The new study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released this week, shocked many with the revelation that atheists and agnostics tend to know more about the world's religions than believers do.
Pew researchers asked more than 3,000 Americans 32 central questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions. On average, people who took the survey got half the answers wrong - and many even tripped on basic questions about their own faith.
Fully 54% of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who started the Protestant Reformation. Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. {Side note- I took that quiz myself, and scored 100%. So did several other atheists of my acquaintance.}
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The age of the Earth, the existence of billions of galaxies, the detailed confirmation of evolutionary biology, including our demonstrated close kinship to chimpanzees and indeed all other mammals - all these discoveries and many more have taken their toll on any literal understanding of the holy texts. Scholarship about the history of those texts has also made it more and more obvious that they are imperfect human artifacts with a long history of revision and adjustment, not eternal and unchanging gifts from God.
So what's a religion to do? There are two main tactics.
Plan A: Treat the long, steady retreat into metaphor and mystery as a process of increasing wisdom, and try to educate the congregation to the new sophisticated understandings.
Plan B: Cloak all the doctrines in a convenient fog and then not just excuse the faithful from trying to penetrate the fog, but celebrate the policy of not looking too closely at anyone's creed - not even your own.
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Atheists tend to be those curious and truth-loving folks who do take a good hard look at religious professions of faith, and hence they tend to know what they are walking away from. There have always been atheists, though not always very visible to the public. In fact, the perennial nagging doubts of the few atheists in the crowd have probably been the main force sustaining theology!
Most people are afraid of what they might discover if they read the fine print too carefully, so they sign on the dotted line without a glance, and then often feel the need to defend their lack of curiosity as an example of their holy trust in their own faith. But every generation has its restless doubters who are just not comfortable with the traditional formulas they are invited to profess by their religious leaders. They cast about, with great intelligence and ingenuity, for alternative formulations that they can assert with a clear conscience.
Those that find them are the theologians; those that don't are the atheists, whether or not they leave their churches or just hunker down in silence.
