Why Are Atheists/Agnostics the Most Religiously Literate Groups?

Know thy enemy.

Discounting the fact that atheists are drawn from the more educated in society because the study controlled for that there are several explanations:

– As Dave Silverman pointed out, religious people with doubts will often delve into their holy books in the false belief that it will strengthen their waning faith. This means that someone on the cusp of skepticism comes face to face with a book that is undeniably human, and not holy, in origin. A perfect recipe for religion-literate atheists.

– The fact that nonbelief carries such a stigma in American society means that nonbelievers are, at the present time, largely a self-selected group of people with the capacity and inclination to question and seek out knowledge on their own. This will undoubtedly change as nonbelief becomes more widespread. I’d cite Greta Christina’s great talk (from minute 47 on) on parallels with the GLBT movement and how we should get ready for atheists to stop being so great as we start being more numerous. I’ll bet if you did this same study in secular Western Europe, atheists and agnostics wouldn’t come out as well, since there’s little social pressure to be religious.

– In some small measure, I think that insofar as nonbelievers congregate with peers and therefore submit each other to peer pressure, other nonbelievers feel the need to conform. You won’t find many nonbelievers willing to openly admit to not giving a shit about science, and I’m sure that has a lot to do with the fact that it’s considered socially unacceptable in our circles to not be pro-science. There is a palpable social pressure amongst nonbelievers to know your stuff, to adquire and appreciate knowledge. Much the same thing can be said about the Jewish community, which did almost as well as we did. We are not immune to social pressure by our peers, and many atheists may have educated themselves about religion out of a realization that this is considered a standard requirement in the community.

I’m not going to stake my non-existent reputation on this, but I have a hypothesis. Since the questions were about a variety of religions, a follower of each individual religion might not know as much about a religion other than theirs. Atheists, on the other hand, can come a wide variety of backgrounds and, on average, may be able to answer more questions, on average, correctly over a broader range of beliefs. If the questions were strictly about Christianity, I think the Christians would have done marginally better. If those “Christian” atheists, that is those atheists that were raised with a Christian background were asked only questions pertaining to Christianity, I suspect the atheists would still outperform their theist counterparts. The difference in the hypothetical study I allude to and the real one is that it might make the Christians look marginally better. I still think the atheist would outperform the rest.

@pseudonym

To compair fairly one should also check take in account the actual belief of said theologians as recent studies in Holland found 1 in 6 stating they don’t belief in god.
Many others have frequent doubts about the truth of their faith.

Tom Flynn’s statement – “So even atheists and agnostics who didn’t engage in the study of religion in the course of abandoning their childhood faith feel pressure to come to “know thy enemy.”” – EXACTLY true for me.

BTW, Hemant – excellent article in the Tribune.

Holy shit an American Atheists essay on Fox News?

Yeah, I was surprised by that, too. Of course, if you peruse the comment thread, and see the those left by Christians – well, they’re as predictable as you’d imagine them to be. Conservative Christians only have about a half-dozen catchphrases among them, which they just keep repeating over and over like mantras. I suppose it’s for the same reason a number of you mention above about not looking too closely into the Bible – it prevents them from having to confront the contradictions and unpleasant bits.

Thinking is hard!

Pseudonym: I’ll add my tuppenceworth to Jantien. Dan Dennett did a study on Preachers who don’t believe (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/Non-Believing-Clergy.pdf); one participant commenting (somewhat hyperbolically) that “you can’t go through seminary and come out believing in God”.

http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

Note that in the study, for strictly Christian questions, the score was:

Mormon, 7.9
White Evangelical, 7.3
Atheist/Agnostic, 6.7
Jewish, 6.3
Black Protestant, 5.9
White Catholic, 5.9
White Mainline, 5.8
Nothing, 4.9
Hispanic Catholic, 4.2

You can take the actual quiz there too.

One reason why Jews know so much about their own religion is because they actually do read all of their Bible (although admittedly not so much of the New Testament). Reformed and Conservative Jews “call off” parts of the Torah and Haftorah by threes, much like choosing teams for kickball. Then they read every third section each Saturday for a year, culminating in Simchat Torah, which falls somewhere in late September or early October, in which they read the last section of one year and the first section of the next. If you attend services every Saturday for three years, you will read the entire old testament. (If you are out of town, no worries. Every Conservative synagogue is reading the same section that week.) And the Tanakh that is available to follow along in the pews is in both Hebrew and English, and annotated to aid study.

In many Christian churches, the pastor/minister will pick a topic, often relating it to events of that week, and then pick out Bible readings to support his ideas. In Judaism, the rabbi’s sermon will be based on whatever part of the Torah or Haftorah is being read that week. And pity the poor Bar or Bat Mitzvah child who has to stand up and explain how that day’s reading has brought insight into his or her life, when the reading was the begats of Genesis or the many “thou shalt nots” of Leviticus.

Personally, I know I had a very hard time becoming an atheist. I didn’t want to give up a belief in the divine, even if I didn’t feel anything. I went searching. I took courses in Eastern religions. I read the Book of Mormon. I read the New Testament AND the Apocrypha. I was a Witch for five years, and read The White Goddess and Drawing Down the Moon. I toyed with my own belief system based on fictional deities and saints. (To this day I will offer a prayer to St. Vidicon of Cathode for malfunctioning computer equipment. I just don’t expect an answer.) Of course I know more than your average “all other religions are works of Satan” one-church parishioner.

Know thy enemy mat account for some portion, but it doesn’t account for why we would know *more* than the enemy. The only factors I could see are intelligence, but probably more likely, we just study the material more. Someone mentioned a good bit of the material is comparative religion. That’s actually an area that I’d guess atheists are more familiar with than evangelicals.

Flynn’s “challenge hypothesis” makes more sense than Silverman’s claim that “reading the Bible makes people atheists.” While the latter principle may be true for some, it’s not true for all. There is no lockstep relation there.

And here are my own blog comments on this survey, FWIW. And here is some discussion about it, on my Delphi forum.

PsiCop:

Flynn’s “challenge hypothesis” makes more sense than Silverman’s claim that “reading the Bible makes people atheists.”

Indeed. I’d say that it’s far more likely that religious believers don’t read their holy books out of laziness than out of fear. I doubt that they are really thinking that deeply about their beliefs.

While I hate to ruin good zingers, the study showed that atheists did not know as much about the Christian bible than the best Christians but rather we knew more about religions in general. We knew more about other religions than Christians while knowing less about Christianity than the best of them. If you took the test you’ll see that it was not focused on the bible as you’d think if you just read these editorials, rather it asked about many different world religions.

The best conclusion is that American Christians are ignorant about what the rest of the world believes and American Atheists are less ignorant.

The most likely cause is that out atheists in the US are likely to be better educated and more highly motivated to learn about other religions because atheism is so rare and so attacked in the US that it tends to attract motivated, driven, educated individuals.

I think the media zingers are funny & awesome but between ourselves I think we should admit that the surveys probably don’t support us as much as we’d like.

For me it’s just interesting that this came out after a two week stretch of various places trying to make atheists into being ignorant critics of religion.

Of course that wasn’t true. It’s nice to have another study take that out of the mis-representation pool.

I do not think there is one explanation. There are atheists who leave their childhood religion because they read up on it and realize it’s bunk. There are those (me) who never were in a religion, but are in the pool of science-interested, hence again inclined to study, investigate and all that. I do not buy the defense argument. Too many atheists are closeted and in this study it was clearly safe to say you are an atheist even though your neighbors may never know.

If a prosyletizer knocks at your door, the reaction is not a long argument for many, but “I’m sorry but I don’t have time”.

@littlejohn — Seriously, “they’re stupid” is your explanation? This valedictorian, Merit Scholar, honors grad of a top-10 law school used to believe. Content-free ad hominem is not an argument worthy of this space.

As for the study results, one huge factor has to be that atheists and agnostics actually stop to understand religious beliefs. The religion of many believers is incredibly superficial, what I call “bumper sticker religion.” They know some very basic essentials of the faith, a lot of stock catchphrases, and what their pastors or political leaders tell them. Digging into the details, even of their own religion, either doesn’t occur to them or is frowned upon as a betrayal of faith. “Be like a little child” is not an uncommon phrase, especially among evangelicals.

And FORGET learning about other religions. That’s just asking the Devil to tempt you.

“God will destroy the wisdom of the wise”

Encouraging ignorance just to get to believe in a fairy tale that won’t come true? No thanks.

Huh, one other thing did occur to me as reading the comments. It’s half-way mentioned with the peer pressure comments but not really. For all I’ve read on this since it came out (and everyone is talking about it), I haven’t seen mentioned one other thing we do:

We share the knowledge. We do expect one another to be able to support our claims but that’s because we actually discuss and disect what we say to each other. This is by far the best Atheist blog I’ve been on and even Hemant is called on to back up what he says. (So many blogs, you are booed and hissed if you dare challenge the blog host.)

As we do, we share the knowledge we have in our explanations. Just look at everyone’s comments. Especially TychaBrahe’s and OneTrueKinsman’s with specific knowledge about specific religions they have experience with. Hemant’s first book is more of the same. Sharing what he found when he tried out the experiment of going to various churches. But on the blogs, on FB, where we know another Atheist face to face, we talk. We’re almost obnoxiously eager to share what we know and think about anything — not just religion. We love discussing shit whether it be religion, science (people, yes an Atheist can find science over her head, largely, but even then I do listen and try to understand what other’s tell, I just have to struggle with science and comprehending it), politics, or the latest hit movie that we just saw last night.

Think of the difference between our conversations and that of the religious. We may say something like Hitchens is so cool or Dawkins is right on the money or go FFRF but compare that to the praise Jesus and praise Allah and the hushed tones of which the religious speak of their leaders in. I do have to qualify that a bit as recently I did get knocked by a local Atheist group for daring to disagree with Dawkins who I run hot and cold with. I agree with about 2/3 of what he says. However, can you even imagine going to a church every Sunday and being able to say when fellow parishioners are praising the minister, I agree with about 2/3 of what he says? No way.

And we’ll dissect the damned movie instead of just saying that’s such a good movie, you should see it or don’t waste your time, it sucked. We often have to use the phrase spoiler alert.

Our peer pressure is to have knowledge; theirs is to have faith. It’s a huge difference. With faith, you not only blindly believe without examining it too closely, you don’t question your religious leaders. It’s part of having faith. That’s exactly why preists have gotten away with molesting children for so long. That kind of coverup in any other institution would have totally destroyed or at least overhauled the entire institution. If a public school district did, a school administrator covered up a teacher molesting children say, angry parents would wreak havoc with the school and the administrator would hang with the guilty teacher. Teacher would go to jail and we’d all be pissed off because the administrator got fired instead of going to jail for aiding and abetting. But the pope, the pope — an ex-Nazi — who played a role in the coverup, is free to stand up in public and call Atheists Nazis.

Ok. That’s my two bits. We’re eager to have knowledge and eager to pass it along as well. So we have that too. We share the wealth.

As for challenge and reading, I agree with both. I went to Judaism before Agnostic and then Atheist and went to a Conservative synagogue for six months along with Hebrew and conversion classes before deciding not to go through with the conversion. (They make damned sure of you first, very smart.) It’s as TychaBrahe said. They read a section of torah every Sabbath. That played no small factor in my not going through with the conversion. It didn’t stand up on examination either. And obviously lots of Atheists have gone through studying lots of religions before giving up faith altogether. Especially those of us who were brought up religiously. Letting go of god is not easy. But we’re where we are because whatever one we studied individually brought us to the same conclusion. (And that’s another thing we share with one another openly, how we concluded there couldn’t be a gawd.)

Challenge is important too, I think. Those who remain faithful aren’t overly challenged. At least not by each other and the extremist are like a dog with a bone. As has been mentioned, they keep reguritating the same lines over and over again no matter how rich and famous a defender of the faith they are. That’s because it’s all they’ve got and we’re the only ones challenging them.

I’ve backed off in the last few years but still occassionally do this when a Christian is especially obnoxious. I always challenge them to prove something to themself, not me, to read the buybull cover to cover front to back skipping nothing five times on their own without guidance from their religious leader (though I say feel free to ask them questions about what you have read). I do this because everyone I’ve ever run across who has done this has lost their faith by the third reading with one exception whose doubts kicked in big time during the fourth.

It’s a fair challenge and few ever take me up on it which just tells me that they are indeed afraid to examine their faith more closely. Ironically, most who have read the buybull did for like reasons that I did — to get close to god and understand him better. I wound up understanding him better all right — understanding that he’s a big freaking scam and nothing more. When I was going to temple and taking the Hebrew and conversion classes with the serious intent of converting (I selected Conservative because I liked the middle of the road feel of it between two extremes as I almost always do in most things), it freaked out Gentiles (Jews were very supportive both ones belonging to the synagogue I attended and ones who went elsewhere). I’d be asked all the time who was Jesus then. I didn’t know as much way back then (this was some 29 years ago) about how questionable it is that Jesus even existed and I’d reply probably the best con man of all time.

So, yeah, not being challenged and refusing to be challenged play a huge factor in this. BTW, I also found buybull study groups to be very limited in scope and the content very monitored by the minister.

Fundie Troll, way to prove a lot of the theories put forth! Refusing to challenge your brain? Very good. LOL!

Go on take my challenge that I mentioned in the comment above which was probably too long for you:

To prove to yourself that your faith will survive it, I challenge you to read the Bible (you pick the version) cover to cover, skipping nothing, five times in a row (yes, I realize this will take years, I devoted an hour a night to it when I believed, you can give God an hour a day, right?) independent of your religious leader’s guidance though you are allowed to ask him questions about it?

Go on. Do it. And see if your faith remains strong. If you can’t give God that kind of faith, you might want to ask yourself why.

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise…so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

Yeah, that’s it.

Now I have to repair my irony meter again. Damn thing keeps busting…

Dave Silverman seems to be good at rattling off zingers, and not so good at making statements supportable by fact.

The plain truth of the matter is that clearly this was a test of broad understanding of many religions, not deep understanding of the Christian Bible, for example.

As such, atheists have a broad understanding of many different viewpoints on religion. Others have given lots of reasons for that to be so.

I also wanted to call him out on the factual inaccuracy of this zinger:

This is how they make a (tax free) living.

Religious institutions are indeed tax-free, as are all non-profits. But preachers and all other employees of the church still are required to pay income tax. If he doesn’t believe me, perhaps he can tell me why Kent Hovind is in prison.

Let’s not be too impressed by our “high” score on the survey. Atheists (and Mormons and Jews) correctly answered about 65 percent of some very basic questions about religion.

We only look good because everyone else did so poorly. On average, we’re slightly less ignorant than most Americans. BFD.

I thought it was because his faith wasn’t strong enough.

No. God’s just testing him.

maybe somebody has already said it, but: they don’t know about their faith because they are cowards. to me, that is the essence of religious belief. fear of death. fear of homosexuality. fear of being called a hypocrite or coward. fear of what science really means. needing to be in the company of like people in order to reinforce a false sense of bravado in life.

yes, i’ll just say it. i’m sick to death of believers telling me that my intolerance of superstition is a bad thing. even the nice ones. i’m intolerant of slavery, sexism, and homophobia as well. i see no reason why i shouldn’t be vocally intolerant of learned and willful ignorance, esp when that ignorance mostly supports projects which reduce or remove my civil and human rights.

Flynn’s “challenge hypothesis” makes more sense than Silverman’s claim that “reading the Bible makes people atheists.”

i think it depends on where you live. if you grew up like cassiek did, it’s a simple matter of recognizing mythology as mythology. but if you grew up in a place where “Jesus Loves You! This I Know” is the official religion, permeating into every aspect of society, reading the Bible can come as a big shock. many bible belt folks live in a type of Jeebus Disney land, in which there are no atheists, Muslims or Buddhists and the few there may be are seen a circus freaks. there is also little connection with the texts of their faith *in context* and the practice of it. i grew up in such an environment and even i, raised as an agnostic/disinterested in religion, was shocked to learn that Jews didn’t believe in the Christian constructs of heaven and hell. it wasn’t so much that i had been indoctrinated with Christian belief as it was utterly un-discussed. it was a “fact” of life in my childhood.

We only look good because everyone else did so poorly. On average, we’re slightly less ignorant than most Americans. BFD.

Yes, but the atheists did above average on something they don’t really care about. The theists did crappily on something they see as the bedrock of their existence.

Jeff:

Yes, but the atheists did above average on something they don’t really care about. The theists did crappily on something they see as the bedrock of their existence.

Except that’s not true at all.

Most American atheists don’t like religion, but given that we’re a minority who has to deal with religious people who oppose us, that most of us used to be religious people and learned a lot about our former religions as we deconverted, we’ve damn well come to care about religion.

It’s the believers who can afford to coast and go with the flow and not put much thought into their beliefs.

I had to add insult to injury. Religious people need a wake-up call. I added this to the comment section:

“Love it. Atheists know more about religion, and everything else. Belief in magical, wish-granting ghosts is certainly a symptom of mental issues. period. If you have these types of symptoms, seek help. I wouldn’t waste a second of my time debating specific passages from a book of myths and fables. Offended? Good! Gonna make a flaming comment, and threaten me with eternal damnation with the fiery goat-man? Go ahead…… but be prepared…. I’m going to point at you and laugh. Your voodoo has no real power in 2010, and it never had any real power….. ever. Religion is a mental illness, or at least a symptom.”

Jeff: “For us, it’s a cultural artifact.”

Or a thorn in the side.

Jeff: “For them, it’s a raison d’être.”

I think you overestimate the extent to which most believers regard their religion as a reason for being.

Adding my two cents in…

As a believer, I was a pretty lukewarm one. I barely read the Bible, nor went to church. I did however believe that there was some kind of truth in what was proposed by priests, monks and churches, and it was reflected in the beliefs of good people.

As I started to consider the factual questions, I suddenly became fascinated on how people could in fact believe so wholeheartedly in what was by then to me total nonsense!

It may be that, for some atheists the additional knowledge is an attempt to understand the apparently ludicrous nature of religious belief.