Bloom: Study of sacred texts should re-enforce our lives

Survey organizations that present us with vast swaths of conclusions about life in America deserve our scrutiny before we believe what they say.

The Pew survey, however, is respected and a credible research polling organization. Recently, the organization offered an analysis of religious life in America. We have heard before that mainstream religions in Christendom are losing numbers and that people in general are less religious. Surveyed categories include belief in God, attendance at a house of worship, and belief in heaven and hell. The survey found that 70 percent of American Christians identify with some sort of Protestant denomination. Furthermore, the Catholic community makes up about 20 percent. The rest of the non-Christian religions make up approximately six percent of the population.

What is disconcerting are the results from the category frequency of reading Scripture.

According to Pew, only 35 percent of Americans read Scripture once a week. Ten percent read their Scriptures once or twice a month, and only eight percent read some sort of sacred writings several times a year. And now for the bad news: 45 percent of those surveyed seldom if ever read Scriptures. If there is a shred of truth in all of this data, then how do we get off calling ourselves a religious nation when so few of us are reading our respective sacred writings?

How does one practice their faith without giving time to reading or studying their tradition’s sacred writings. Scriptures for many Americans could mean the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

For Jews it could mean not only the Hebrew Bible but also the rabbinical sacred writings comprising the Talmud and other homiletical literature throughout the ages. Does this statistic apply to the Islamic community, the Hindu and Buddhist communities as well?

I don’t deny that faith comes from within our hearts and souls, but how do we guide our faith and shape it without the stories, traditions and the laws that our ancestors bequeathed to us throughout history? How can we hope that our young people will learn for the future the lessons of our faith traditions if their parents and grandparents do not study?

I remember that religious educators used to make us memorize passages from the Bible. We may have not understood what it all meant, but we could at least recite them and it stuck with us into adulthood. If there is any truth to Pew’s statistics, then maybe we need to band together to promote the importance of not just reading Scripture but studying it as well. What would happen if people lost the ability to interpret the meaning of their Scriptural teachings? We would have collections of books abandoned in our houses of worship libraries or downloaded onto our tablets or laptops but no one is reading them?

One solution is to have a day of study for all religious institutions in our community. Just imagine one night where congregations from all over the religious spectrum gathered together to study. Groups, couples and individuals could choose topics, and we could share in the learning of other people’s wisdom, too. It could be a joyous event for promoting the idea that knowledge matters and, regardless of one’s religious affiliation, people of faith can unite to affirm that sacred texts can enrich us intellectually and spiritually.

If we stop studying what our sacred writings say, then do we not risk abdicating our free will and thinking selves to what a few others in a hierarchy would tell us that our teachings mean? We have so many opportunities to download all sorts of apps onto our technology devices. Or we can simply buy the traditional books.

The point is that it is not about access to the texts. It is, rather, about prioritizing where sacred texts fit into our value system and lifestyle in our secular society. When we say we are Jewish, Christian or Muslim, shouldn’t that mean that we live the faith tradition as well as study it, too? Isn’t education integral to our culture’s ethos in American life? Doesn’t that ethic apply to religion too?

This story was originally published March 21, 2016 at 6:48 AM with the headline "Bloom: Study of sacred texts should re-enforce our lives."