What, we asked, do the results of Pew’s quiz tell us about knowledge—and ignorance—of religion in the United States? And how important is the sort of religious knowledge that the survey tested to American public life?

Our respondents are:

Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

Penny Edgell, Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Chair of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California, Berkeley

Paul Lichterman, Professor of Sociology and Religion, University of Southern California

Vincent Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia State University

Kathryn Lofton, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Yale University

Andrew Perrin, Associate Professor, Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

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Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. Since many Americans apparently do not know some of these things, it is concluded that they are ignorant not only of other people’s religions, but also of their own. Predictably, the survey’s release has been met with widespread hand-wringing about Americans’ “religious illiteracy”: “Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans,” was the headline in the New York Times.

In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion. If, for example, 45 percent of U.S. Catholics “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,” then perhaps it is a mistake simply to identify Catholicism with what Catholic bishops say it is. To conclude that Americans are “uninformed” about “their own traditions” betrays a subtle bias in favor of elites and begs the question of what constitutes one’s “own” religion: are we “illiterate,” or do we simply disagree about what belongs in the “canon”?

Still, whatever one’s standard, there is almost certainly room for improvement. After pronouncing Americans “deeply ignorant about religion,” the New York Times was obliged to issue the following correction: “An article on Tuesday about a poll in which Americans fared poorly in answering questions about religion misspelled the name of a beatified Roman Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was Mother Teresa, not Theresa.”

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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

As interesting as I found the Pew results, I found even more suggestive the responses they generated. There were the tender-hearted ones, fearful that we will never overcome our rancor without better testing. There were the triumphalists, mocking the “Christianists” so manifestly out of touch with their tradition. Closer to home, we witness familiar academic rituals: calls for greater religious literacy or, more provocatively, to consider the differential modes by which “religion” is established.

I wonder, however, whether tests on just about any subject would produce similar results. Would our knowledge of, say, PEN/Faulkner award winners be statistically different? Surely, novels are less obviously tied to public life than religions, whose importance is obviously central to our moment. Yet it may be that what’s significant in these findings is not people’s fluency with data about “religion” but something more.

While I certainly wish that more Americans knew more things about religions, I have no confidence that this would improve public life, as implied in many responses. Instead of explaining away the ongoing outrage that constitutes public life by pointing to religious illiteracy alone, we might also consider what this survey cannot capture. What’s striking is not that citizens are uninterested in knowledge about religion but instead that we gather data incessantly, doing so not in the service of shared civic projects but as fuel for indignation, each decontextualized datum rendered an endorsement of our self-fashioning. “Knowledge” about religion here may not link up to anything outside itself but simply keep sturdy those obstacles between us as the particulars wash away. Even as I tell myself that tomorrow’s midterm will in some way avail my students in public life, I fear that their test scores may matter little in a time of digital isolation, conspiratorial rage, and an endless smile which tells us not to worry.

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John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

Perhaps the most surprising result from the Pew survey is that most Catholics and Protestants appear not to understand the most basic elements of their own theology. 41% of Catholics incorrectly thought that their communion ritual did not transform the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Only 19% of Protestants knew that Protestants were the group that ‘traditionally teaches that salvation comes from faith alone.’ And yet these issues were precisely those over which schisms spread and blood was spilled. Why, then, have they sunk from salience in the minds of the faithful?

The answer may be that precisely because these issues divide people, ministers choose to play them down in their services. My Catholic students know that their church teaches transubstantiation (that the wafer and water are transformed), but they also report that it would be easy to miss this during the service. Anglicans (or Episcopalians) include those who believe in transubstantiation and those who do not, so the issue is deliberately fudged in those churches, and what Catholic priest would mind a few converts?

Protestant theologies have their own problems. Presbyterians may officially follow Calvin in his doctrine of strict predestination, but saying ‘you cannot do anything about your salvation’ hardly encourages people to come to church. Accordingly, it is little mentioned. And, to return to the survey question, emphasizing Sola Fide may be theologically correct for a Lutheran or a Methodist, but suggesting that good works won’t hurt on Judgment Day surely would seem like the pragmatically best message to put forward. (Some respondents also may have been puzzled by the absence of any mention of “grace.”)

In the end, why do we make much of church-goers’ failure to get the theology right? Is ‘having correct beliefs’ the main point of religion? There may be socially useful reasons to play that down in favor of encouraging shared values: compassion, service, and social justice.

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Sociology Department, University of New Hampshire

The Pew Forum’s recent survey documents major gaps in Americans’ knowledge of basic religious tenets. As the news accounts emphasize, Catholics and Protestants are far less knowledgeable than their minority Jewish and Mormon peers, and atheists know the most. As someone who defends the thesis that faith and reason are not only compatible but mutually influential in religious adherents’ lives, these data do not help my case. On the other hand, I can’t say I am too surprised by the findings. There are a couple of reasons why not. One, surveys of Americans’ civic knowledge also show remarkably high levels of ignorance and uncertainty about the basic functions of American government. Yet, this does not prevent Americans from having strong political opinions and vigorously participating in political debates. Two, religion as it is lived is really more about everyday habits and sensibility than religious knowledge. Thus, it is instructive that 45 percent of Pew interviewees think (incorrectly) that “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is one of the Ten Commandments. In practice, however, this adage aptly summarizes all the commandments, and hence it makes practical sense that respondents would equate it with the Commandments.

Nevertheless, given the contemporary relevance of religious issues, the evidence even among college graduates of major gaps in religious knowledge does not bode well for the substance and tenor of public discourse. The fact that approximately two-thirds of Americans think that public schools are prohibited from teaching classes on comparative religion suggests that many schools probably don’t teach it, and that, if they were to, the move would not be without controversy. Yet, religious pluralism requires a basic knowledge of others’ traditions even if it does not dissolve disagreements among diverse adherents. By the same token, it is hard to have faith in the religious socialization of new cohorts of Christians if so many of their parents are ignorant of their respective denominations’ distinctive beliefs.

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Penny Edgell, Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

It’s time to play the devil’s advocate—a term originating in Catholic Church history for the canon lawyer appointed during the canonization process to try to poke holes in the candidate’s case. If that question had been on the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, probably about as many people would have known that as knew that Maimonides was Jewish (8 percent).

I think there are wrong reasons and right reasons to be concerned about religious ignorance.

It is wrong to think that we must know the details regarding other people’s religion because religion motivates social action in a straightforward way. (For example, evangelical doctrine and popular culture abhors divorce, but evangelicals divorce at higher rates than do mainline Protestants.) And it is wrong to conclude that people do not care about their own religion because they can’t answer these kinds of questions. It’s crucial to remember that religion is more than doctrine. People care about it, and participate in its organized forms, for a variety of reasons, including the aesthetic and emotional appeal of ritual and the sense of community it provides.

The right reason to be concerned, it seems to me, has to do with a more general fragmentation of our common cultural references and our sense of history, fostered by a variety of factors including the proliferation, globalization, and niching of the media that deliver information. People do not know who Maimonides was, I think, for the same reason they do not know the origin of “devil’s advocate.” Our culture has become more pluralistic, and people draw upon its elements in the way of the bricoleur to construct a web of meanings that is flexible, contextually activated, and what we would call “post-modern” (though I suspect Latour was right and we were never as “modern” as some thought we were). Perhaps more fundamental, the rules that shape how the bricoleur selects the various elements have also changed. Religion is far less formative of our public discourse and culture in the deep, constitutive way that it was even as recently as the postwar period, due in large part to the rise of neo-liberalism. These changes are important, and not well understood, and more difficult to talk about than simply chiding “the American public” for its (completely unsurprising) ignorance.

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Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Chair of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University

I suspect, and I am not sure I should say this, that if we ask Americans a range of questions about matters that extend beyond their immediate horizons, we would be somewhat amazed by the blind spots in our thinking. Ignorance about religion might very well extend to ignorance about geopolitical concerns or about other cultures generally. What is striking, and simultaneously disturbing, is the degree to which our comfort and certainty about ourselves as Americans and about the world we inhabit enable us to settle into a kind of willful ignorance. So I am not inclined to single out religion in this regard; something more fundamental has been revealed.

To take seriously the results of the Pew quiz leads us to question the substance of our national commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism.

If our knowledge of other religions (even our own) is shoddy, then what constitutes the substance of our toleration of others? Is it simply a procedural concern? And, more importantly, if we fail to know basic facts about others, do we make it easier to retreat into the comfort of insular spaces, deaf to the claims of others? Do we expect, at the end of the day, no matter our public announcements to the contrary, that all others should sound and believe as the majority of Americans do? Is that the price of entry into the public domain?

Ignorance heralds, more often than not, intolerance; it also can aid in the sanctification of bigotry. Hopefully, the Pew study can help us see this and help us change.

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David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California, Berkeley

The Pew Study reveals how badly the United States needs a more candid, public discussion of religious ideas. Too often, religious utterances are given a “pass,” with the result that obscurantist ideas flourish all the more. This society would be much better off if religious believers whose ideas are the most consistent with modern standards of cognitive plausibility would join non-believers in actually criticizing the ideas that the New Atheists, for all of their throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater mistakes, are correct to lampoon. The real fault-line in American religious discourse is not between believers and non-believers. Rather, it is between the ignorant and the knowledgeable. Many educated non-believers share with believers an appreciation for religion’s role in providing structures of meaning and communities of belonging. There is a natural alliance across the believer-non-believer divide predicated on knowledge. The ignorance revealed by the Pew Study is partly the result of the failure of the relevant educated parties to engage the public in honest, sustained conversation about religious issues. This need not be done in an arrogant or patronizing manner. The key is direct, respectful, open engagement. Not everyone will listen, but lots will if given a chance. Truth is a powerful, shared ideal. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” said a great preacher (John 8:32), even if his notion of what was true, specifically (Jesus was trying to get Jews to give up Judaism and to support his monomaniacal ministry), is unpersuasive. Americans knowledgeable about religion have too often withheld what they know for fear of causing offense. Speak up, for Christ’s sake (oops . . . sorry; I mean, for the sake of all of us).

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Paul Lichterman, Professor of Sociology and Religion, University of Southern California

A headline summary of Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Knowledge survey might read “Grim prospects for evangelical Protestantism.” How else do we make sense of the fact that after decades of growing churches, multi-million dollar television ministries, bestselling book series—and VeggieTales to boot—only 28 percent of white evangelicals answered correctly that Protestantism teaches salvation through faith alone?  Combine that with the finding that nearly twice as many of that same population know that the Koran is Islam’s holy book, and we arrive all too easily at the crudest, culture-warring claims about rising Islam’s threat to Christian values. So what can we really take away from this survey? Scholars have long held that religion is America’s common coin, that it brings us together. But if it is that aspect of religion that would make the Pew findings concern us, the survey is not measuring it. The survey tapped a kind of cultural literacy that matters more to religious professionals than other people even in a still relatively religious country. If regard for religion somehow unites Americans, smooths differences, or wins elections, it’s not the religion of Sunday school primers or comparative beliefs courses in college. What if the survey had asked, “Is religion a matter of deeply personal faith?” or, “Is religion mostly a matter of being a good person and living a life worth modeling?” Probably much larger numbers, across religion and non-religion, would have answered “yes,” the correct answer in view of the American cultural mainstream. Of course this answer would show little more inter-religious knowledge or sensitivity than the results Pew obtained. But it would represent a more widespread kind of cultural literacy that, for better or worse, may unite Americans, smooth over our differences, and even win elections, in some places some of the time.

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Vincent Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia State University

Philosophers talk about two sorts of knowledge. On the one hand, knowledge-that is the belief a certain proposition is true: a triangle has three sides, Atlanta is in the South, or the world is round. On the other hand, knowledge-how is an ability: knowing how to swim, or how to bake a cake, or how to speak a foreign language.

The Pew Forum’s Religious Knowledge Survey examines one type of religious knowledge: knowledge-that. Respondents were asked whether certain propositions about world religions were true. But it is an open question whether this really is the sort of knowledge that we have in mind when we are talking about religious knowledge. At least sometimes, it seems like we mean knowledge-how.

Knowledge-how is occasionally conveyed in a way that looks like knowledge-that. We make an instruction manual intended to convey how to swim, or how to bake a cake, or how to speak a foreign language. But certainly we don’t confuse mastery of the instruction manual with knowing how to do the activity itself. This translation into knowledge-that is effected for certain pragmatic reasons, such as pedagogy or explanation. I wonder whether the high rates of religious knowledge found among atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons can be attributed to the frequency at which explanations must be given, explicitly when asked or implicitly to themselves—mutatis mutandis for the low rates among Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics.

While one response is to devise measures of religious knowledge-how (as S. Brent Plate suggests in the jargon of embodiment), I wonder whether religious knowledge might actually be a form of knowledge that resists reduction to either knowledge-how or knowledge-that. If these are secularist reductions, religious knowledge from the atheist’s perspective, what might the post-secular alternative look like?

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Kathryn Lofton, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Yale University

If you’re searching for ignorance, it is never hard to find. The question for us is the meaning of a given ignorance. If concertgoers today can’t identify Big Mama Thornton, does this make them ignorant of rock history? Or does it suggest that the interviewers have different definitions of rock, and different definitions of knowledge, than that of those fans? As a scholar of religious studies, I know I should be happy about this recent set of revelations from Pew, since it offers attention-grabbing openers for grant applications and renewed stakes to departmental pleas for funding. But for me deploying such statistically formatted failures of religious literacy seems a rather bad premise for arguments on behalf of our work. Is it the job of scholarship to teach Catholics what that wafer is? Is it the job of our courses to explain that Maimonides was Jewish, or that Indonesia is largely Muslim? It seems worrisome to imagine that our classes explain that the wafer means any one thing, or that ‘Jewish’ is a neat marker of any one person. Of course, Pew didn’t seek to supply legitimacy to my or our academic ventures, and here I may be anticipating argumentative applications that never will transpire. For now, I can only observe that a survey which pits religious groups against one another in a Quiz Bowl, and which imagines that praying Protestants ought to know the authority of Martin Luther, tell me very little about religious knowledge, and tell me even less about what the humanities do to serve such a surveyed public. It may be that we live in a budgetary time that begs for base descriptions of our basic (un)knowing. I would only warn that the minute we believe the answers we offer begin with multiple choice questions is the same minute when we cede our complexity to that formation of ignorance.

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Andrew Perrin, Associate Professor, Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Essentially, my answer to the “how important” question is “not very.” Relatively secular readers, particularly those hostile to religion, are likely to delight in the finding that, to oversimplify, many religious people don’t even know what it is they believe. But this begs the question of to what extent religious experience and even belief are essentially about a catechism, that is, a set of precepts agreed to in much the same way one might agree with precepts of science or sociological analysis. My view is that religious belonging is really not much at all about these. It is mostly about participation in a community of believers—even if the community isn’t quite sure what it believes in! The unwritten premise of the survey is that belief ought to be individual, considered, and fully-informed. But that premise fits neither religious experience nor human subjectivity over the long term. Thus to ask these questions in this way is to presume a particular kind of religious subject that is largely nonexistent, then to take pleasure in clucking over its nonexistence.

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James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

I had two initial reactions to reports about this survey. The first was cynical: the inability of Americans to articulate the particularities of even their own religious faith sort of confirms the isomorphism of American religion—that the “religion” of this “deeply religious” country is, at the end of the day, just a functional deism necessary to sustain American civil religion.

My second reaction was more critical, and perhaps more charitable: I continue to be suspicious of such surveys and reports precisely because they reduce religion to “knowledge.” Or, more specifically, they reduce religion to the sort of quantifiable knowledge that can be measured by a survey instrument, crunched with statistical analysis, and then be presented in colorful pie charts that carry an air of scientificity.

But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.

In this vein, I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules. Surveys like this mistakenly assume that everyone who plays the game (of religion) can also articulate the rules. I think Charles Taylor gives us good reason to be suspicious of such assumptions.

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The commentary surrounding Governor Sarah Palin’s creationism smacks of the same sort of pubescent snort. Indeed, the most cited Palin creationist factoid is a farce, an embarrassment to those who want to protect the methodological scrutiny of science. “God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan,” wrote one Internet blogger, satirizing Palin’s imagined fundamentalism. Not long after, many of America’s brightest cultural critics (and, of course, Matt Damon) began using the unverified “dinosaurs” motif as a comic embellishment. This is despite the fact that Palin had said little about creationism, or dinosaurs, other than what reporters borrowed from a 2006 Anchorage Daily News article. In that article, Palin presented a flagrantly nonpartisan position toward the subject. “My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution,” she said. “He would show us fossils and say, ‘How old do you think these are?’” When asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin said, “I believe we have a creator.” According to Alaskan reporter Tom Kizzia, Palin would not say whether her belief also allowed her to accept the theory of evolution as fact, saying instead that she thought both creationism and evolution should be taught in school. “Teach both,” she said in a televised debate. “You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

This pose of pedagogical equitability is, of course, a recognizable rally to those in the creation-science movement. But with such limited information, such inadequate first-person testimonial, we can say little, as analysts and observers, about the precise nature of Palin’s Christian faith and correlating evolutionary imagination. “I’m not going to pretend,” continued Palin in 2006, “I know how all this came to be.” Such relatable humility before divinity has been Palin’s main theological articulation thus far. That, plus her taste for martial metaphor, is all the RNC has allowed her to exhibit. Otherwise, she is mere suppositional window dressing, the zealot without yet ostensible zealotry.

But we’ll go after the subject anyway, deriving from scratchy YouTube clips complex preacher postulates and theological profiles. We do this because that’s what we do, squeezing from a single strawberry the dream of a full jar of blatherskite jam. For many academics, this is the precise reason participation in public intellectual work is so problematic, since it tugs one into that problematic process of pressing against nothing (shards of observation in the Anchorage Daily News, for example) for the deadline of something (anything, any thing at all). Yet the appearance of popular epistemologies in the public sphere tugs at academic attention, offering as they do moments of diluted intellectual commentary. To take another example: springtime observers of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign may recall the controversy surrounding his pastor and, in particular, the sense that beneath the veneer of genial Obama lay the raging heart of an Afrocentrist. This impression derived largely from secondhand tirades by Jeremiah Wright, former Senior Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) in Chicago. Jeremiah Wright’s recorded race pride reintroduced Afrocentric discourse into the heart of the presidential contest, begging voters to wonder wildly about an epistemological system that seemed (from media representation) at best comically archaic and, at worst, violently provocative. As historians have explained, Afrocentrism is a continuous thread within African American popular and academic histories, with origins in the eighteenth century continuing well into the twenty-first, and including proponents from Olaudah Equiano to Cheikh Anta Diop, George Washington Williams to Asa Hilliard. What binds this long chain of (sometimes) folk narrative and (sometimes) careful historicizing is a commitment to reply, insistently, to Eurocentric outlines of civilization and progress. “The Afrocentric tradition,” wrote Wilson Jeremiah Moses in his 1998 study Afrotopia, “is related to utopian ideas of progress because it promises a glorious destiny for African people.”

The parallels between these two discourses—Afrocentrism and creationism—are not limited to the comedy they supply, nor to the censoriousness they inspire. Both Afrocentrism and creationism emerged from benighted populations seeking alternatives to ideas propagated by the modern (white) research (atheist) university. Both literatures developed heavy historiographies using discourses of reason, evidence, and analysis that mimicked selections from the scientific and historical processes which were being refined (and still debated) in those aforementioned universities. And both Afrocentrism and creationism were unabashed about the social ideologies which their research was to serve: uplift of the race among all oppression, uplift of God’s people among all creatures, great and Simian. Although “creationism” and “Afrocentricism” suggest concepts easily distilled into bullet point ideologies, their animating despair and disgust with white historiography and atheist science have produced wide-ranging and diffuse print cultures, infusing many local knowledge communities with new chronologies, debatable theories of civilization, and clever reworkings of postmodern epistemology.

My college teacher would call these ideologies myths, and would encourage us to seek the rituals concocted to enact (recreate and confirm) the substance of their binary oppositions and fantastical creatures. For our political leaders, a key rite of passage has become an interrogation of how thoroughly their myths, their “worldview” (to borrow from Palin’s language) affects and infuses their legislative actions. Barack Obama was forced to wrestle, publicly, with whether the myths of his pastor were evident in his aspirant political rituals. I remain uncertain as to whether this onslaught, and the sacrificial takedown of Wright, brought dignity or embarrassment to the history of ideas. It seems dangerous argumentative waters to imagine candidates must make transparent all their functioning myths, all their enduring premises. I say this because the correlation between what we believe and what we do (what we govern) has yet to be intellectually demonstrated as coherent or demonstrably consistent, across the political spectrum.

Nonetheless, there was Barack Obama, speaking on March 18, 2008 of his “former” pastor’s “distorted views.” Speaking, too, about the role of race in his own identity formation, in his own political consciousness, and in the history of his nation he wanted very much to lead. Obama’s speech on race was his counter-narrative to the Afrotopias of his forefathers. It was also his to explain how Wright’s Afrocentrism could not be deleted from the record. “To simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

There is something to be said for that command performance, for the candidates forced into a position where they must show themselves as thinkers, as believers, as members of social movements often inexplicable to those outside and estranged from the disappointment and alienation which congeals those enclaves. After all, that is the executive expectation set before their runs toward elected office. Now creationism makes a brief shadowy show, still unsubstantiated, mocked and feared by those flailing in the vagaries of Dover, Pennsylvania and the Institute for Creation Research. Sarah Palin owes it to her constituents, and to her critics, to account for this accounting, for the ways she reconciled her science teacher father and Pentecostal pastor. If she cannot make an argument as to what role her beliefs play in her framing of the world, in her imagination of the American (scientific, political, and evolutionary) possibility, then she will have not only demonstrated definitively (with verifiable evidence) that she should not be the vice president of anything, but also that banning her, from universities or intellectual exposure, does nobody—not her, not creationists, and not the religions that produce it—any sort of intellectual good.

Later, University of California and other top schools began refusing to give incoming students credit for high school science courses that taught Intelligent Design. An association of Christian schools was not quiet, took their concerns to the courts, and brought a lawsuit against the University of California higher education system. The growing controversy over the role of religion in higher education led me to ask how top university scientists think they ought to respond to religiously based challenges to science.

I continued to raise this question as I crisscrossed the country over the past three years, completing 275 personal interviews with natural and social scientists at our nation’s top institutions of higher education. These interviews were a follow-up to a survey conducted with 1,646 scientists about their religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. I found that many scientists are not as anti-religion as volumes like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion might lead us to believe.

Indeed there were the expected atheists and agnostics. Yet, a surprising number of those who teach the sciences at the nation’s top universities are also part of a religious tradition (about 50%). These scientists approach religion and spirituality in diverse ways-ways often different from the faith found among the general public.

Surprisingly the majority of scientists (over 65%) are interested in matters of spirituality. And although some—following in the footsteps of Dawkins and other outspoken scientists—appear nearly hostile to religion, the majority of scientists at these top schools are simply confused about how they should deal with students who raise religious objections to science.

Part of this conundrum stems from what I began to call a secret spirituality, where scientists with faith feel uneasy talking about this aspect of their lives because of the perception that everyone around them is irreligious. On a plurality of occasions I found a science professor who was involved in a house of worship or interested in matters of spirituality yet was sure there was no one else in her department concerned about such pursuits. I would interview the colleague of such a religious scientist only to find out that she too was religious, also sure she would be laughed at by those in her department if others were to find out. While the majority of scientists are not religious, there is unexpectedly more openness to religious practice and ideas among scientists than even scientists themselves suspect.

To be sure, among all the scientists I interviewed, religious and non-religious alike, there was not one who thought Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution in a biology classroom. Yet, some had come up with creative ways to be what I call boundary pioneers, those who successfully negotiate the tensions between science and religion while keeping the integrity of both.

For example, a chemist routinely points her students to a website by a religious scientist who talks about how he maintains his faith while doing research that shows that the earth is billions of years old. Such efforts by scientists are made in order to transmit science more effectively to their religious students.

Many of the scientists I talked with thought that more still needs to be done to address the public’s lack of scientific understanding. Some thought these efforts could start within science curricula, with attempts to address issues related to public science directly.

One such example is a course on science and society taught by Phil Hockberger and Richard Miller to Northwestern University graduate students in biology. Among other topics, the course provides a brief overview of the historical debates between religion and science, the lives of religious and non-religious scientists, public challenges to science, and how to discuss science with a believing American public.

Over sixty Northwestern University graduate students attended an event where Hockberger presented findings from my study about levels of religiosity among academic scientists, showing the interest in these issues among students pursuing advanced degrees. The next day I led a roundtable discussion with some of the students who attended the lecture, during which we talked about topics like: why religion persists given what we know about science, various ways that religion might have an influence on science ethics, how to translate science to a largely religious American public, and a host of other issues.

Courses like this one would be a popular addition to social and natural science curricula in undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in a 1989 article for Parade Magazine that, “Ignorance of science threatens our economic well-being, national security, and the democratic process. We must do better.”

America’s elite universities are the central places where our future societal leaders learn-either implicitly or explicitly-how to think about the connection between religion and science. The thought scientists give to engaging the students in their classrooms about matters of public science-particularly the connection between science and religion-may be the backbone of how scientists engage with the broader public outside the university.

[For more from Elaine Howard Ecklund on Religion and Spirituality among University Scientists, visit the SSRC's essay forum on the Religious Engagements of American Undergraduates, and a related online guide, intended as an overview for college faculty and administrators.]