Thursday, September 30, 2010

Religious Knowledge Survey

The Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey has been in the news lately. I was disappointed as the results aren't the least bit surprising. The shocking conclusions seem to be:
The survey results are clear: People with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about religion.
The survey shows that reading and talking about religion are related to higher levels of religious knowledge. People who say they read Scripture at least once a week, for instance, get significantly more questions right on average than those who read Scripture less often. The same pattern is seen in frequency of reading books (besides Scripture) about one’s own faith.
I did find one amusing bit:
And only about one-third of those polled know which famous court trial dealt with whether evolution could be taught in public schools; 31% know this was the Scopes trial, while 36% say it was Brown vs. Board of Education and 3% name the Salem witch trials.
I would really like to see a breakdown of the 3% that thought the Salem witch trials were related to evolution. Unfortunately the raw data doesn't seem to be available yet.