The Pew Research Centre recently surveyed Americans on their religious knowledge – and for a country where religion is so prominent, the results were surprising. Self-described atheists and agnostics out-performed every other group, barring Jews. According to Pew:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.
Part of the quiz is online and you can take it for yourself right here and see how you compare with Americans who took the quiz by gender, religious belief and education. A word of warning, at least three of the questions have an obvious US angle, making them tricky for non-Americans to answer. But what the hell.
