The depth of this religious ignorance is the subject of an important new book, Religious Literacy, by Stephen Prothero. Some of Prothero's statistics, based on reliable public opinion polls, are truly astonishing and depressing to anyone--religious or secular--who cares about our common culture. Fewer than half of Americans can name Genesis as the first book of the Bible.Only about half can name even one of the four gospels. One of the more surprising findings is that evangelicals are only marginally more knowledgeable about Christianity than other Americans.

Predictably, we are even more ignorant about Islam and various eastern religions than we are about Christianity and Judaism.

I want Americans to know more about religion (as opposed to believing in religion) for two distinct reasons.

First, anyone who hasn't read the Bible lacks one of the most important keys to western literature and culture. I feel sorry for everyone who hasn't read the King James version of the Bible, with its boundless store of allusions and metaphors that do not require faith to be appreciated for their beauty and psychological insight into the best and the worst of human existence.

And the importance of understanding the role of various religions in history--in our own nation and around the world--ought to be obvious at a time when we have gotten ourselves involved in a conflict that is, in part, a civil war between groups of Muslims arguing over which of them is the true heir of the prophet Mohammad (and over political power, of course).

As a freethinker and an atheist, my second reason for wanting Americans to know more about religion is that knowledge fosters skepticism about faith--and I believe that our country needs much more skepticism and much less faith. If Americans actually read about the actions of a capricious God--his treatment of poor Job, his slaughter of the Egyptian first-born on behalf of Jews, his slaughter of the innocents while sparing Jesus--they might think about whether they want to go on praying to such a heartless and unreliable being. Thank you, Mr. Gutenberg.

I regard American religious illiteracy as simply one more manifestation of a broader cultural illiteracy, evinced by our equally deficient knowledge of American and world history. Furthermore, American high school students consistently rank near the bottom in international tests designed to compare the scientific knowledge of teenagers.

We are doing a poor job of teaching our children what they need to know about history, literature, science, and mathematics. Why should we think that public schools can do a better job of teaching religious history?

Prothero suggests that teachers, parents, and school administrators get together and devise a course about religion to be taught at the high school level. This might work in the best of all possible worlds--a multicultural, educated community that pays its teachers high salaries and is willing to foot the bill for the additional training they would surely need to do justice to such a course. But what sort of curriculum agreement could be reached in communities where teachers are too intimidated by fundamentalist parents to use the word "evolution" in biology classes?

There is no Constitutional bar to teaching about religion, as distinct from indoctrinating children in particular religious beliefs. But that is really beside the point, because the line between teaching and preaching is too fine for the average public school. To take just one straightforward example, Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah--the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy--and Jews believe that Jesus was, well, just another Jew. An interesting Jew, perhaps a Jewish prophet, but a Jewish man and no more. I would love to hear the average high school teacher explain this "straightforward" fact of religious history, and its relationship to historical anti-Semitism, to a class of 16-year-olds.

Furthermore, if we are going to teach the history of religion, we will also have to teach the history of secularism--something totally neglected now in public school American history classes. In a history of religion class, a teacher would have to explain why the founders deliberately left the word "God" out of the Constitution and why there was so much debate about that omission at the time. I'd be happy to have this bit of history included in a public school class, but I'll bet some other parents would storm the principal's office.

When we talk about "mandatory" public school courses dealing with religion, we are really indulging in the fantasy that public schools can do a job that parents and churches are failing to do. Even though American ignorance about religion is clearly a byproduct of more general cultural ignorance, people of faith ought to be discomfited by Americans' shaky grasp of the tenets of even their own religions. There is something truly out of kilter in a society in which Christian fundamentalists take up arms in the culture wars in order to install the Ten Commandments in courthouses and ignore the fact that so many Americans (including politicians who have supported these efforts) do not know exactly what the commandments say.

Perhaps the push for more religious symbols in public life is really a confession of the private failures of families, and the institutional failure of churches, to educate their young in religious traditions.

Three-quarters of Americans even hold the erroneous belief that the Bible says, "God helps those who help themselves." This non-Biblical saying is certainly made to order for those who don't believe in government aid to the poor; it enables them to worship Christ and the unregulated "free market."

The real problem is that we are an increasingly ignorant people, in thrall to endless infotainment and unwilling to devote time to the serious reading required to transmit any aspect of culture--including religion. How pathetic it is that we are talking about classes to summarize the role of the Bible in culture as a substitute for actually reading the Bible.

As Thomas Jefferson memorably said in 1816, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."