According to Smith, “the language and therefore experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist, and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward.”

One of the stories from the departmental lore where I work comes from a colleague who a few years ago had stopped into a barbershop for a haircut. He noticed a breaking news story on the shop’s TV and asked the barber what was happening. The barber responded by saying, “Oh, it’s just an event somewhere over there in Islam.” So now, whenever we crack departmental jokes about ignorance, the phrase “somewhere over there in Islam” inevitably makes an appearance.

I am guessing that members of the American Society of Church History are all too familiar with Americans’ ignorance of the world and its history. We probably react to this reality in different ways. We might wring our hands. We might disregard ignorance as something that can’t be helped. Personally, my temptation is to turn to humor in the face of this ignorance, though I don’t know if this is healthy, since it can breed cynicism and self-righteousness.

Yet it provokes me to ask a couple of questions. Is there anything we can do to help the situation? Do we have a responsibility to try to do more to address this ignorance?

We devote ourselves to scholarship and teaching, projects that certainly play a role in the expansion of knowledge and understanding. But we are probably also aware that most of the work we do does not seep through to the public at large.

The findings of a Pew Research poll on Americans’ religious knowledge bear this out. The 2010 poll found that about half of all Americans did not know that Martin Luther inspired the Reformation or that Joseph Smith was Mormon. Only 40% knew that Catholicism teaches that during communion the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Close to 90% could not connect Jonathan Edwards to the First Great Awakening.

The problem, of course, extends beyond just factual knowledge. Ignorance also shapes perceptions of the current religious composition of the United States (and the world), a reality that cannot help but shape the ways that Americans engage one another. According to a study by Grey Matter, “only 56% of all Americans can give any sort of substantive definition of ‘evangelical,’ beyond a simple ‘I don’t know’ or just criticism or invective.” To make matters worse, that 56% included Americans who gave substantive definitions that completely missed the mark, such as stating that evangelicals were strict Catholics or that they worshiped angels.

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