Joan of Arc, wife of Noah? Why Johnny can't quote scripture, and why it matters.

• Author: Balmer, Randall
• Position: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn't - Book review

Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--and Doesn't By Stephen Prothero HarperSanFrancisco, 304 pp.

Several years ago, as workers were preparing to cart away the 5,280-pound granite monument emblazoned with the Ten Commandments that Roy Moore had plopped into the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Building, one of the assembled protesters screamed, "Get your hands off my God!" Apparently, this poor soul had never seriously considered that one of the commandments etched into "Roy's Rock" had something to say about graven images.

Such is the sorry state of religious literacy in the United States today. Stephen Prothero, professor and chair of the religion department at Boston University and author of the acclaimed American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, argues in his remarkable new book, Religious Literacy, that Americans are woefully ignorant about the very matters of faith, religion, and theology that they purport to hold so dear. "Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion," he writes.

Consider the evidence. Many high school seniors believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, while a majority of Americans cannot name one of the four Gospels. Jay Leno asked his Tonight Show audience one night to name one of Jesus' twelve apostles; they came up empty. One in ten Americans believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and only one-third knows that Jesus (not Billy Graham) preached the Sermon on the Mount. One of the most frequently quoted passages from the Bible--"God helps those who help themselves'--actually appears nowhere in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.

And then there was the hapless Howard Dean. When asked during the course of the 2004 presidential primaries to name his favorite book in the New Testament, the former governor of Vermont stammered and finally blurted out "Job," a book located for centuries squarely in middle of the Hebrew scriptures.

All of this folly could be passed off as harmless ignorance, but Prothero argues otherwise. Scarcely a day passes when a story related to religion doesn't grace (pun intended) the front page of the daily newspaper, be it the Sunni-Shiite violence of Iraq's civil war, the sophomoric "pro-life" versus "pro-choice" bumper-sticker war, the persistent tensions between Muslims and Hindus in South Asia, the endless cycle of violence in Palestine, or even the debate over global warming.

Prothero is not the first to...