Agnostics, atheists, Jews, Mormons score highest on religon

Are we surprised?
07:18 AM CDT on Tuesday, September 28, 2010

By SAM HODGES / The Dallas Morning News
samhodges@dallasnews.com
If you have a factual question about religion, you might want to ask an atheist.

A new survey of Americans shows that atheists and agnostics rank with Jews and Mormons as the top-performing groups in religious knowledge.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life posed 32 basic religious questions and found that atheists and agnostics answered, on average, 20.9 correctly. Jews were right on 20.5, and Mormons on 20.3.

The survey found atheists and agnostics to be more knowledgeable about religion than Protestants and Catholics.

People in the South – the Bible Belt – tended to score lower on the survey than those in other regions. Tweet