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.

Last week, I had the privilege of writing a guest post for the Social Action Massachusetts blog. They often have people of different faiths blog about what, from their tradition, motivates them to work towards social justice. But Caitlin from SAM realized they’d never had a nonreligious perspective on that topic, so she asked me to contribute. This is what I wrote.

This summer, a Christian student at my school told me that if he found out God didn’t exist, he would kill himself.

I was horrified, of course, but also simply confused. If this student stopped believing in God, would his world really look that bad? Would it suddenly look that different? Would it cease to be worth living in?

That world is my world. I live every day of my life assuming that God doesn’t exist, and I’m having a grand old time.

But I was even more confused when the same student went on to say that, if he didn’t kill himself, he would at the very least become a heartless monster; he would stop doing community service, stop caring about the wellbeing of others, and devote the rest of his life to selfish and radical hedonism.

As somebody who has lived through exactly the process he is hypothesizing about – the transition from a theistic worldview to an atheistic one – I can testify that my commitment to serving others only became stronger when I stopped believing in God.

I’ve always believed in the importance of community service. But, for most of my life, it didn’t seem particularly urgent. It will all be evened out eventually, I figured. It’s nice to do what you can, but no matter what we do in this life, God will sort it out in the next. Justice will be served regardless of my participation in it.

When I became an atheist, I suddenly lost recourse to this comforting thought. I became painfully aware of the very real possibility that justice might never be served. With that awareness came the unshakable conviction that I must do everything in my power to ensure that people do, as nearly as possible, get justice in this life. If I don’t do it, I can’t assume that it will get done.

Rabbi Hillel famously asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I ask, if we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? And if I am not for my fellow humans, who will be for them?

Thus, the idea that atheism dissolves responsibility is baffling to me. On the contrary, the way I see it, responsibility is a constant; the question isn’t whether it exists, but who bears it. You can only abdicate responsibility if you have somebody to foist it off on – somebody like God. When God is removed from the picture, the weight of the world falls squarely and irrevocably on our own shoulders.

That’s why I, as an atheist, am committed to working as hard as I can for social justice.

I believe in the religion of reason – the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

– Robert Ingersoll

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with 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. This 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.

Today, this article popped up in my twitter feed, courtesy of the lovely Amber Hacker of the Interfaith Youth Core. The gist of the article is that some Notre Dame students applied for official university recognition of a club called Atheist, Agnostic and Questioning Students (AAQS); the application was denied.

I feel like the kneejerk reaction of many atheists to stories like this is to decry the intolerant administration’s thickheaded discrimination against brave, nonconformist students. But I’m going to play devil’s advocate – erm, savior’s advocate? – and say that this was a perfectly fair decision by the university.

Notre Dame is, of course, a Catholic school. Everybody knows this. But it seems to me that most people expect religiously affiliated schools to make equal accommodations for both the students who do not belong to the affiliated denomination and those who do. This isn’t a totally unreasonable expectation based merely on precedent; for example, Georgetown University, another Catholic school, was the first university in the country to hire a full-time Muslim chaplain.

But I have to ask: what, if anything, do people think it means for a university to be religiously affiliated? We can’t claim to be down with religious affiliation while simultaneously looking askance at any religious university that doesn’t behave exactly like a secular university. People seem to expect religiously affiliated universities to be such in name only. That surely can’t be fair. It is the people who take that attitude, not the universities like Notre Dame who act according to their overtly stated religious values, who are being unreasonable.

Although there are clearly a variety of constraints on students’ college choices, it is enough of a free choice to fairly say that students decide whether to attend a religious or a secular school. Notre Dame isn’t exactly subtle about its Catholicism:

So the students who choose to attend certainly know what they are getting themselves into, and any non-Catholic who matriculates essentially forfeits, while on campus, any religious accommodations beyond those required by law.

Of course, there is always the possibility that a student who begins college as a Catholic may end it as an atheist – my boyfriend is proof of that – or as a Muslim or a Lutheran or anything else. But surely Catholic high school seniors, along with their parents and advisers, are as aware of that possibility as anybody else. The risk of inconvenient apostasy – and of all the struggles that doubt entails when it occurs within a religious institution – is one that all who choose to enter such an institution must be willing to take.

In the case of the Notre Dame incident, the rejection letter stated that “A club’s purpose must be consistent with the University’s mission….No organization, or member of any organization on behalf of the organization, may encourage or participate in any activity which contravenes the mission of the University or the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.” So if your club idea doesn’t mesh with the administration’s interpretation of Catholic doctrine, you’re out of luck – and you should have known that to begin with.

There is perhaps a discrimination claim to be made on the basis of hypocritical inconsistency. If an atheist group is not “consistent with the University’s mission” and goes against “the moral teaching of the Catholic Church,” then surely so is any student group devoted to any religion besides Catholicism. Right? Wrong: Notre Dame has a Jewish club and a Muslim club. So what’s that about?

Then again, that’s still within the rights of the school. If they want to interpret “the moral teaching of the Catholic Church” to mean that Jews are A-OK and atheists are verboten, that’s their prerogative. If Notre Dame decides homosexual activity is grounds for expulsion, that’s fair game. If they decide that gay is okay, that’s fair game. If they decide everybody has to wear a purple hat on Thursdays, that’s fair game.

The way I see it, the students at religious colleges are constantly at the mercy of the administration’s interpretive whims. (Which is just one of the many reasons why I would never attend such an institution.) For this reason, the question of whether religious affiliation is conducive to the environment of questioning and discovery one generally expects as the foundation of a college-level liberal arts education is an open one – but a fairly irrelevant one for the current discussion. The important point here is that the student (more or less) chooses the school, so they don’t have grounds to complain when they end up getting exactly what it said on the tin.

Besides, Notre Dame’s incipient atheist community has, according to one of its would-be founders, “been meeting underground this whole time,” which is way cooler anyway.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with 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. This 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.

This woman is probably the closest thing to a deity in my worldview.

We all know that respect is the sine qua non of interfaith work. The first part of the Interfaith Youth Core’s three-part definition of religious pluralism (via Professor Diana Eck of Harvard University – holla!) is “respect for religious and non-religious identity.” Sounds simple enough. But even though everybody can (I hope) agree that respect is important, not everybody seems to agree on what it is. So here’s your chance, for what it’s worth, to find out what it means to me.

It is my firm belief that respect is largely predicated on honesty. I don’t see how you can ever build any kind of relationship with anybody if you’re not honest with them. Being dishonest immediately puts up a barrier to understanding.

This should be fairly self-evident. Have you ever really respected somebody who made a habit of lying to you?

Exactly.

And did you feel respected by them?

Exactly.

That’s why I’m absolutely convinced that respect never requires dishonesty of any kind. In fact, dishonesty isn’t just non-required; it’s completely incompatible with real respect.

Maybe this all sounds really obvious to you. Maybe this is totally boring. If that’s the case, I apologize. Here’s another Aretha Franklin video to make up for it.

But seriously, I think a lot of people know in their heads that dishonesty is disrespectful, but then they run into a situation where they worry that being honest is going to hurt somebody’s feelings, and so they tell a nice little white lie to smooth things over, and then pat themselves on the back for being so diplomatic.

Sure, maybe that’s diplomacy. But it’s not respect.

I believe that, if pluralism is going to work, we’re going to have to be willing to be honest with each other, even in situations in which we’ve been conditioned to lie (or flatter or equivocate or change the subject or do anything other than just tell the damn truth).

[Disclaimer: this approach might not make you very popular.]

Our liberal democracy is replete with a kind of “Oh, isn’t their culture charming!” attitude towards people of other beliefs. Some people think this kind of extreme cultural relativism is the glue that holds a diverse world together. I think it’s a wedge that drives us apart by immediately separating people into “us” and “them.”

The attitude of many well-meaning interfaithers often reminds me of the attitude that self-congratulatory white people have toward “indigenous peoples” and “non-Western cultures,” in that they are really into celebrating their beautiful artwork and their cute little creation myths, but not so into treating them the same way they treat other white people. And then the white people get to feel like Gold Star Diversity Champions for protecting the lovely native culture from the big Blue Meanie of cold-hearted Western science.

This is the kind of attitude that prevents anthropological researchers from, say, empowering women in so-called “primitive” tribes with knowledge and control of their own reproductive systems, choosing instead to let them hold on to their “quaint” (and incorrect) beliefs about the magical impregnation spirits of the yam harvests or what have you. But I think real respect for other cultures would mean treating them like real people worthy of knowledge and capable of making their own decisions – not treating them like funny little figurines in your curio cabinet, and talking about how “enriched” you and your fellow white people are by their backwards ways. To me, this smacks unpleasantly of the imperialist delight in the “noble savage.”

Some people’s conceptions of religious pluralism remind me uncomfortably of that kind of attitude. A lot of people flock to interfaith work (or run away from it) on the assumption that “respect for religious and non-religious identity” means never hurting anybody’s feelings. That’s how we get cloying, unproductive “Kumbaya interfaith,” with everybody hugging and telling each other how beautiful their traditions are. Many people think that gloves-off conversations about controversial topics like LGBTQ rights, abortion, or women’s rights have no place in interfaith work. I don’t think this could be farther from the truth.

I don’t see any incompatibility between respect for identity and open disagreement with many of other people’s beliefs. In fact, I think it’s the condescending, disingenuous sickly-sweetness of the Kumbaya approach that is truly incompatible with real pluralism. Only in an environment of honesty and openness can we build strong relationships with people of other beliefs on a foundation of true respect.

There is, of course, an important distinction between being brutally honest and just being brutal. Honesty is necessary for respect, but it is not sufficient. There are plenty of disrespectful ways to be honest, and how you say things matters almost as much as what you say. Gratuitous scorn is just as inimical to respect as dishonesty is. The key is to walk the line at the intersection of honesty and kindness, without slipping into either sugarcoating on one side or browbeating on the other. This is easier said than done, of course, but I do think it is possible for the gloves to come off without the knives coming out.

So the next time you feel like you have to play a role in order to avoid stepping on someone’s toes, don’t do it. Just tell the truth. Don’t sugarcoat it. Don’t brag about it. Just say what you think, and go from there. Then we will all know the truth, and the truth will set us free.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with 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. This 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.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I rebelled against death by going to a big, bright yellow house to eat tea cakes.

Sparks House tea is a tradition begun by the late Rev. Peter Gomes in 1974. Rev. Gomes wanted an opportunity to get to know the individuals who made up the Harvard community. So, for one hour every week, for over thirty-five years, he invited them – one and all – into his home. In the starched-collar world of Ivy League academia, such unconditional hospitality is a rare treasure.

Tea with Rev. Gomes had long been one of the items on my senior spring bucket list: the fun things I knew I’d want to do before I graduated, but which I felt I couldn’t possibly fit in until the magical post-thesis end times. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always conform itself to the plan I’ve laid out for it on Gcal, and my future teatime plans were derailed when Rev. Gomes died last February.

I had never met Rev. Gomes. I’d seen him speak once, at my freshman convocation, but I didn’t understand then what a legend he was. (If I’d met him, he could have told me himself: as he once said of another professor, “He may well be a star, but I am an institution.”) Despite never personally connecting with him, I felt that the campus was palpably enriched by his charismatic presence. I looked forward to meeting him at that mythical spring tea, and to hearing him speak at my graduation, as he had spoken at dozens of graduations past.

So I was saddened by the news of his death last semester, and I deeply regretted my postponement of afternoon tea with the institution that was Rev. Peter Gomes. However, I hadn’t thought about him or his teas overly much since spring – until last week.

Ten years after the collapse of the World Trade Center, those of us old enough to remember it – and it’s odd to think that there are about a billion people alive who don’t – tried to figure out how best to mark the day. Many religious services were held for those who were comforted by anticipation of afterlife reunions or by faith in the good judgment of a divine choreographer. Those of us without an instruction manual were left to our own devices.

I have a makeshift three-step process for dealing with death that I improvised last year when one of my high school friends and my grandfather died less than three weeks apart. That month was a formative experience in the development of my Humanist philosophy, and I’ll be sure to post about it when I feel like I have time to do it justice (and when I feel like I can do it without crying all over my keyboard…so…maybe never). Anyway, I had to figure out how to cope with all the futility and helplessness I felt then – how to prevent death from being meaningless – and this was what I came up with:

1. Remember. Death is the end of someone’s consciousness, but it doesn’t need to be the end of their influence on the world. As long as their memory is cherished, part of them is still alive. Do your part by telling their story.
2. Pay it forward. In honor of those who once gave love to you, give love to someone else. Death – especially sudden, violent, or early death – reminds us how fragile we are, and how alone in the universe. In such an uncertain world, we each must do what we can to help others make the most of their time here. When you encounter suffering, do what you can to alleviate it.
3. Live as hard and as loud as you can. Death teaches us to cherish the little time we have. Don’t postpone the important things in life, or the frivolous but fun ones.

So, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I helped the Harvard Chaplains organize an interfaith reflection and remembrance event for people to share their stories of their own experiences ten years ago. I felt that it was crucial to focus on interfaith cooperation in commemorating a day like 9/11, when thousands of people were sacrificed on the altar of religious conflict.

After the reflection, I helped NPS’s very own Chris Stedman run a massive interfaith service project, sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. With the help of almost 200 volunteers, we packaged 10,002 meals (far exceeding our symbolic goal of 9,110) for undernourished children right here in the Boston area. Our volunteers also wrote hundreds of letters to congresspeople asking them not to cut funding for crucial hunger relief programs in the coming fiscal year.

That day also kicked off a partnership between the Harvard College Interfaith Council and Gordon Christian College’s Loving Our Religious Neighbors organization. Several Gordon students came to Harvard to help package meals on September 11^th. The following weekend, a dozen Harvard students accompanied as many Gordon students on a journey to a farm just outside of Boston, where we helped grow produce for hunger relief programs. Between planting and weeding, we also grew our mutual understanding, and forged friendships to be strengthened during our year of partnership.

And finally, a few days after this city mouse ate her first raw green bean, freshly picked and still warm from the sun, Sparks House opened its doors for the first afternoon tea since Rev. Gomes’s death. The Memorial Church staff members who worked with Rev. Gomes are keeping his memory alive by continuing his tradition of offering the whole Harvard community a pick-me-up at what Gomes endearingly called the “flabby part of the day.” And I, after weeks of thinking about death while organizing events for 9/11, was ready to stop putting off my plans and start grabbing life by the sugar cubes. And so, on Wednesday afternoon, I set aside my intimidating stack of unread articles and incomplete problem sets, pinned a flower to my hair, and set out to eat tea cakes in honor of a man I had never met.

They were delicious.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with 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. This 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.