Religion test stumps America and Lang 2.0

New York City- A basic test on religious knowledge showed that many students at Lang, identified as atheists, might not know what the word "atheist" actually means.

The New York Times put out an article titled “Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans.” When further into the article it discusses how Americans are very religious people, however,they also are ignorant when it comes to their knowledge about religion itself. After reading this story it prompted me to take on the religion test in a smaller setting asking the students of Eugene Lang the six questions the NY Times posted on their website. The NY Times said that “those that scored the highest were atheists and agnostics," which I found particularly interesting when I did my own testing because out of the 25 people I asked 19 of them identified as atheists.

I used six basic questions that the NY Times put on their website as my template, short questions about multiple religions that anyone with a high school education should be able to answer. After polling two of my classes most of the reactions I got were “I feel so stupid” or “I need to read more about religion” which only fueled my quest for answers more. I wanted to know if the statistics the NY Times received from over 3,000 people was the same or close to the statistics I was getting from a smaller number of people. The NY Times reported that most people answered more than half the questions wrong, however, they asked 32 questions and I only asked six. Nonetheless my outcome was closely related to theirs.

“As study after study shows, religious people generally don’t know much about their own traditions either” an interesting point Mark Larrimore, a teacher at Lang and the head of the Religions Studies Department recently wrote about the NY Times article on his blog, “ It’s sort of shocking but- to this scholar of religion at least- not surprising”. This was a similar reaction to how I felt upon reading this article. Over the course of emails with Larrimore we talked about what questions the test raises and whom it effects.

“I think the survey, and the way its results have been reported, raise really interesting questions about what religious knowledge is, and why and to whom it matters; i'm not sure there's a single answer to those questions” Larrimore wrote to me. I can’t help but agree with this statement because religion affects each person differently as well as people understand religion in different ways.

With those questions impossible to be properly answered I decided to speak to another teacher at Lang who was involved with Religious Studies, Val Vinokur. When I asked him if he took the test he responded with “Yes, and I got all the questions right. But I better, I was the head of the religious studies department!” I continued to ask him how he felt about the test and what he thought the outcome means.

“I want to know if there is a necessary connection between knowing about world religions and being religious. In Judaism you learn about the religion and that is how you practice but that is not always the case in other religions.” Vinokur ended with saying “The outcome however, doesn’t surprise me that Atheists knew the most, because aren’t they the ones always trying to find out more?”

Although the test done at Eugene Lang had a similar outcome to the NY Times, one couldn’t really compare the two because the majority of people who took mine were atheists. There was not a diverse enough variety of people. However in saying that, it can be understood that the outcome was similar because more than half of the people got more than half of the answers wrong, in keeping with the statistics of the NY Times. The point was re-realized that religion is widely interpreted, people have different views, understand, and practice religion in all different forms so many of the questions proposed after conducting this test were unable to be answered.