The United States has an organisation known as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which comes up with some interesting statistics from time to time.It recently surveyed a sample of 3,412 Americans on their religious knowledge. It found that atheists/agnostics, Jews and Mormons were better at religious knowledge than evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics.
When it came to questions on the Bible, Mormons did better than white evangelicals, with both of them ahead of black Protestants and atheists/agnostics.
Commentators bemoaned the fact that 37 per cent of Americans didn't know that Genesis was the first book in the Bible - but 63 per cent did.
More than half of the people who identified themselves as Protestants didn't know that Martin Luther was the man who inspired the Protestant Reformation; 45 per cent of Catholics didn't know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used during mass do not merely symbolise but actually become the body and blood of Christ; and only 19 per cent of Protestants and 28 per cent of white evangelicals knew that Protestants teach that salvation is through faith alone.
But 37 per cent of Americans read the Scriptures at least once a week, not counting worship services.
One wonders if people in the UK, with their greatly inferior numbers of church membership and church attendance, would do nearly so well.
