A few billboards around Champaign-Urbana have been telling us for the past couple months that “An Educated Person Knows the Bible.” It is a message sponsored by the Bible Literacy Project and is apparently not so much an informational observation as a nationwide promotion of a textbook published in 2005 called The Bible and Its Influences.
I don’t know all of the politics and agendas behind this campaign; perhaps fertile fodder for another article sometime. But the message at its face value has prompted me to reflect on some other things that an educated person (especially an educated religious person) should know, but often doesn’t.
AN EDUCATED PERSON KNOWS THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD
Knowing what other people — especially those with different beliefs than yours — think is an important part of being a responsible, educated, peaceful, and tolerant human being. Many of us religious folk need to stop condemning and converting others and start understanding and appreciating others. Maybe we could start by picking up a book on world religions and reading it, with a goal of trying to find similarities instead of differences. Or, if we really wanted to be educated, we could actually talk with someone of a different religion and ask them to explain it. Then we might accompany that person to their synagogue, mosque, church, shrine, or wherever it is they worship.
AN EDUCATED PERSON KNOWS NO PREJUDICE
Along with not condemning people of other religions, an educated person does not condemn people of other races, sexes, or sexual orientations. Most of us religious people have come a long way in the areas of racism and sexism. But we have yet to overcome homophobia. There is still a very strong gay-bashing mentality, especially among conservative evangelical Christians, so we sorely need more education in this area. For starters, try the article I wrote last year called, “What Does The Bible Really Say About Homosexuality?”
AN EDUCATED PERSON KNOWS THE LIMITATIONS OF ONE’S OWN RELIGION
Religious people could do something very useful with that critical attitude that we so often turn on other faiths. We could turn it on our own. We should be humble enough to acknowledge and accept the fact that not everything in our religion is perfect. Our sacred texts contain myths and mistakes. We need to be brave enough to step out of the comfort zone of what we were taught as children and not take everything literally. An educated person can distinguish between truth, myth, and fact.
AN EDUCATED PERSON KNOWW WHAT LITURGICAL SEASON IT IS
A lot of us may know that Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday) this year is February 24. But do we also know that it is the day of festivities that precedes the following day, Ash Wednesday, which in turn begins the Christian season of Lent? Many Christians are what are called C&E Christians, that is, they go to church only on Christmas and Easter. But even many of the us who do go to church every Sunday have little knowledge of the liturgical seasons and holy days that make our faith so rich. I blame a lot of this on the pastors who selfishly choose to preach on whatever they feel like instead of following a lectionary that is tied to the liturgical cycles. This is related to the bigger problem of pastors who decide first what they want to say, then use a concordance to find passages in the Bible that they can use (or twist) to support their biased opinions.
Know what liturgical season it is as well as what the lectionary readings are for Sunday. Then hold your pastor accountable to focus on that. It will give your worship services an intelligible continuity throughout the year as well as a communal bond with the rest of Christians throughout the world who haven’t forsaken the aesthetics of liturgy.
AN EDUCATED PERSON KNOWS HOW TO READ MUSIC
I’m not sure how it’s going in other religions, but in Christianity over the past couple decades we have created a generation of music illiterates. This is because many churches have done away with books that had both words and music and replaced them with words only on a big screen. Add to this the demise of general music classes in many of our schools and we now have a society of people who don’t know a treble clef from a time signature. Maybe this is only the curmudgeonly old piano teacher speaking within me, but I do think it’s sad.
AN EDUCATED PERSON KNOWS HUMILITY
There’s an old joke that goes like this: when you get your bachelor’s degree you think you know everything. Then, when you get your masters degree, you realize that you don’t know anything. Finally, when you get your doctorate, you realize that nobody else knows anything either.
This is really the secret to a good education, isn’t it? The problem with most of us, especially us religious folk, is that we’re just too damn arrogant. If we could set aside our arrogance long enough to talk with and understand people of other faiths or with people of other sexual orientations or with anyone who is different from us, then maybe we could really, finally learn something. If we could set aside our stubbornness in believing our religion and our holy book is perfect and without errors, then maybe we could be worthy of saying that we are educated.
Or at the very least, wise.