What is a religiously literate person?
It’s someone who knows enough about Christianity and other religions to engage in public conversation. It’s not about expertise, it’s about being able to follow what’s happening. When did you first realize that Americans were seriously religiously illiterate? I’m a teacher, so I’ve gradually learned over the past 15 years how little college students know about religion. When I started off, I thought they would know basic things about the Bible, about Judaism. But I was wrong. The events in Waco, Texas, were really formative for me. The FBI had no clue what was going on [with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians] because they didn’t treat it as a religious event, they just treated it as some crazy group. I’m not an expert on the Bible or on apocalypticism, but I felt I knew what was going to happen. I said to myself, he’s going to lure them in, and it’s going to burn, and he’s going to think that’s great. It made me realize there weren’t people in government who knew enough about relig
