One thing I said at the meeting was that I’ve never actually had a situation where I felt a journalist totally misunderstood what I was saying. This is something that my colleagues talk about all the time. I’m not saying you don’t get misunderstood , but I’ve never actually had a situation where I was talking about a religion story where I felt that I was just being manipulated - except for by Dave Van Biema [of Time magazine] - I’m just kidding, Dave. (Chuckles.)

The other thing that I want to say by way of introduction is that the last few years I’ve made a concerted effort to try to be writing more and more for the general public instead of for academics. I found it depressing to write books that took me 10 years and were bought by 500 people and read by 50 people, where my mother was 2 percent of the reading public. (Laughter.) My father doesn’t read, unfortunately; that would have been 4 percent.

So I’ve been making an effort to talk more and more with editors and publishers and journalists and that’s been wonderful for me. And I found that the conversations I have with my friends in journalism and in publishing are actually, in a lot of cases, more interesting than the conversations I have with my colleagues about American religion.

What I’d like to do today is talk a little bit about this religious literacy project that I’ve been working on. Let me say at the very beginning, though, that there are two ways to talk about religion. This is a message that I’ve figured out only by talking about my book over the last year. It’s really crucial, at least for me, to get it out there, which is that there’s this Sunday school, synagoguey, churchy, mosquey way of talking about religion, which is the way that religious people talk about it. Then there’s this other way of talking about religion, which is more secular. And I think there’s a fear in the general public that there’s only one way to talk about religion-the religious way.

Transcript of Pew Forum’s Faith Angle Conference held in December with author Stephen Prothero.
Prothero has written: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn’t