Spiritual illiteracy
02/20/2008
By DAVID YOUNT,
Scripps Howard News Service

"My mind is my own church," proclaimed patriot Thomas Paine, rejecting the constraints of America's Puritan founders in favor of individual freedom. Over time, the independence of faith and conscience that Paine espoused has probably made America one of the most religious nations on earth.

Professor Stephen Prothero disagrees, arguing that our religiosity as a people is sustained without drawing much at all from our minds.

A decade ago, when Prothero moved from the Bible Belt to teach religion at Boston University, he began to doubt his effectiveness in the classroom. Time and again, his students reacted to his lectures with blank stares. "When I would say things like in Matthew, blah, blah, blah, the students would get that look like they sort of knew what I was talking about, but they really didn't," he confesses. the rest