Summary Of Illiteracy By Stephen Prothero

There are three components in the video that Stephen Prothero discusses are; the religious illiteracy problem in the United States, the second is about the past and how it came to be, and finally, he talks about his proposal about the problem of illiteracy and how we can fix it.

Prothero starts by talking about how he had become interested in the topic of illiteracy of religion in united states. he talks about the experience he had with his students who were not very much aware of the main topics of religion as they should be. Then he created an evaluation test to give to his students at the beginning of class to see what they know. He was not very surprised when he found out that students knew very little about their religion, as well as

He says that he sees two civic or political issues on lack of understanding on world religions, one is domestic and the other in international. He states that domestically; two political parties that are now religious parties in a sense that politicians in both parties are eager to connect religion with public policy issues. Republicans have always used religion as a strategy in their campaigns, but Democrats only started when President Obama was running and they used the bible to take care of the foreigner. The politicians connect their public policy views with the bible. He states that since we have less literacy of religion in the united states it gives our representative more power to control us and we can’t distinguish between people who are genuinely trying to help us or those who are cynically using religion for political game. Per Prothero, we need to start having more conversations about religion that are informed and civil. If the citizens are uninformed, then what is the benefit of democracy. If we look abroad and we try to make sense of what is going on in the Middle East, Kashmir, china, Myanmar or Sri Lanka we can’t do that without the understanding of world religion. we must look at the Hinduism of India, or the Quran of Muslims where president Obama has visited. We had a huge wakeup call after 9/11 that we need to know something about Islam and we didn’t know anything.

He says we need to do a better job of educating ourselves and our children about the Bible as well as world religions. He believes it should start in public schools and we should have mandatory courses on bible and world religion. Some people believe that religions are different paths on the same mountain. Yes, there are difference but those differences don’t matter because at the top of the mountain no one knows what there is. Some might say compassion, while others may say it is about the mystical experience. Prothero does not agree when people say that where there are religious differences, there will be war. He says that yes, there are wars and it is horrible. However, just because there is existence of difference it doesn’t mean that there will be conflict. It also does not help when we say that religions are different paths of the same mountain. It is condescending to religious people and it handicaps us. It makes it impossible for us to understand religious conflicts in our world. He does not agree with the statement about paths and mountains and religions. He says the statement that all religions are the same fails to respect and appreciate the beauty of each religion. Because Christian will say why do they have to learn about Buddhism because it’s the same it’s just repeating what they already