How Forward Staff Members Fared on Pew Religion Quiz
You may not be smarter than a fifth grader, but do you know more about religion than the average American? The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life recently published results from a survey on Americans’ religious knowledge, which found that Jews are among the smartest religious group. (We knew we were smart, but reading about it never gets old.)
The “U.S. Religious Study Survey” found that atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons were among the highest scoring groups in the country, beating out evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics. The findings were based on 32 questions that Pew asked of 3,412 Americans age 18 and older, covering everything from history and world religion to core teachings to religious leaders. (Basically, the kind of questions you might find on “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”)
Here at the Forward, we decided to see how we measured up. We asked four employees — two Jews and two non-Jews — to take Pew’s Religious Knowledge Quiz, which includes 15 of the questions that appear in the survey. The result? If you work here, you automatically get every question right — except for the really embarrassed person who answered two questions incorrectly, but we won’t name names. Apparently, among journalists at least, knowledge is equal opportunity.
Confident you’d ace the test? Don’t be so sure. On average, Americans answered 16 questions correctly. The breakdown: Atheists and agnostics averaged 20.9 correct answers while Jews and Mormons had 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole averaged 16 correct answers, Catholics as a whole 14.7. Even after Pew adjusted for different education levels, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperformed other groups on the survey.
If you want to see how you measure up against us (and the country), turn off your iPods and cell phones and click here.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO