If the reports that writer Robert Joustra found are accurate, Christians know less about world religions and science than ever before.  Why? Joustra believes it is an issue of a break of trust.  I’m not sure if I agree with that conclusion or not, but Joustra’s reports are scary and reflective of the current interest in knowledge among Evangelicals.

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Christopher Hutton

3 Comments

  1. The only issue I have with this is the the religion polls covers multiple religions. If you are of one belief you may not know a lot about others. If they would have a protestant only, or hindu only poll then I bet people of those beliefs would have done better.

    Reply

    1. I could see that. But I must respectfully disagree. I do think this is problematic, for if one doesn’t understand other religions, then one will not interact with them well. And since most evangelicals either take little time to understand that, or they rely on over-simplified understandings of it. And that can be troubling.

    2. Well, if I’m going to look at the results of the science study according to the demographic breakdown, another real problem is how little women apparently know about science. Men outperformed women in answering 11 of the 13 questions on the online quiz at the link, sometimes by almost 20 percentage points.

      Since we know that the presence or absence of a Y chromosome has no bearing on intelligence — in spite of what the Pew survey results try to tell us — we should perhaps be wary of drawing too many conclusions based on it. Including what “most evangelicals” might or might not understand.

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