Do Atheists Know More About Christianity Than Christians? from The Atlantic Wire by Heather Horn

A new Pew survey is pretty much guaranteed to ruffle the feathers of the faithful. In a survey of religious knowledge, Americans did fairly poorly, displaying little knowledge of world religions. More provocatively, Americans did not even know much about their own religions. A shocking forty-five percent of Catholics incorrectly answered a question about Catholicism and Communion, for example. To make matters worse, it seems that those who scored highest on this survey were, in fact, atheists and agnostics. The next-highest scoring groups were Jews and Mormons. 'Religion Congruence Fallacy' That's what "academics call it," writes Jeffrey Weiss at Politics Daily, referring to the phenomenon of "Americans who say they belong to a particular religious tradition tend[ing] not to act like it," whether through premarital sex or divorce or what-have-you. He points out that, until this survey, there had been little evidence to support scholar Stephen Prothero's claim that "Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion." Weiss is skeptical, though, about some of the questions (on which Prothero, apparently, was consulted), which, he says " read to me as if they were taken from a religion version of Trivial Pursuit." That said, he's fascinated by the fact that Jews, Mormons, and the "religiously unaffiliated" do so well, and is particularly struck by the responses to two questions [...]

Read the full Atlantic article here. See also: Statistics on Religion in America Report -- Pew Forum on Religion, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert