… any better than anyone else. (And worse than liberal catholics!)
I’m not sure how I missed news of this news conference, but I don’t recall seeing it discussed. Apologies if I’m going over old ground. This is the most interesting summary:
Fundamentalists, or those who take a literal view of Scripture, do not know more about the Bible than anyone else. In fact, researchers said, it’s readers whose attitudes they described as “critical,” meaning that they see the Bible as the word of God but in need of interpretation, who are over-represented at the highest levels of Biblical literacy. In other words, fundamentalists actually score lower on basic Biblical awareness.
But this observation runs it a close second:
There is no apparent correlation between reading the Bible and any particular political orientation. In other words, it’s not the case that the more someone reads the Bible, the more likely they are to be a political conservative or liberal.
I’d love to see the questions that were actually asked and the methodology employed. If true, however, it may suggest very controversially that not only does “believing the Bible” function as a shibboleth rather than anything else, but that the scriptures may exercise very little power over the biblically literate and illiterate alike. If Bible reading and knowledge has no correlation with political affiliation, that would seem to be suggested.
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