As religious literacy educators, we use the KSAM method to define religious literacy as having the Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, and Motivations to promote the public understanding of religion.

Knowledge: Religious literacy requires the vocabulary and cultural fluency needed to understand how religion, spirituality, and nonreligion manifest in everyday life.

Skills: As a subfield of religious studies and interfaith engagement, religious literacy applies the following two civic competencies.

Academic Research: We apply research methods promoted by the American Academy of Religion to understand that religions are “internally diverse, change over time, and are embedded in all aspects of culture.” We apply research on how individuals form and reform their religious identities when manifesting different degrees of “beliefs, behaviors, and acts of belonging.”

Civil Dialogue: We respectfully contribute to the public discourse by practicing civil dialogue when speaking about and encountering the religious other. We use our research methods to ground the public in facts while modeling how to effectively communicate in multireligious societies.

Attitudes: Religious literacy embodies the virtues of openness, curiosity, and intellectual humility. We cultivate empathy for others by seeking to understand another’s point of view, aware that understanding need not imply agreement.

Motivations: Religious literacy is an ethical pursuit. We reject the dangerous intent of learning about religion to cause another harm, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Religious literate people first, practice nonmaleficence by promising to do no harm, and second, to practice beneficence by promising to do good. We take shared responsibility for defending the inalienable rights of people of all religions and none.

Professor Diane L. Moore, advisor to the Foundation for Religious Literacy, and director of the Harvard Religious Literacy Project, articulates four basic assertions about religions and the study of religion. These help us counter problematic misperceptions about the academic study of religions while creating a useful method for inquiry.

▸ First, there is a difference between the devotional study of religion to encourage religious commitment and the nonsectarian study that seeks to understand religion without promoting or discouraging adherence to it. This premise affirms the credibility of particular religious assertions without equating them with absolute truths about the traditions themselves.

▸ Second, religions are internally diverse and not uniform as is commonly represented. Scholars recognize that religious communities are living entities that function in different social/political contexts.

▸ Third, religions evolve and change through time and are not static or fixed. Religious expressions and beliefs must be studied in social and historical context as they are constantly interpreted and reinterpreted by adherents.

▸ Fourth, religious influences are embedded in cultures and not separable from other forms of human expression.

Citation: Diane L. Morre, “Four Principles.” Harvard Religious Literacy Project. 

The faculty at ReligionAndPublicLife.com recognizes that individuals and communities construct their religious identities in complex ways. Benjamin P. Marcus, special advisor to The Foundation for Religious Literacy, notes that studying “religious identity development” requires recognition of the historical, political, geographic, and economic factors that shape the beliefs people hold, the behaviors they exhibit, and their membership within multiple intersecting communities. Put simply, beliefs, behaviors, and the experiences of belonging to communities—including but not restricted to only religious communities—shape and are shaped by one another.

▸ Beliefs and values include theological, doctrinal, scriptural, and ethical evaluative claims about daily life as much as those about a transcendent reality or experiences of the divine.

▸ Behaviors include practices associated with rites, rituals, and life both inside and outside of strictly religious settings.

▸ Experiences of belonging include membership in religious communities and other social communities with intersecting racial, national, ethnic, familial, gender, class, and other identities.

Citation: Benjamin P. Marcus, “Chapter 4 – Religious Literacy in American Education” in Michael D. Waggoner and Nathan C. Walker, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

The rule of law has often been used to suppress freedom of religion and discriminate against religious minorities. However, history shows that the rule of law can be effectively used to promote mutual understanding of one another’s differences. These four principles explain how the rule of law can protect freedom of religion or belief as a fundamental human right, rather than be used to coerce or harm:

1. The rule of law should promote diversity over uniformity. [But it cannot stop there. The rule of law should promote pluralism––see next framework.]
2. Peaceful co-existence can derive from mutual understanding, with the awareness that understanding need not imply agreement.
3. States should move beyond the zero-sum game, where one person’s win is another’s loss, to ensure that the rule of law does not put religious rights in opposition to human rights.
4. Religious freedom flourishes when liberty is legally defined as a shield that protects people, not a sword that harms them.

These principles, not to be construed as a definitive list, can help move beyond culture wars where religious rites are pitted against civil and human rights. They support the adoption of legal frameworks that transcend the mere tolerance of religious difference toward the active promotion of peaceful co-existence, as promoted on ReligionAndPublicLife.com

Citation: Lyal S. Sunga and Nathan C. Walker, Freedom of Religion or Belief through Law: Current Dilemmas and Lessons Learned, Rome, Italy: IDLO, 2014/2016.

Aware of the limitations of using only a “diversity” framework, Michael D. Waggoner and Nathan C. Walker, wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education that pluralism advances the idea that freedom of religion is a constitutional guarantee and a fundamental human right. Unlike the self-selection process of privatism that can lead religious groups to segregate themselves from civil society, and unlike the legal agenda of secularism that can lead to government hostility toward private religious practices, pluralism argues that in one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world, the public square and public schools must serve as holding grounds for citizens to engage one another’s differences.

Pluralism is not simply a synonym for diversity, as Diana L. Eck explains that diversity is the evidence of difference, whereas pluralism is the engagement in that difference; pluralism is not religious relativism but an expression of individual commitments.

“First, pluralism is not the sheer fact of diversity alone, but is active engagement with that diversity…. Second, pluralism is more than the mere tolerance of differences; it requires knowledge of them… Third, pluralism is not simply relativism, but makes room for real and different religious commitments… Fourth, pluralism in America is clearly based on the common ground rules of the First Amendment to the Constitution: “no establishment” of religion and the “free exercise” of religion… Fifth, pluralism requires the nurturing of constructive dialogue to reveal both common understandings and real differences.” Read More >>

One way to achieve these goals is for public schools, as we advocate at ReligionAndPublicLife.com, to adopt the policy agenda that religious literacy is a compelling state interest. This means that governments of pluralist democracies require graduates of public schools to demonstrate knowledge of religions and how religion manifests in people’s lives. This is essential if students are to understand how various religious traditions use distinct sources of authority to govern their own communities and how individuals who affiliate with those religions may use those same sources differently to inform their own participation in a democracy. In this way, the state seeks not to banish religion from the public arena, but rather to treat the government as one arena in which citizens gain understanding about one another’s differences, including religious ones.

We work from the premise that mutual understanding is neither endorsement, nor advancement, nor exclusion of religion. Aware that the United States is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world, pluralists demonstrate, as we do in this curriculum, that the purpose of public schools is to strengthen democracy through increased knowledge of and engagement with one another, including citizens’ religious diversity.

Citation: Diana L. Eck, “From Diversity to Pluralism,” Harvard Religious Pluralism Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 

Citation: “Introduction” in Michael D. Waggoner and Nathan C. Walker, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.