According to a Christianity Today report The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life surprised many with the results that on average, Americans could only answer half of the 32 questions they put forward on religious topics including the Bible and Christianity, world religions, and religion and public life. Although Evangelicals scored well on questions related to Bible and Christianity, in general, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons outscored Protestant(both Evangelical and Mainline) Christians. The difference came in knowledge of world religions and religion in public life. In her piece in Christianity Today in January 2011, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway advocates for the ancient Christian practice of catechesis – a process of transferring not just doctrine, but lifestyle as well. The results of the Pew survey offer statistical support for such an approach, showing that those who attend worship regularly scored much better on the quiz. More importantly those who are active in a Christian church or fellowship also see greater transformation in their lives as well.
Wonder how you compare with the average American? Here’s your chance to find out.
Take the Pew Trust’s 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.
Your responses on the quiz do NOT affect the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey’s results.
Have fun! I scored 87% how about you?
93%, though some were just educated guesses. Missed the one about Pakistan. I found it interesting that all the biblical questions were on the Old Testament.
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You did better than me. I missed the prayer in schools question, of all things!
It would be interesting to see the results of a Biblical rather than religious set of questions.
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Woo hoo, I am more holy than 87% of the public! I would have only missed one, but I suspected 2 of being trick questions and gambled on the less obvious choice. They weren’t.
I’d be interested to see how these questions correlate with the lifestyles of the demographics they mention. What does knowledge of religious trivia signify?Whatever it is, we should find it most in Jews and atheists, and the latter are by definition not church goers. My suspicion is that education is the meaningful factor here, and that these questions could have been replaced by any number of historical subjects — but I’m also running on 4 hours of sleep, at the end of another long day, so I might be missing it.
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