Importance of Religious Literacy
To begin her talk about religious illiteracy, Diane Moore, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, listed a few of the answers students at a Boston-area university recently gave in response to basic religious questions.
Asked what language Jesus spoke, the majority of students said English. Asked about Sodom and Gomorrah, they identified them as a married couple in the Bible.
Addressing NMH students and faculty on January 13, Moore said that if they didn’t know why those answers were wrong, they had some learning to do, too.
Moore’s State of the World address, held at Raymond Concert Hall to accommodate the audience, had a long title (“Religion Beyond Fundamentalisms: The Importance of Religious Literacy in the 21st Century”) but a basic premise: religions are not very well understood, but understanding them is essential.
To emphasize her point, Moore presented several common examples of religions being portrayed overly simplistically.
Is Islam a religion exclusively of terrorism? No, Moore said. Neither is it a religion exclusively of love and peace, she said. Instead, it is a combination of many ideas, traditions and constantly evolving interpretations, the same as religions such as Hinduism, Christianity and Buddhism.
But even basic tenants, like the 10 commandments of Christianity, five pillars of Islam or the four noble truths of Buddhism, are not well or widely understood, said Moore.
Among the host of reasons why religious illiteracy exists, Moore said some of the most common included a hesitancy to explore what are often seen as intensely private practices; the idea that teaching classes about religion would be akin to proselytizing; and the basic – but mistaken – assumptions that religions could be “good” or “bad,” but were always uniform and static.
Compounding the problem were the strong, often-unconscious assumptions teachers and students often had about certain religions, she said, and the tendency to defer to religious leaders as experts in entire religious traditions.
“We also need to understand the difference between religious studies and theology and faith communities,” Moore said, adding that faith leaders are typically expert only in their theology—not in religious studies.
Although religious illiteracy often fueled prejudice and antagonism, Moore said that literacy could foster understanding and cooperation. In a world of nuclear proliferation and global warming, she suggested that anything other than religious literacy is reckless.
Religious literacy, she said, involved a basic understanding of history, central texts, beliefs, practices and contexts of multiple religions.
“We teach religion as separate but it is connected,” Moore said. Religion, she said, represents the full range of human experience and behavior—“everything from the heinous to the heroic.”
“There’s an intellectual obligation, but also a huge civic obligation to understand [world religions],” she said.
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