About sixteen months ago, the Pew Research Center announced the results of their study of religious literacy in the United States. This study caused such a buzz that the Pew website crashed from all the traffic. Atheists and agnostics  were – perhaps unsurprisingly? – found to be the most religiously literate belief group, and we’ve hardly stopped bragging since. Hemant Mehta wrote a good Friendly Atheist post assembling some choice excerpts from the flurry of atheist commentary attempting to explain the results, including his own very compelling Chicago Tribune piece on the topic (in which he suggests that we’re atheists precisely because we’re so religiously literate).

Before you break out the confetti all over again, I’d like to point out that the study results might not be as impressive as we non-religious apologists have all made it out to be. Yes, we scored the highest, but barely: on the 32-question quiz used in the study, atheists/agnostics answered an average of 20.9 questions correctly, but the Jews and Mormons were breathing down our necks at 20.5 and 20.3, respectively.

But, even more importantly, it’s time to acknowledge that 21 out of 32 is an embarrassingly low score on such an appallingly simple test. Sure, we did better than the rest of America, but I think a more accurate characterization of the results is, “holy shit, everyone else is even more ignorant than we are.”

Seriously, this was not a hard quiz. We are not talking about theological minutiae or obscure sects here. We’re talking about very basic, fundamental ideas in the world’s most prominent belief systems, and major, world-changing events in the history of religion. This Huffington Post article and this Vancouver Sun piece provide some horrifying examples of America’s rampant ignorance. For a taste, here are just a few of the things that over half of Americans don’t know:

- that Judaism is a religion

- that the Qur’an is the sacred text of Muslims

- that Martin Luther was a leader of the Protestant Reformation

Again, this is not complex stuff. Forget about the tenets of Judaism; a majority of people don’t even know what Judaism is.

And it gets worse: not only do people have no idea what everyone else believes, they’re also totally ignorant of the basic ideas that make up their own beliefs.

- Almost half of Catholics don’t know that their church officially teaches that, during communion, the bread and wine literally turn into Jesus. Keep in mind that this exact belief was a huge source of violence and general chaos in the sixteenth century, and is a major reason for the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.

- Speaking of which, more than half of Protestants don’t know that Martin Luther was a major player in that whole debacle.

- Over a third of Jews don’t know that Maimonides – who, as Rachel Zoll notes in the HuffPo piece, was “one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history” – was Jewish.

I think you probably get the idea. The fact that atheists are, on average, very slightly more religiously literate than everybody else isn’t very impressive when you realize just how low the bar is.

So, while 2012 is still young and there is still time to make belated resolutions, I’d like to issue a challenge to my fellow atheists (and everyone else): this year, try to learn a little more and suck a little less.

To this end, my New Year’s resolution is to read the Bible in its entirety before 2013 rolls around. It’s the most influential piece of literature in the Western canon – and, arguably, in history – and I’m embarrassed to have lived 22 years and change in the most Christian country in the world without reading it cover-to-cover. I’m documenting my journey from Genesis to Revelation at Blogging Biblically; each post includes a [snarky and unorthodox] summary of that day’s reading, so if you prefer your scriptures partly digested, I invite you to subscribe and follow along. And I’m very interested in other people’s thoughts on the Bible and reactions to my ideas about it, so please feel free to join in the conversation in the comments. </shameless plug>

Whether or not you give a rat’s ass about my Bible blog, I hope you’ll take seriously my challenge to boost your religious literacy this year. Richard Dawkins’s disgruntled complaints about fairyology aside, there are clear benefits to understanding what other people – billions of them – believe about life, death, morality, fate, and the universe. Indeed, in a country where sharia law and fetal ensoulment are hot political issues, and in a world where centuries-old beliefs inspire bloodshed in theocracies and democracies alike, you can hardly afford not to.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She recently founded and currently writes for two other blogs, The Unelectables (following religious minority candidates in the 2012 election) and Blogging Biblically (documenting her attempt to read the Bible in a year). She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, the former President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council, and a Volunteer Ambassador for the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (hasty breakfast? more like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. Last summer, she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.