Old-Time Religion

By David Ruenzel

Poll after poll has demonstrated that among the Western industrialized nations, Americans are the most religious. As the English once believed in the supremacy of the British Empire, so do Americans--90 percent of them--believe in God. But the small yet growing numbers of public school teachers who teach about religion say religious belief, at least among their students, is as shallow as it is wide. And their lack of understanding about religion seems to confirm that.

"I'm shocked by their lack of knowledge," says history teacher Jennifer Norton of Argonaut High School in Jackson, Calif. "As a pretest, I asked them to describe three major world religions, and they mentioned Catholics, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses. And a lot of them don't think Catholics are Christians."

Vinetta Bell, who teaches a course on "The Bible in History" at William G. Enlou High School in Raleigh, N.C., says: "I was surprised by their lack of familiarity with the basic Bible stories--Jonah, Ruth, Esther, especially since most of them are conservative Christians. They have a superficial idea of what the Bible is, thinking it was the 1611 King James Protestant Bible that came down miraculously through the ages. They don't realize that no one was walking with Jesus with a...