Do you know an Anglican from a Zoroastrian?

Yeah, probably. But a Unitarian from a Universalist? What are the five pillars of Islam? Unless you're a religion geek - don't look at me like that - the answers are hazy. And why shouldn't they be? Religion seems to be the one information sphere in this hyper-glutted age where less is more. If you're a believer, sniffing around in other traditions seems kind of... blasphemous. Right?

Author Stephen Prothero - chair of the religion department at Boston University - disagrees. In his new book Religious Literacy, Prothero says that what America needs most is a healthy dose of what many think we've got too much of already - religious schooling. From a book review in the Washington Post...

Americans are also the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world. Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

That's not me, right? Take this quiz from Prothero and find out.

Newsweek is also giving ink to the book. Here's a clip:

Americans are selling themselves short by remaining ignorant about basic religious history and texts, by not knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite or the name of Mormonism's holy book. "Given a political environment where religion is increasingly important, it's increasingly important to know something about religion," he says. "The payoff is a more involved [political] conversation."

The book proposes a solution that is at once controversial and familiar: teach religion in public schools.

I always felt like a lone voice position during the evolution-vs.-creationism debate. Of course we should teach creationism in the schools. Tell them about the Glittering World and the magic reed of the Dine. About Eros born from the egg of the Night in Homeric traditions. About the dreaming of sleeping Vishnu. And of course, about the Semitic traditions that shape Western civilization. American kids know so little of the world around them, and this is especially true of religion.

But somehow, as Susan Jacoby points out in her Post review,

a curriculum that would meet with the approval of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and nonreligious parents would probably be a worthless set of platitudes.

I'm a little more optimistic. A little knowledge is a wonderful thing.