There is little debate over whether religious literacy should be a core competency in higher education programs and courses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of interreligious and interfaith studies. The value of cultivating civic religious literacy among a society’s populace is not self-evident, but it is intuitive. Demonstrating the value of religious literacy is beyond the scope of this short article, but no less important. The aim of this article is simply to articulate what it means to be religiously literate. It is becoming clear that most Americans know very little about religions, even their own. In other words, most are religiously illiterate. This raises the question: what does being religiously literate entail?

In 2007, Stephen Prothero literally wrote the book on religious literacy in his New York Times Bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t. For Prothero, a religiously literate person has “the ability to understand and use in one’s day-to-day life the basic building blocks of religious traditions—their key terms, symbols, doctrines, practices, sayings, characters, metaphors, and narratives.”^[1] In 2012, Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen raised common concerns levied against Prothero’s proposal: 1) it focuses too much on facts (doctrines and texts), 2) it does not go far enough beyond focusing only on knowledge and beliefs of the world’s religions, and 3) Prothero’s “dictionary of religious literacy” is heavily weighted to Christianity, with over fifty-eight percent of its entries devoted to Christianity.^[2] Despite these criticisms, I find Prothero’s text valuable, and I will continue assigning it to my students. The Jacobsens nuance the idea of religious literacy by acknowledging that, like any other form of literacy, there are degrees or levels that fall across a spectrum. They admit that attaining “complete religious literacy is impossible.”^[3] In other words, it is not realistic to teach everyone about everything having to do with religion. Above all, for the Jacobsens, the objective of religious literacy is “the ability to observe, understand, and intelligently discuss different expressions of religion as they actually exist in the world.”^[4]

In his 2016 publication, Interfaith Leadership, Eboo Patel advocates for going beyond Prothero’s “objective, neutral, ‘just the basics’ approach”^[5] to cultivating religious literacy. In addition to the basics, Patel preaches the need to develop an “appreciative knowledge” of the religions, which “actively seeks out the beautiful, the admirable, and the life giving rather than the deficits, the problems, and the ugliness.”^[6] This call for appreciation echoes Krister Stendahl’s emphasis on leaving room for “holy envy”^[7] of other religions and begins to venture into territory charted by some comparative theologians, namely Francis Clooney and his employment of the term “interreligious literacy” to refer to the fruitful process of interreligious learning across traditions.^[8]

In 2016, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) won a $160k grant to conduct a five-year project to discern guidelines for religious literacy for college students. Led by Dr. Eugene V. Gallagher and Dr. Diane L. Moore,^[9] the project’s aim is to identify “the knowledge and skills related to religion that every A.B. or B.A. degree recipient should gain.” At the most recent annual meeting of the AAR in Boston (2017), the project’s steering committee offered its most recent draft of its guidelines. It argues, “every college graduate ought to have a basic understanding of how religion affects human life,” and “some critical understanding about the ways in which religion shapes human behavior.”^[10] A particular strength of this project is its attempt to demonstrate the value of religious literacy for the many academic disciplines, professions, and vocations in society. Overall, when complete, this project will be a welcome initiative that could lead to the retention (and revision) of the study of religion in higher education as well as encourage the development of new programs.

Being religiously literate involves knowing that religion can influence particular contexts, and having the wherewithal to discern and learn how it does.

Adding to this robust conversation, and endorsing many of the above sentiments, I agree with Prothero that being religiously literate entails the ability to communicate within and across religions in concrete everyday contexts. Religious literacy is, like any other form of literacy, the ability to communicate and employ a set of practical skills in conjunction with knowledge or wisdom—it is a phronesis.^[11] With the Jacobsens, I agree that complete religious literacy is impossible. This echoes what Leonard Swidler often quips, “Nobody knows everything about anything.”^[12] That is, we simply cannot know everything about every religion in all contexts, and to place such an expectation on those striving for basic religious literacy is unrealistic.

Religious literacy certainly includes the knowledge we have of religious traditions and how they function in society, but perhaps even more importantly, it is about knowing that, and what, we don’t know (and knowing how to learn what we don’t know). Barbara McGraw raises this very important aspect of religious literacy: “Religious literacy is not about knowing every religion—which is impossible—but being well-informed enough generally to know what one needs to find out to be effectively literate for the situation at hand.”^[13] If this is the case, then religious literacy competency programs are right to devote attention to building this awareness. This is what Eboo Patel refers to as “building a radar screen for religious diversity”^[14] and what I refer to as cultivating “interreligious wherewithal.”^[15] It includes having the sense that religion can influence many situations, from PTA meetings to business negotiations,^[16] to providing health care, to effective inter and intra group leadership. Being religiously literate involves knowing that religion can influence particular contexts, and having the wherewithal to discern and learn how it does. In this way, it is most certainly a skill to be cultivated and not just an accumulation of facts about traditions and worldviews.

Being religiously literate entails putting into practice, with wisdom, one’s basic understanding about the ways religion shapes human behavior. Interreligious literacy contributes to the ability to navigate religiously complex situations, should they arise, especially between and among religious traditions and peoples, with an eye to producing effective and constructive ends.

Photo: © Hans Gustafson, 2017

Endnotes

^[1] Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 15.

^[2] Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64.

^[3] Jacobsen and Jacobsen, No Longer Invisible, 71.

^[4] Jacobsen and Jacobsen, No Longer Invisible, 70.

^[5] Eboo Patel, Interfaith Leadership: A Primer (Boston: Beacon, 2016), 112.

^[6] Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 113. He continues: “The substantive dimension of appreciative knowledge has three main parts: recognizing the contributions of other traditions, having sympathetic understanding of the distinctive history and commitments of other traditions, and developing ways of working with and serving other communities” (Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 114).

^[7] Stendahl described holy envy as moments “when we recognize something in another tradition that is beautiful but is not in ours, nor should we grab it or claim it.… Holy envy rejoices in the beauty of others” (Krister Stendahl, “From God’s Perspective We are All Minorities,” Journal of Religious Pluralism 2 [1993]). See Hans Gustafson, “Suppressing the Mosquitoes’ Coughs: An Introduction to Holy Envy,” Learning from Other Religions: Leaving Room for Holy Envy, edited by Hans Gustafson (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).

^[8] Francis X. Clooney, Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Śrī Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 2008), 204. Marianne Moyaert also employs the phrase “interreligious literacy” in “Interreligious Literacy and Scriptural Reasoning: Some Hermeneutical, Anthropological, Pedagogical, and Experiential Reflections” in Teaching Interreligious Encounters, edited by Marc A. Pugliese and Alexander Y. Hwang (New York: Oxford University Press), 79-94.

^[9] Diane L. Moore assisted the AAR in adopting the following definition or religious literacy to help educators understand and teach basic understandings of religion: “Religious literacy entails the ability to discern and analyze the fundamental intersections of religion and social/political/cultural life through multiple lenses. Specifically, a religiously literate person will possess 1) a basic understanding of the history, central texts (where applicable), beliefs, practices and contemporary manifestations of several of the world’s religious traditions as they arose out of and continue to be shaped by particular social, historical and cultural contexts; and 2) the ability to discern and explore the religious dimensions of political, social and cultural expressions across time and place” (Diane L. Moore, “Definition of Religious Literacy,” Harvard Divinity School Religious Literacy Project, https://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/definition-religious-literacy, accessed December 1, 2017).

^[10] “AAR Guidelines: What U.S. College Graduates Should Understand About Religion,” draft 3.1, several authors, distributed at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference in Boston, MA on November 18, 2017.

^[11] Phronesis (Greek) is that practical wisdom which assists in cultivating virtuous living.

^[12] Leonard Swidler, “Nobody Knows Everything About Anything!” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 45 (Spring 2010), 2.

^[13] Barbara A. McGraw, “Toward a Framework for Interfaith Leadership,” Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE) vol. 3 (2017), issue 1 of Interfaith Opportunities for Catholic Higher Education, 6.

^[14] Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 135-39.

^[15] Hans Gustafson, “Interreligious Wherewithal: Cultivating a Leadership Virtue” on State of Formation, published November 16, 2017, www.stateofformation.org/2017/11/interreligious-wherewithal-cultivating-a-leadership-virtue, accessed December 2, 2017.

^[16] Paul Lambert, Assistant Dean at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and Senior Business Fellow at the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, argues that “In the context of business, religious literacy is familiarity with, and understanding of, religious influences on people. At the core, business is all about people: it is people who are making your product and it is people you’re bringing these products to in the market place. If you want to be successful in creating your product and running a business, you need to understand the primary things that influence people. Religious literacy is about understanding those influences. You don’t have to be a scholar of religious studies to be religiously literate. But you do need to make an effort to understand” (“An Interview with Paul Lambert: Understanding the Importance of Religious Literacy,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, www.fletcherforum.org/home/2017/11/17/the-business-of-religion-understanding-the-importance-of-religious-literacy, accessed December 5, 2017).