A recent survey done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Hispanics are the ethnic group in the United States with less knowledge about their own religion and of the religion of others. However, according to some experts, it seems the survey reveals more about the researchers than about the Latinos who answered the questions.
According to the survey, of the 32 categories analyzed, atheist, Mormons, and Jews answered correctly to half of those questions, while Hispanics only answered correctly one-third of the questions.
When the questions were about Christianity, Hispanics again gave correct answers only one-third of the time, compared with half of correct answers among White Evangelicals and Mormons.
When the questions dealt with religion and public life in the United States, Hispanics knew only half of the answers, while Jews and atheists answered right 75 percent of the time.
Greg Smith, a researcher at the Pew Forum, said ignorance of basic information about religion affects not only Hispanics. According to Smith, knowledge of religion depends in the number of years a person received formal education.
Smith also said most of answers from Hispanics were from Catholic Hispanics, with not enough answers from Hispanics of other religions to draw any conclusions. Also, only a small number of surveys were conducted in Spanish. For that reason, he said, caution should be used before drawing any conclusions about the meaning of the survey.
It is a good warning and we should follow it. At the same time, the results of the survey are there and I want to know their meaning.
Stan Perea is the Executive Director of the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH, for its name in Spanish), an association of 3,000 Latino theologians and pastors from different expressions of faith all over the country.
According to Perea, Latinos do not learn information about religion “because we feel, almost without exceptions, that faith is the only thing we need.”
“We not because somebody taught us about faith, but because received the faith from our parents, and they received it from our grandparents. It is an unshakable faith not based on cognitive elements,” he said.
Dr. Miguel De La Torre, Associate Professor of Social Ethics at Iliff School of Theology (in Denver) said that, “The survey reveals more about the researchers than about the Latinos.”
“It is true that we Hispanics have limited knowledge of dogmas and history of religion, but that doesn’t mean we are less spiritual than any other group. The lack of doctrinal knowledge doesn’t prevent God from being presence in our lives,” he said.
According to De La Torre, “we don’t base our faith in what we know about our faith, but on what we do with our faith.”
For that reason, with his usual clarity, De La Torre said the survey “reveals the marginalization of Hispanics.”
“The true question should be why in our society there is still of group of people unable to access the religious education they need,” he said.