A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life generated a lot of headlines by showing that, although Americans are more religious than most people in the developed world, they also appear to be relatively ignorant about religion.

Pew asked 3,400 American 32 questions about religion and religious issues, and most could answer fewer than half correctly. Ergo Americans are ignorant about religion.

It’s not that simple though. In 2007, the Iona Institute commissioned polls here and in Northern Ireland assessing levels of basic religious knowledge in this country. We found that there was a low level of religious knowledge among young people in particular, and that the level of religious knowledge among Protestants in Northern Ireland was also lower than might be expected.

For example, 63 per cent of Northern Catholics knew the authors of the four Gospels, compared to only 54 per cent of their Protestant neighbours.

But the questions we posed to people were strictly about Christianity. So what was being assessed was people’s knowledge of their own religion.

By contrast, the Pew poll surveys people’s knowledge about religion in general, including questions about non-Christian religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam.

In fact, it turns out that evangelical Christians, for example, know plenty about questions concerning the Bible.

So, while the survey shows that white American evangelicals were only able to answer 17.6 of 32 questions on religion generally, they had much more success in answering questions about their own faith.

Eighty five per cent of white evangelicals were able to name the first book in the bible, compared to 74 per cent of white Catholics in the US, and only 52 per cent of the total Irish population.

Seventy one per cent of white evangelicals are able to name the authors of the four Gospels, compared to only 40 per cent of white Catholics, and 66 per cent of Irish people.

Actually, the religious grouping that comes out worst of all in terms of knowledge of its own faith is US Catholics.

Only 33 per cent of US Catholics can name the authors of the four Gospels, while barely half (55 per cent) can say what happens during the Sacrament of the Eucharist (the transformation of the bread and wine into the body, blood, soul and Divinity of Christ). Only 42 per cent can accurately name the first book of the Bible.

One reason for this appears to be that the score for Hispanic Catholics is dragging down the overall Catholic score, and this is probably because Hispanics tend to be socially disadvantaged than most other Americans with fewer going to college etc.

However, even when this is factored in, US Catholics still seem to lag behind other groups in their knowledge.

What conclusions can we draw from all this? One is that when American Christians are asked about Christianity, they aren’t as ignorant as the headlines might indicate. But the fact that Catholics are less well-informed than other groups, and less well-informed than Catholics here (and Catholics here aren’t that well informed!), has to be of concern to Catholic leaders in the US.