(no subject)

[winterbadger]

With thanks to wcg, a link to a quiz based on the Pew Center poll questions on religion.

Without giving away anything in case people want to try their hand, I have to say that I think 15 questions are too few to really get a grasp of what people know about so many different religions. The original survey (a PDF of which can be found here) asked a several more, some substantive and some questions to help characterise response categories on other factors. But, still, the number of questions and the way some of them are only tangentially related to religion make me feel this is a weak poll. For instance, how much does it tell one about the public's knowledge about a religion to know whether it is predominant in a given country or not? TO me that indicates something about how much the respondent knows about the *country*, but not much about what he or she knows of the religion in question.

That said, I am enough of a social science geek to wish I had access to the data files and time to play with them...

Comments

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thanks.
The Christian questions are a lot more obscure than the others. And the ones specifically about the US I just had to guess wildly. 13/15 though, not bad!

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

I'm curious, which ones struck you as obscure? The only one I had no clue on was the great awakening, tho I was guessing on the US ones also.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Me too. I had to guess on that. I was sure it wasn't Billy Graham, but picked blindly between the other two. I didn't find the Christian ones difficult. I was brought up Church of England, but things like transubstantiation one sort of acquires through general knowledge.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as to whether the great awekening thing is as widespread and common knowledge as, say, Moses or whatever, in the US overall. I mean, I'd never heard of the Rapture till I met it in fantasy/SF novels from the US..

[watervole.livejournal.com]

It's historical, not theological.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening

going by the poll results, most Americans weren't familiar with it either. It had lower than random correct results.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Yes, I got the wiki when I googled... was wondering about the results so ta on that :)

[winterbadger]

I would be surprised if it were very common knowledge. It's crucial to the development of what are now a HUGE variety of Protestant denominations in the US, but I don't think even mildly religious people read up on the history of the faith, any more than most Scots could probably name the 275434654 different versions of Free Church there and explain what separates one from another. As Chris says, some of the questions about Christianity probed to a deeper level than those about other religions, and as Judith pointed out, that one is definitely historical, rather than about the scripture of the religion. It's as if there were a question about Abraham Geiger. But then, given that the US is about 80% Christian, 10% non-religious, and the remaining 10% is mostly split between four other faiths, it's a reasonable assumption, I think, that most of the respondents will be Christian.

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

I suppose the definition of obscure that I was using is that it's something the person saying it doesn't know! I'd never heard of the great awakening, nor of two of the three people who were its possible leaders. The other one I got wrong was something to do with Job. Or not.

However what I was getting at was that the questions about other religions were really basic - which "religion" promotes Nirvana, which believes in Shiva, what is Ramadan. Equivalently difficult questions for Christianity might be something like:

In which religion does God have a son called Jesus?
- Islam
- Buddhism
- Christianity

As a result I had to guess pretty much all the Christian questions but I knew the answers to all of the other ones. (For context I'm not religious but I have a smattering of compulsory Christian indoctrination from my early schooling)

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Job, yep, though if I hadn't known that from the Bible (raised Catholic but I've studied a lot about the Bible since, as a good little pagan :) ) I'd have got it from cultural contexts, references in classical music or poetry or even Heinlein.

Very interesting point about the tone of the questions tho, it does assume the test-taker is nominally Christian compared to the vagueness, I'd completely missed that one.

[redactrice.livejournal.com]

Wow, 15 out of 15! I love quizzes.

If pub quizzes or trivia nights had more stuff like that, I'd be so there.

[winterbadger]

"... and, for the 2 a.m. hour, we have twenty questions on the 95 Theses--as well as the 39 Articles of Faith, the First Blast of the Trumpet, and the Second Disputation of Zurich! Yes, it's the John Calvin Memorial Obscure Protestant Theology Hour Bonus! To start answering questions, call 413-597-WCFM now! But this hour, you can only get credit for correctly answering questions--no guesses and no bringing us pizzas! Yes, you must be justified by faith, not by good works!"

[schizokitty.livejournal.com]

Bwah-hah-hah!

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Very US based, but I still got 14 out of 15.

I guess that makes me like most US atheists - who appear to know more about religion than any other group apart from Jews.

'The West Wing' appears to work as a primer on US laws relating to religion.

[winterbadger]

'The West Wing' appears to work as a primer on US laws relating to religion.

Yep, it won't give you all the perspectives on them, but it does a good job of demonstrating what all the major political issues are and what their influence on the process is.