Prothero on Religious Literacy

Pew Forum has published a transcript of a conference of journalists talking to Stephen Prothero about his book "Religious Literacy: What Every American Should Know." Here's a quote from Prothero talking about the role of religion in politics:

How do you engage these people if they're making religious arguments without knowing something about religion yourself? Now, of course, you can say as people like [John] Rawls and [Richard] Rorty and other political philosophers have said, this is wrong. We shouldn't have a politics that so infused with religion. Europeans, apparently, get along perfectly without it. Why do we have to be different? This is a violation in some way of at least the spirit of the First Amendment if not the letter of the First Amendment.

And my response is, well, that's all well and good, but we have the country that we have and people are going to be talking about religion on television. Politicians are going to be invoking religious reasons for their public policy stances, and we, as citizens and as journalists and academics, should know something about religion so we can engage them, and also so we can - I think, in some cases - so we can flush out the demagogues who actually don't have a religious argument but have a kind of religious invocation where they're sort of invoking God or invoking religion without actually having a religious argument underneath that invocation. So that's the domestic side.

The international side, to me, is even more urgent. This is where we have a situation like Madeline Albright observed in her book, The Mighty and the Almighty a couple of years ago. When she was secretary of state under [President] Clinton, she had a couple dozen economic advisers she could call any time of the day or night when she wanted to figure out what was going on with the economy of some country, or the political situation.

But she had really no religion adviser; she didn't have anybody that she could call up and say explain to me this Sunni-Shiite thing, or what's going on in Afghanistan with religion, or in Kashmir do people really care about Hinduism and Islam there and is that operative? Or, what's going on with the civil war in Sri Lanka between Hindus and Buddhists? I thought Buddhists were nice to each other; I didn't think that they liked to kill people for religious reasons. She didn't have anybody for that purpose.

She also observed in the book that there's no requirement for ambassadors to countries that have substantial religious populations, that they know anything about that religion. There's neither a prerequisite nor a policy of having U.S. ambassadors to Middle Eastern countries, for example, have any training in Islam, have even one course in Islam, even know how to spell the word "Koran" or be able to know one salient difference between Sunnis and Shiites, or for the ambassador to India to know that India is a Hindu country, or to know anything about Hinduism whatsoever.

I think one thing we've learned in terms of the Iraq War is that it doesn't look, at least to me, like our government knew much at all about Islam before we went into Iraq, and we had a sense that we understood the situation by understanding it in terms of ethnicity, in terms of politics, in terms of the economy. But I don't think we understood it as a religious place, where religious reasons mattered, where people were, perhaps in many cases, primarily motivated by religion.

And so we weren't motivated as a government to figure out what we knew and what we didn't know, particularly, what we didn't know. I think that one thing that this project on religious literacy can do is to make people aware of the stuff that they don't know, particularly politicians and particularly when it comes to international affairs and foreign policy.

I just opened a social networking group on Shelfari for Mainstream Baptists to discuss books they are reading. If you would like to read and discuss Prothero's book, follow this link and join my group (P.S. You don't have to be a Baptist to join the group).

Hat Tip to Dr. Barbara Boyd of Oklahoma University for recommending Prothero's book to me.