Proverbs 18:15 “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”

Pluralism as a philosophy or ideology means to recognize and affirm peaceful coexistence of diverse interests, beliefs, and lifestyles within a culture. America’s promotion of pluralism is being debunked as we witness the hostility in America against Jews since the October 7 Hamas slaughter of innocent Israelites.

The source for this hostility toward Jews, and the positive promotion of Hamas and Palestine as a nation, has been traced to our university campuses. But there is a more fundamental reason for America’s complete lack of understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian War. Americans as a nation get an “F” in religion.

Harvard University’s Palestine solidarity groups at released their “Statement of Solidarity” after the Hamas attacks: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold Israel entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. The Apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death.”

These Harvard groups believe Israel is an apartheid state who forced this indigenous Palestinian people to live under Israel’s deadly control. Not true. In a previous article “The Miracle of Israel,” we proved the Jews are the indigenous people in the land, dating to 1400-1200 BC. American universities get an “F” in religion.

Second, this war is not over colonization but religion. In “The Palestinian Delusion,” author Robert Spencer points out that Hamas’s charter (“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”) comes from Islam’s Hadith, believed by Muslims to be a record of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad said and did as transmitted through narrators.

As Spencer explains (page 40), Muslims are bound by their religious ideology to exterminate the Jews from Isarel: “Muslims are taught in their holiest books not just to despise and mistrust Jews, but that Muslims are doing a good and virtuous deed if they kill Jews, a deed that will bring about the consummation of all things and the dawning of eternal justice and mankind.” Do Americans know this is a religious war?

In the 2007 interview “In America, an ‘F’ in Religion” by US News & World Report with Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion at Boston University, we get the answer for why pluralistic America, after 16 years since this article, is still getting it wrong on what is happening in Israel. Below are some highlights.

“With roughly 9 in 10 of its citizens claiming to believe in God, America is acknowledged to be the most religious of modern industrial nations. Yet when it comes to knowledge about religion, America ranks among the most ill-informed. While close to two thirds of all Americans regard the Bible as a source of answers to life’s questions, only half can name even one of the New Testament Gospels. Similarly, in a land of growing religious diversity, only 10% of U.S. teenagers can name the world’s 5 major religions.

Stephen Prothero, the head of Boston University’s Religion Department, calls this condition a ‘major civic problem.’ His new book, Religious Literacy, tells how we got here and how we might do better.

‘In America, religious literacy and basic literacy went hand in hand. The Bible was the first book read by early Americans. As they learned to read, they read the Bible. Americans conducted many of their most important civic debates, including the debate over slavery, largely in biblical terms.

Biblical literacy was actually undermined by churches themselves when they started focusing on loving Jesus rather than on listening to Him. The Bible slowly became a kind of ornament and a source of authority rather than a book you actually read. Sermons became more about ordinary life and less about biblical narratives. Sunday schools focused more on morality than on learning and thinking.

Rather than knowing God through a combination of the head and the heart, through religious thinking and reason, Christians focused on experience and emotion, turning Americans away from religious learning.”

As this week’s verse also says, Professor Prothero explains how Americans must fix religious illiteracy: “We need to have mandatory courses about the Bible and world religions in churches, middle and high schools. Students would learn the Bible’s stories and characters as well as the uses of the Bible in world and American history, in literature, and in politics. I think few students would opt out of these courses.”
“The Evidence of Faith’s Substance” _ Article #588