On Wednesday I asked New Statesman readers to participate in a truncated verson of a Pew Centrereligious questionnaire. The Pew study suggests that that, in the US, atheists know more about religion than their faithful counterparts.
Thanks to a healthy battery of responses, I can reveal the results. The scores have been pro-rated to those on the original Pew questionnaire, and calculated as a mean average. They are as follows:
Interestingly, the trend is quite the reverse in the UK of that found by Pew for the US. At the NS, believers outscored both atheists and agnostics on average.
One interesting point was that atheists who declared themselves to be raised under a faith scored consistently better than those who did not.
Now, do bear in mind that these results are completely unscientific, not least because I had 46 reponses. Atheist respondents far outweighed Christians — a window on our readership, perhaps — and as with the American poll, we did not get any Muslim or Hindu participants.
Still, I think we can all be chuffed to have outscored the Americans (though a couple do feature), with consistenly higher scores and a higher overall average of 27.61 scored against the overall US average of 16.
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