It’s like The Who in Cincinnati all over again: 19 states, despairing over their traditional places in the 2008 presidential primary schedule and fearing irrelevance, are currently stampeding to leapfrog the process and hold their primaries earlier and simultaneously, which, if successful, will result in what many are already calling “Tsunami Tuesday,” an ultra-mega-primary to be held on Feb. 5. This in turn has prompted states whose primaries usually come early to propose even earlier primaries, and Iowa and New Hampshire, who have laws on the books stating that their wingdings must come first, are now talking seriously about kicking off the 2008 election cycle this December. Happy Holidays!

Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention already knows that the race is in full swing now, with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama leading a pack of Democratic candidates once again frantically tap-dancing to condemn the war but not the military and a horde of Republicans just praying for a happy accident to happen to Fred Thompson. Like it or not, we have a two-year presidential election cycle now, which means a whole extra year of candidates proposing policies they couldn’t possibly enact and artfully misremembering their own records.

Let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? Exit polls from the 2000 and 2004 elections showed that the issue that matters most to Americans is “values,” i.e., which candidate pays the most convincing lip service to family, flag and God. Never mind that any candidate who has cut enough back-room deals to be viable presidential meat is basically the devil’s bitch: the candidate who wins is the one who best sounds like he or she just stepped off the bus home from Bible camp. Questions of imperialistic foreign policy, a rapidly warming planet, the increasing marginalization of the working class, a spiraling deficit, and a health-care crisis about to go all Titanic on us will inevitably take a back seat to “What would Jesus do?”

What Would He Do?

The interesting thing about this is that, while 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, most of them have little more than a vague notion of what Jesus would do. Only a third of us know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and half of us cannot name even one of the four Gospels or the first book of the Bible. In the midst of ongoing litigation over displaying the Ten Commandments in government buildings, most Americans, even those involved in the fight, can’t name all 10. Given the sheer number of religious issues dividing the nation - school prayer; creationism, evolution and “intelligent design;” abortion; stem cell research; same-sex marriage; and our continuing adventures in the Middle East - it is distressing, to say the least, just how ignorant we Americans are of even the basic tenets of our own supposedly Judeo-Christian ethic, much less the other faiths that are rapidly growing within our borders and with which we must deal around the world.

Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero tackles this crisis in his remarkable book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn’t (HarperCollins, 2007). And it is a crisis:

“Unfortunately, U.S. citizens today lack this religious literacy. As a result, they are too easily swayed by demagogues on the left or the right. Few Americans are able to challenge claims made by politicians or pundits about Islam’s place in the war on terrorism or what the Bible says about homosexuality. This ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).”

In other words, without a foundation of education about world religions, the potential consequences run the gamut from the merely annoying (the endless nattering over Bill O’Reilly’s so-called “War on Christmas”) to the fatal (the numerous post-9/11 attacks on innocent Muslims in America, or on people perceived to be Muslims, such as Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh shot dead in Arizona by a vigilante who thought Muslims wore turbans). Religion is a fundamental component of any dealings we have with the rest of the world. We cannot talk seriously about Chinese hegemony in Tibet unless we are familiar with Vajrayana Buddhism. The religious divide between India and Pakistan now has a nuclear threat behind it. We can’t negotiate peace in the Middle East, if that’s even possible, without knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, and we have absolutely no business sending American flesh and blood in there without a firm grounding in Islamic culture and the implications of jihad.

Knowledge is All

If one agrees that religious ignorance is a widespread and dangerous problem in need of remedying, then Prothero’s book is a good place to start. His assessment of the sorry state of religious knowledge in America - it’s not just a Bill and Ted joke: 10 percent of Americans actually believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife - is a serious eye-opener, and he follows it with a crash course in just where we lost our grasp of the materials we profess to revere. Prothero asserts that where once rote knowledge of the Bible was not only compulsory but taught with more vigor than mathematics, the rise of the charismatic sects in opposition to stern Calvinism in the 19th century ushered in a philosophy wherein personal experience of God became more important than chapter and verse. In this revolution, a spirit of know-nothingism prevailed, and, in certain circles, the lack of formal biblical training was a point of pride. This spirit is still very much in flower today as much of what passes for Bible study in many Protestant churches is conducted under the auspices of “Christian living,” the application of sectarian principles to secular concerns - who would Jesus want me to vote for? who would God want me to take to the prom? - rather than actual discourse over the content of the Bible.

Prothero’s focus is heavily weighted toward the issues of American Christianity, but that’s fair considering the overwhelming influence of Christian doctrine on the culture and policies of the nation. Let’s face it, if we cannot claim a solid grasp of even the basic writings of our own dominant religion, how can we even hope to understand, much less influence, the rest of the nation and the world? In any case, while Prothero’s discourse on the problem occupies the first half of the book, the second half consists of “A Dictionary of Religious Literacy,” a broad primer to the various religions, sects and concepts currently in play on the world stage. While by no means comprehensive (Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions is probably still the best single volume for beginning one’s study of comparative religion), Prothero’s dictionary is enough to illustrate just how much the reader knows or does not know about the state of faith in 2007.

And this knowledge is vital, as our interests abroad depend so heavily upon just how willing we are to subvert the cultures of other nations, as at home scriptural interpretation determines so many of our domestic policies, and as, across the board, our basic lack of understanding of each other continues to have dire and often deadly consequences. As we spend the next year and change watching our presidential aspirants wave their Bibles for our benefit, it behooves us to ask whether or not they’ve actually read them.

John G. Nettles