You make a good point, though, about Catholics reading the lives of the saints. When you think about it, more or less the entirety of the Old Covenant is narrated in the Bible, whereas less than one-twentieth of the history of the New Covenant is narrated. What’s more relevant to someone living in the New Covenant, to know the minuitiae of the life of Joshua, who lived in a less dispensation, or that of St. Francis, who lived in the better one? Biblical or not, the life of St. Francis is a much more immediate model for behavior.

There are also things like praying at abortion clinics, but Protestants sometimes do those things.

Or they might do the corporal works of mercy, since they’re part of the criteria at the Last Judgment (unlike knowing the Bible chapter and verse . . .).

One of the things we were commenting on in the conversation I mentioned: for Protestants, ministers are often taken to be, in essence, Bible experts. They don’t have the kind of authority we take priests or bishops to have (after all, how could they, without believing in the Apostolic Succession?) and if their sermons are bad, their congregation is likely to leave and go find a minister they like better, even if it’s someone in a different denomination. (Lots of Protestants seem fairly indifferent on that point, and happy to move between different denominations as suits them.) The minister’s only authority is as someone who was trained in matters of religion… i.e. someone who knows a lot. And mainly what they’re expected to know, in most Protestant denominations, is the Bible. Their churches are even built, often enough, like lecture halls in which the Good News can be preached.

So you’d certainly expect that Protestants would know the Bible better than Catholics, and I’m sure many really do. But I’m also becoming aware of a group of people who consider themselves “serious Christians”, but who aren’t Catholics and also don’t know the Bible. To my mind that’s a strange thing. Anyway, thanks to you, Brian, for the comment.

As regards whether ordinary students at a Southern State university really know their Bible - it’s hard for me to judge, since I don’t live in the South (or even in the US). But as an Independent Baptist I came into contact with quite a lot of American co-religionists. They were fundamentalist, KJV-only, total-abstinence types, and they were generally suspicious of state schools *and* state universities. Nearly all the young ones I knew ended up either going to Bible college or no college at all. In fact, my pastor’s concern when I announced that I would be studying philosophy at university - “You start getting into all that stuff and you’ll lose your faith” - was one of the things that prompted me to leave that church.

So what I guess I’m saying is that probably many nominal Protestants at Southern universities will not have learnt many Epistles off by heart, because the evangelicals/fundamentalists who do that sort of thing usually don’t go to state universities.

But I don’t know the situation exactly and I’m open for correction on that.

This is a pretty damning statement. Look at the conclusion, where he writes that, “it appears to us that only a minority of US teenagers are naturally absorbing by osmosis the traditional substantive content and character of the religious traditions to which they claim to belong. For, it appears to us, another popular religious faith — Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — is colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.”

Ouch. And the really depressing part is that, as you go through, everything he says is completely plausible. Seemingly the teddy-bear God really is the favorite one in American society today. No wonder liberal academics have such contempt for religion.