A Nation in Need of Religious Literacy

In his 2007 book Religious Literacy, Steven Prothero advocated for a new era of religious literacy, emphasizing its importance in personal and public spheres. His argument for integrating religious studies into public education impacted me. While he was focused on the historical roots of Christianity in America, his ideas apply to becoming religiously literate of other religions. In my case, this means Islam. However, understanding Islam cannot be found in books alone; it requires relationships with Muslims.

Defining Religious Literacy

Religious literacy might be defined as gaining an understanding of a religion’s logic, doctrines, stories, and lived experiences, as well as the existential and metaphysical questions it addresses or aims to resolve regarding life's major challenges. For instance, having a general religious literacy about Islam allows one to comprehend how Muslims derive inspiration and guidance from the commandments, injunctions, or encouragements found within their religious texts and community practices.

The Limitations of Textual Understanding

However, book knowledge alone is just the beginning. To truly understand a religion, one must engage with its followers, who evolve and adapt religious practices over time.

A Muslim might read the Bible and question why modern Christian practices differ from its teachings, like women covering their heads in church. Conversely, a Christian might read the Quran and mistakenly think they understand Islam fully. Both religions are so rich and complex as to defy easy descriptions.

• Stereotyping: Reducing a person's identity to a simplified, often incorrect, image based on religious texts.

• Misunderstanding: Assuming all followers of a religion are uniform in belief or practice, which is far from true.

The unintended and often innocent harm of simplifying a person to a fixed image is manifold. One such harm is the folding of a Muslim’s identity into a “meme,” a reproducible, book-informed image, which is perpetuated in churches, social media, and everyday conversation. But a Muslim isn’t one thing or one type of person. Muslims, like all other religious adherents, have different levels of understanding or connection to their religion, and many might be only Muslim in name. Others might not want to talk about their religion, and an unknowing Christian armed with a little knowledge might assume it’s proper to bring up Islam as a way of dialoguing and building bridges.

I wrote a PhD dissertation on the concept of making a meme of a religious person or their religion, arguing that memeifying religious others is a mechanism by which religious scholars and students work out ideas of their own religion and personhood. Christians had done this for centuries, too, as Jeremy Cohen argued in his book “Living Letters of the Law,” where they represented Jews as “they were supposed to be, not who they actually were,” indicating that Christians wrote about them based on literary images. The consequences of memeifying are evident in the tragic treatment of Jews by Christians down the ages, including the Crusades, Inquisition, expulsions, and much more.

Christians, too, have been a meme in Muslim discourse. In Arabic legal literature, the Christian has one name: Nasrani.  This Christian behaves in a particular way and ultimately serves as a representative of the Christians of all times and periods. Of course, Muslims would have distinguished between real life and legal thought, but the fact remains that the Christian is representative of how Muslims ought to determine every day, normal behavior as it relates to Christians, whether in intermarriage, communal prayer, economic contracts, marketplace behavior, and more.

Personal Experience

I’ve experienced firsthand how Muslims have a tendency to memeify Christians to their Quranic image. In 2022, at a dinner following a panel discussion, a young Muslim woman asked a colleague how a "Nasrani," could believe in the authenticity of the Gospels. By doing so, she implicitly suggested that he fit a stereotype. He gently replied, “I am Masihi,” another term meaning Christian, aligning himself with Christianity's broader historical tradition. In other words, he used a more appropriate term reflecting Christian experiences outside of literary texts. This exchange was pivotal for religious literacy and multi-faith understanding in Morocco, as I recently argued.

It was this moment that changed the way I looked at Muslims. I, too, had fallen into the same erroneous thinking about Islam, reducing Muslims to a literary image. Now I have committed myself to treat Muslims based on my knowledge and experience of them rather than what I read in news or books. And this is exactly the type of interaction we need between Muslims and Christians today.

The Need for Multi-Faith Engagement

Fortunately, there are many initiatives working to build relational solidarity and to advocate for relational diplomacy. One such initiative is the art of multi-faith engagement called “scholarly companionship” as developed by the Study of Religions Across Civilizations, a multi-faith academic program that aims to bring Jews, Muslims, and Christians together to study their religions. The result is a commitment to intellectual solidarity and social cohesion that remains when violence or trauma occurs, such as what we are seeing in the Israel-Palestine war.

It’s not only academic study of religion that needs renewal but also in seminaries and Christian training centers. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary offers programs in Islamic studies and many seminaries like Liberty have apologetics degrees. Smaller seminaries with lower enrollment face the challenge of interest in Islam and enough enrollment to justify hiring faculty or adjuncts to teach courses. The future does look promising, and I’ll discuss why in an upcoming blog. Other non-academic organizations such as the non-profit Multi-Faith Neighbors Network has been advancing religious literacy and deepening relationships between religious leaders, a positive indicator of growth in the American Christian understanding of Islam.

Moving Forward

Religious literacy must evolve from theoretical to practical knowledge, moving from mere images of others to real experiences with them. One of my life’s goals is to develop curriculum to implement in Christian seminaries that helps students learn to appreciate a diversity of religious experience without asking them to agree with it. I firmly believe that a renewed understanding of religious others will help build a more stable world and promote a flourishing life for all.

Photo: Author’s photo.