Protestants vs Atheists

            Just this last week the Pew Forum published the results of their study on US Religious Knowledge. The findings from the survey give a lot of insight into the current state of religious importance to Americans today. 
           According to the survey’s results, atheists and agnostics have the highest scores on religious knowledge answering 20.9 out of 32 questions correctly, while white mainline Protestants only answered 15.8 of these same 32 questions correctly.  What is the reason for this? 
            There are a few ways to interpret these results. The first question is, “Why do Atheists, who don’t believe that there is a god, know the most about religion?” Atheists and agnostics have presumably chosen their beliefs after searching for the religion or belief system they feel they can faith in. We are all born with an inner sense of there being a god, therefore it takes much hard study and rationalization to remove that inclination and claim that there is no god. That study of religion includes knowing what certain religions believe and being able to disprove or rationalize the rejection of those religious principles. This therefore helps to explain the study’s results as to why atheists have more a comprehensive knowledge of religion than their religious counterparts.
            The question that I find hard to answer is, “Why don’t white mainline Protestants have more knowledge of the religion they proclaim to believe in?” It could be that this group of people has less formal education. In the study it was revealed that those with a college education answered an average of 8 more questions correctly as opposed to those without one. The real question is, “What are the white mainline Protestant’s excuses for not knowing what they believe in?” It is commanded in the Bible to, “…go out into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature…” Mark 16:15 How are they going to effectively preach the gospel without knowing all about it? How do these Protestants plan to try to convert their atheistic and agnostic friends when the atheists know more about their religion than they do?

http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx