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From 2010-2014 the Lawrence
Journal World, Lawrence, Kansas'
daily newspaper, included Dr. Minor in its respondent
pool to the questions about religion it poses in its
Saturday "Faith Forum" column. Since Dr.
Minor taught for 33 years in the Religious Studies
Department of the University of Kansas in Lawrence,
his answers reflect his research, teaching and background.
The following were not archived on the Lawrence Journal
World website:
The "Faith
Forum" columns
below were only in the hard copy of the Lawrence
Journal World:
It’s difficult to measure “depth of faith.” We’re
stuck with self-reporting, and, as one pollster remarked:
the questions most misreported by respondents are “likelihood
to vote” and “regularity of attendance
at a religious service.”
Claims about the relationship between religious education
and belief are anecdotal and rarely without self-interest
in the results. However, a Pew Research Center poll
released last September revealed how little Americans
know about religions including their own.
It found that atheists and agnostics know the most.
Mormons ranked highest on questions dealing with the
Bible and Christianity, and Jews on questions dealing
with world religions.
One would expect that a religion’s education
would mean a better knowledge of ones own faith, but
years of university teaching convinced me that it only
results in limited knowledge of elements of a believer’s
religion – those the teaching institution prefers
to emphasize, with many seemingly important teachings
surprisingly missing.
There’s also plenty of survey evidence that
younger Americans are leaving their religions more
than ever, but that doesn’t mean they don’t
consider themselves religious. There is growth in Americans
identifying themselves as atheists, agnostics, pagans,
and spiritual but not religious.
But conveying of factual knowledge might not be the
most influential result of children receiving an education
in parochial schools, catechisms, and once-a-week Sunday
School–type programs. Likewise, internalizing
orthodox beliefs or knowledge of a religion’s
scriptures in depth, seem not to be the key to the
futures even of those who will attend their institutions
till death.
It’s the non-intellectual elements of religious
education that appear to have the most long-lasting
effect. Religious education reinforces in those who
receive it a belonging, a community, a larger identity,
and an outlet for charity so they are comfortably familiar
and less emotionally threatening than independently
questioning them and creating alternatives.
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