martin's family, and I think the failure of our justice system to convict George Zimmerman is an outrage, but I am not Trayvon Martin. I do not possess his particular set of circumstances, his particular outlook on the world, his particular genes and tastes in food and music.
But I have a deeper reason for saying that I am not Charlie. Before the attacks, Charlie Hebdo had a circulation of around 60,000; National Public Radio announced yesterday that a print run of 3,000,000 was expected for its first post-attack issue. While this clearly shows that terrorist attacks can have the opposite effect of the one intended, it does not show that rushing to the side of purveyors of religious disrespect is the best way of either preserving freedom of speech or of countering the threat of fundamentalist forms of Islam. Indeed, the more liberals in the West proclaim that they are Charlie, the more embattled the likes of Al Qaeada of Yemen--who claimed responsibility for the attacks yesterday--are likely to feel. Fundamentalist religion of all stripes thrives on its adherents' sense of being embattled against a modernity that threatens to overwhelm their faith. This is why chants and hashtags proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie" are unlikely to be effective; such claims can only work with people who place values of avoiding harm to others above those of doing nothing to undermine authority. But fundamentalist religion, of whatever faith tradition, makes the opposite choice. Arguing for, or proclaiming, the values of free expression will do nothing to soften the ire or change the behavior of those who dot share that value.
How then is the problem of violent fundamentalist Islam to be dealt with? I would contend through education. The slide in religious literacy--not just belief and practice, but basic literacy--that has marked modernity must be halted. I am not suggesting a return to mandatory devotional Bible reading in public schools, but of mandatory courses in World Religions. The more students are forced to understand and contend with differing faiths and worldviews, the less likely they are to engage in the kind of immaturity Charlie Hebdo showed in its cartoons; the more they are able to see people of different or no religion as people, the less likely they are to seek violent retribution to religious slights.
And this is where blogs like mine can make a difference.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
How Many Klingons Can Pray Toward Mecca?
Sometimes, a story becomes so useful to people with a philosophical or ideological axe to grind that it manages to continue in circulation no matter how unbelievable it may seem and no matter how thoroughly and repeatedly it has been disproven. The best case in point is the much-repeated rumor that the phrase "rule of thumb" derives from an archaic English law allowed a man to beat his wife as long as he used a stick no thicker than her thumb, an idea first bandied about by feminists in the 1970s. In the sphere of religion, the best example of this phenomenon is the widespread but misinformed belief that Scholastic theologians used to sit around debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (Thomas Aquinas did in fact discuss whether several angels can occupy the same space in his Summa Theologica, but this was in the context of a discussion of what it meant for angels to be incorporeal). This particular belief about the Scholastics circulates, I believe, because it serves the ends of people who need to stereotype religious leaders as hairsplitting harebrains out of touch with the real world. So it does not surprise me that in recent years, people intent on arguing that religious people are out of their minds have started hypothesizing about what would happen if people concerned with otherworldly matters had to face the existence of other kinds of creatures who are from beyond our world in a more concrete way.
This week, theweek.com published an opinion piece by David A. Weintraub speculating on what will happen to our religious beliefs when human beings make contact with sentient life forms on other planets. Setting aside Weintraub's misuse of the word "sentient" (cats and dogs are sentient beings as much as humans are--though I suspect Weintraub is not terribly concerned about our contacting a cosmological canine), Weintraub's assessment of what will happen when humans encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life is shot through with absurdities that ignore the past and present realities of the traditions he examines. To whit:
Weintraub asserts that Christians will have to deal with the question of whether there can be intelligent life that is not susceptible to original sin and thus of whether Jesus is the savior only of humankind. While noting that there is no answer this question that currently satisfies all Christians (not surprising, since even belief in the Trinity is not held by all self-defined Christians), Weintraub ignores that Christianity has dealt with this question before, when Christianity had to face the question of whether Native Americans were fully human. There is no reason to suppose that the Church would reach a different conclusion about intelligent extraterrestrials--though as with the Native Americans, it might take a lot of time, a lot of sorting out of conflicting reports about these extraterrestrials, and a lot of contact before the question became settled.
As humorous as this question is, Weintraub is at his most hilarious when he speculates about how Muslims on another planet will manage to pray five times a day in the direction of Mecca on a planet light years from earth, where determining the direction of prayer would be difficult. In fact, rabbis have had to deal with similar questions. Traditional Judaism requires the faithful to pray three times a day--at sunrise, in the afternoon, and at sunset--in the direction of Jerusalem. Rabbis have fielded questions from Jewish astronauts about how they should handle their prayers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the sun does not set for part of the year, and in outer space, where the sun neither rises nor sets. Muslims have also long dealt with the question of what to do when the direction of prayer cannot be determined--not surprisingly for a religion born in the Arabian desert, where traveling Muslims could easily find themselves lost. In fact, the astrolabe, one of the Islamic world's great contributions to the Age of Exploration, was developed not to help sailors lost at sea, but to help the Muslim faithful figure out how to pray toward Mecca when they were in the middle of nowhere.
Weintraub is on firmer ground when he posits that, after the discovery of extraterrestrial life, adherents of many faiths will have to ponder whether their God is the God only of earth or of the entire universe, but this is also a question religious traditions have had to ask before; indeed, the question has been asked every time one faith has come into contact with another. If history is any guide, Weintraub is right that the experience will be discomfiting at first, but not that it will be disruptive. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all survived the shock of having to determine whether they were particularistic faiths meant for particular groups of people, or messages meant for all of humanity. If the accepted definition of "humanity" comes to include intelligent life forms from other planets, there is no reason to suppose the myriad faith of mankind will not survive.
And they will do so with a clear answer as to how Muslims on Klingon can pray toward Mecca.
This week, theweek.com published an opinion piece by David A. Weintraub speculating on what will happen to our religious beliefs when human beings make contact with sentient life forms on other planets. Setting aside Weintraub's misuse of the word "sentient" (cats and dogs are sentient beings as much as humans are--though I suspect Weintraub is not terribly concerned about our contacting a cosmological canine), Weintraub's assessment of what will happen when humans encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life is shot through with absurdities that ignore the past and present realities of the traditions he examines. To whit:
Weintraub asserts that Christians will have to deal with the question of whether there can be intelligent life that is not susceptible to original sin and thus of whether Jesus is the savior only of humankind. While noting that there is no answer this question that currently satisfies all Christians (not surprising, since even belief in the Trinity is not held by all self-defined Christians), Weintraub ignores that Christianity has dealt with this question before, when Christianity had to face the question of whether Native Americans were fully human. There is no reason to suppose that the Church would reach a different conclusion about intelligent extraterrestrials--though as with the Native Americans, it might take a lot of time, a lot of sorting out of conflicting reports about these extraterrestrials, and a lot of contact before the question became settled.
As humorous as this question is, Weintraub is at his most hilarious when he speculates about how Muslims on another planet will manage to pray five times a day in the direction of Mecca on a planet light years from earth, where determining the direction of prayer would be difficult. In fact, rabbis have had to deal with similar questions. Traditional Judaism requires the faithful to pray three times a day--at sunrise, in the afternoon, and at sunset--in the direction of Jerusalem. Rabbis have fielded questions from Jewish astronauts about how they should handle their prayers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the sun does not set for part of the year, and in outer space, where the sun neither rises nor sets. Muslims have also long dealt with the question of what to do when the direction of prayer cannot be determined--not surprisingly for a religion born in the Arabian desert, where traveling Muslims could easily find themselves lost. In fact, the astrolabe, one of the Islamic world's great contributions to the Age of Exploration, was developed not to help sailors lost at sea, but to help the Muslim faithful figure out how to pray toward Mecca when they were in the middle of nowhere.
Weintraub is on firmer ground when he posits that, after the discovery of extraterrestrial life, adherents of many faiths will have to ponder whether their God is the God only of earth or of the entire universe, but this is also a question religious traditions have had to ask before; indeed, the question has been asked every time one faith has come into contact with another. If history is any guide, Weintraub is right that the experience will be discomfiting at first, but not that it will be disruptive. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all survived the shock of having to determine whether they were particularistic faiths meant for particular groups of people, or messages meant for all of humanity. If the accepted definition of "humanity" comes to include intelligent life forms from other planets, there is no reason to suppose the myriad faith of mankind will not survive.
And they will do so with a clear answer as to how Muslims on Klingon can pray toward Mecca.
Monday, January 5, 2015
One Denomination or One Direction?
Sometimes, writing on religion gets basic facts--not just what is written in creeds, catechisms, or codes of religious law, but facts of what actually happened when a religious figure spoke or acted--so horribly wrong that it can only properly be considered entertainment, not news. A good example of this is this piece on Inquistr.com about Pope Francis's most recent message for World Day of Peace (known to non-Catholics as New Year's Day).
Inquisitr begins innocuously enough by noting, accurately, that Pope Francis chose to focus his speech this year on the continued existence of slavery in the world, despite its having been outlawed by the laws of nearly every country as well as by the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and by noting, equally accurately, that the Pope urged the leaders and laity of other world religions to work together with Catholics to bring an end to enslavement and human trafficking. Later, however, Inquisitr veers off into the deep end by suggesting that the Pope urged the formation of one world denomination--a suggestion that was not made in the Huffington Post piece Inquisitr directly quotes and that is equally absent from the Vatican's webpage publication of the Pope's speech. Inquisitr even quotes--but does not name--"responses" (presumably readers of the Huffington Post) as asking "how [members of other faiths[ would...feel if someone suggested that al [sic] people become a different religion…like say Buddhism" and stating that "Muslims in general will never agree to anti-slavery, at least not in practice, else they’d have to edit their [holy] book[, the Qur'an]."
Quoting this reader, without raising any questions about his or her comments, is doubly troubling because it implies that Inquisitr accepts at face value the idea the Qur'an unambiguously endorses slavery, or at least that all Muslim clerics accept interpretations that validate slavery. In fact, the issue of slavery has had as long and complicated a history within Islam as it has had within Christianity. While the Qur'an does contain passages that can be read as supporting slavery, this is within the context of the enslavement of prisoners of war, and in fact all Islamic countries have abolished slavery--the most recent being Mauritania, in 1981. Clearly, no alteration of the Qur'an, which traditional Muslims regard as a God-given and thus unalterable miracle--was necessary to make this happen.
Thus, the Pope was not suggesting that the world ought to become one denomination--only that it ought to continue moving in the one direction of ending, in fact as well as in law, the enslavement and trafficking of human beings.
Inquisitr begins innocuously enough by noting, accurately, that Pope Francis chose to focus his speech this year on the continued existence of slavery in the world, despite its having been outlawed by the laws of nearly every country as well as by the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and by noting, equally accurately, that the Pope urged the leaders and laity of other world religions to work together with Catholics to bring an end to enslavement and human trafficking. Later, however, Inquisitr veers off into the deep end by suggesting that the Pope urged the formation of one world denomination--a suggestion that was not made in the Huffington Post piece Inquisitr directly quotes and that is equally absent from the Vatican's webpage publication of the Pope's speech. Inquisitr even quotes--but does not name--"responses" (presumably readers of the Huffington Post) as asking "how [members of other faiths[ would...feel if someone suggested that al [sic] people become a different religion…like say Buddhism" and stating that "Muslims in general will never agree to anti-slavery, at least not in practice, else they’d have to edit their [holy] book[, the Qur'an]."
Quoting this reader, without raising any questions about his or her comments, is doubly troubling because it implies that Inquisitr accepts at face value the idea the Qur'an unambiguously endorses slavery, or at least that all Muslim clerics accept interpretations that validate slavery. In fact, the issue of slavery has had as long and complicated a history within Islam as it has had within Christianity. While the Qur'an does contain passages that can be read as supporting slavery, this is within the context of the enslavement of prisoners of war, and in fact all Islamic countries have abolished slavery--the most recent being Mauritania, in 1981. Clearly, no alteration of the Qur'an, which traditional Muslims regard as a God-given and thus unalterable miracle--was necessary to make this happen.
Thus, the Pope was not suggesting that the world ought to become one denomination--only that it ought to continue moving in the one direction of ending, in fact as well as in law, the enslavement and trafficking of human beings.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Rushing to Judgment
Recently, as part of an ESL class I was teaching to upper-level undergraduates, I gave my students an excerpt of a Brooke Gladstone's Influencing Machine, a graphic novel dealing with the public's relationship to the media. Gladstone points out that, while the public tends to be focused on the question of whether the media have a liberal or conservative bias, there are actually other biases--many rooted in the media's need to make money--that ought to be of more concern. One of the ones she points out is "narrative bias", the attempt by the media to create story where, in fact, there is none.
A good example of this kind of narrative bias occurs in Bob Unruh's recent piece on WND.com sensationalizing the appointment of Anglican priest Jane Shaw as Stanford's Dean of Religious Life. Unruh's title, "Stop Conversions, Stanford Religious Dean Tells Churches", is as melodramatic as it is misleading. In the video of an interview Uhruh supplies, the Rev. Shaw never says that the church should stop performing conversions, only that the church must be an environment in which all can be welcome, including people of other faiths who have no intention of converting. The title, however, implies that Shaw does not believe the church should welcome sincere converts in the fold.
Uhruh's distortions also extend to misrepresenting Shaw's comments on global climate change. Noting that climate change has become one of the great issues of our time, Shaw quite reasonably suggests that the church can have a role in doing something about it. This position seems to be consistent with Gen. 1:26, in which God grants humanity dominion over animals--a dominion that implies responsibility on humanity's part to ensure the continued existence of God's creation. She does not claim, as Uhruh suggests in quoting Rush Limbaugh's laughable reaction to her interview, that we ought to "worship earth as a religion."
Nor does Shaw suggest that the church should "stop doing religion", as Uhruh and Limbaugh claim; she says, more mildly, that the church shouldn't "just be doing religion"--that the church must do more than simply provide doctrinal instruction and worship services. This seems consistent with a long tradition of churches involving themselves in social and political controversies that gave us, among other things, abolitionism and the civil rights movement.
Uhruh and Limbaugh's motivations in distorting Shaw's interview are pretty clear. They are more interested in promoting a conservative political and social agenda--one that ignores the reality of global climate change and even seeks to reverse the basic constitutional principle of birthright citizenship. It is a shame that, in advancing their agenda, they choose to pillory a woman who has achieved such distinction within her denomination and within academia as well.
But the real shame is that millions of Americans know so little of the teachings of their own faith that Uhuh and Limbaugh's rantings can seem plausible. Far too few Americans know that religion
has anything to say about the responsible use of the earth, or that the Bible specifically demands protection for the stranger. Deuteronomy 10:19 specially commands the Israelites not merely to welcome, but to love, the stranger, as they have been strangers in the land of Egypt; in the parable of the sheep and the goats, in the book of Matthew, Jesus notes that at the final judgment, those who welcomed in the stranger will be as those who welcomed in Jesus himself. It says a lot about the religious literacy of many Americans that assertions such as those of Uhuh and Limbaugh can seem plausible.
A good example of this kind of narrative bias occurs in Bob Unruh's recent piece on WND.com sensationalizing the appointment of Anglican priest Jane Shaw as Stanford's Dean of Religious Life. Unruh's title, "Stop Conversions, Stanford Religious Dean Tells Churches", is as melodramatic as it is misleading. In the video of an interview Uhruh supplies, the Rev. Shaw never says that the church should stop performing conversions, only that the church must be an environment in which all can be welcome, including people of other faiths who have no intention of converting. The title, however, implies that Shaw does not believe the church should welcome sincere converts in the fold.
Uhruh's distortions also extend to misrepresenting Shaw's comments on global climate change. Noting that climate change has become one of the great issues of our time, Shaw quite reasonably suggests that the church can have a role in doing something about it. This position seems to be consistent with Gen. 1:26, in which God grants humanity dominion over animals--a dominion that implies responsibility on humanity's part to ensure the continued existence of God's creation. She does not claim, as Uhruh suggests in quoting Rush Limbaugh's laughable reaction to her interview, that we ought to "worship earth as a religion."
Nor does Shaw suggest that the church should "stop doing religion", as Uhruh and Limbaugh claim; she says, more mildly, that the church shouldn't "just be doing religion"--that the church must do more than simply provide doctrinal instruction and worship services. This seems consistent with a long tradition of churches involving themselves in social and political controversies that gave us, among other things, abolitionism and the civil rights movement.
Uhruh and Limbaugh's motivations in distorting Shaw's interview are pretty clear. They are more interested in promoting a conservative political and social agenda--one that ignores the reality of global climate change and even seeks to reverse the basic constitutional principle of birthright citizenship. It is a shame that, in advancing their agenda, they choose to pillory a woman who has achieved such distinction within her denomination and within academia as well.
But the real shame is that millions of Americans know so little of the teachings of their own faith that Uhuh and Limbaugh's rantings can seem plausible. Far too few Americans know that religion
has anything to say about the responsible use of the earth, or that the Bible specifically demands protection for the stranger. Deuteronomy 10:19 specially commands the Israelites not merely to welcome, but to love, the stranger, as they have been strangers in the land of Egypt; in the parable of the sheep and the goats, in the book of Matthew, Jesus notes that at the final judgment, those who welcomed in the stranger will be as those who welcomed in Jesus himself. It says a lot about the religious literacy of many Americans that assertions such as those of Uhuh and Limbaugh can seem plausible.
Thursday, December 25, 2014
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.
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.
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.
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