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What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't
HarperSanFrancisco
March 2007
On Sale: March 13, 2007
304 pages
ISBN: 0060846704
EAN: 9780060846701
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Religion
The United States is one of the most religious places on
earth, but it is also a nation of shocking religious illiteracy. * Only 10 percent of American teenagers can name all
five major world religions and 15 percent cannot name any.
* Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible
holds the answers to all or most of life's basic questions,
yet only half of American adults can name even one of the
four gospels and most Americans cannot name the first book
of the Bible. Despite this lack of basic knowledge, politicians and
pundits continue to root public policy arguments in
religious rhetoric whose meanings are missed—or
misinterpreted—by the vast majority of Americans. "We have a major civic problem on our hands," says religion
scholar Stephen Prothero. He makes the provocative case that
to remedy this problem, we should return to teaching
religion in the public schools. Alongside "reading, writing,
and arithmetic," religion ought to become the "Fourth R" of
American education. Many believe that America's descent into religious
illiteracy was the doing of activist judges and secularists
hell-bent on banishing religion from the public square.
Prothero reveals that this is a profound misunderstanding.
"In one of the great ironies of American religious history,"
Prothero writes, "it was the nation's most fervent people of
faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy.
Just how that happened is one of the stories this book has
to tell." Prothero avoids the trap of religious relativism by
addressing both the core tenets of the world's major
religions and the real differences among them. Complete with
a dictionary of the key beliefs, characters, and stories of
Christianity, Islam, and other religions, Religious Literacy
reveals what every American needs to know in order to
confront the domestic and foreign challenges facing this
country today.
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