September 30, 2010 10:32 PM
Atheists, agnostics know more about religion than we do
How much do you know about religion?
And how do you compare with the average American? Here's your chance to find out.
Take our short, 15-question quiz, and see how you do in comparison with 3,412 randomly sampled adults who were asked these and other questions in the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey. This national poll was conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life from May 19 through June 6, 2010, on landlines and cell phones, in English and Spanish.
When you finish the quiz, you will be able to compare your knowledge of religion with participants in the national telephone poll. You can see how you compare with the overall population as well as with people of various religious traditions, people who attend worship services frequently or less often, men and women, and college graduates as well as those who did not attend college.
For a full analysis of the findings of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, read the full report.
Your responses on the quiz do NOT affect the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey's results.
I got a 93% - I would have been embarrassed if I had gotten less. But could barely believe the results, which show atheists and agnostics knowing more about religion than religious groups.
Posted in Religion | Permalink
Comments
thanks for posting this because I heard about this survey on EWTN and I wondered what the questions were. I was happy that I scored a 93% too! and I'm even Catholic! haha! Catholics sure had a poor showing. Not really very surprising with the poor catechesis over the last generation.
Posted by: Julie | September 30, 2010 11:07 PM
The poor results on this are really shocking. I scored 100% on this and, honestly, could not believe that the questions were so easy.
Posted by: marian | October 1, 2010 12:21 AM
Hey, I got a 93% too. It really wasn't much of a quiz, tho.
Posted by: dottie | October 1, 2010 3:26 AM
100%.
That's not really a quiz on religion - but a quiz on religious personalities and non-doctrinal trivia with the exception of perhaps 1 or 2 questions (transubstantiation for Holy Communion and nirvana for Buddhists) . I'm not sure if they scrambled the questions or had different questions for different on-line respondents - I did note they had 32 questions in the actual phone survey.
I'm curious why the Christian denominations were broken down into various ethnic groups while the Jewish denominations were not broken down. I also find it interesting they lumped atheists and agnostics together, while making distinctions between other denominations.
I also don't necessarily see the lack of knowledge about another religion as being a negative. A more accurate assessment would entail how much each respondent knows about their own faith relative to other faiths.
BTW - For religious affiliations, I didn't see columns for Hindus, Muslims or Buddhists.
Posted by: Chris Arsenault | October 1, 2010 7:46 AM
I agree with Marian; the question were surprisingly really easy. I scored a 100%. I admit that I did guess on the Jonathan Edwards one. Good guess, eh? I've read a book - a few times actually - called Handbook of Today's Religions, by Josh McDowell. It's an excellent resource for knowing what religions believe, even agnostics/atheists/existentialists/humanists.
Posted by: Joanna | October 1, 2010 7:54 AM
When I looked at the results broken down by question, I understood why atheist and agnostics scored higher. The questions they almost all got correct were the ones about Asian religions. Those are also questions that many of the Christians got wrong. So the issues isn't that Atheist know more about the Bible, it's that they study world religions and Christians don't. It made me feel a little better (Christians did seem to know their own religion a little better than an atheist).
Posted by: silver | October 1, 2010 8:05 AM
Fun quiz and interesting responses to your post, as well. I scored 100%, although I did make an educated guess on two of them.
Posted by: Crystal | October 1, 2010 4:34 PM
