Bonus SWAG GRAB QUIZ: How Would You Score On Pew’s New Religion Test?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life today released the fascinating (some might say disconcerting) results of a survey on religion knowledge.

The headline you’ll see on most stories about the survey will say something like ATHEISTS KNOW MORE ABOUT RELIGION THAN CHRISTIANS DO.

The study’s executive summary begins thusly:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education….

On questions about Christianity – including a battery of questions about the Bible – Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge. Jews and atheists/agnostics stand out for their knowledge of other world religions, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism; out of 11 such questions on the survey, Jews answer 7.9 correctly (nearly three better than the national average) and atheists/agnostics answer 7.5 correctly (2.5 better than the national average). Atheists/agnostics and Jews also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion.

Other provocative findings include:

45 percent of Catholics in the United States do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ.

53 percent of Protestant Christians cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity.

43 percent of Jews do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

Only 47 percent of Americans know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist.

And a mere 38 percent correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism.

Only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia – the country with the world’s largest Muslim population – are Muslims.