While almost six in ten Americans say religion is important to them and four in ten attend religious services once per week, a recently released study from the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life suggested that U.S. citizens still have a great deal to learn about religious practices in general, including their own in some cases.

On average, Americans as a whole answered 16 of 32 questionscorrectly, which would receive a failing grade of “F” on most tests in United States academic institutions.

The study, released on September 28, entitled the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey,” asked questions on various religions including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and separated answers of the 3,413 respondents based on religious affiliation to determine each group’s knowledge of religious topics through a mostly-multiple choice quiz of 32 topics about religion.

The Pew Forum is a non-partisan, non-advocacy organization that does not take positions on policy debates.

On average, Americans as a whole answered 16 of 32 questions correctly, which would receive a failing grade of “F” on most tests in United States academic institutions.

The highest-scoring segment of respondents to the survey in relation to religious affiliation was the atheist/agnostic group, which averaged a 20.9 score out of 32 possible correct answers. Jewish respondents came in second at 20.5 correct answers average while Mormons came in third at 20.3.

Catholics and Protestants were separated by race due to their large numbers, with white evangelical protestants finishing 4th overall at 17.6 correct answers on average, white Catholics averaging 16.0 correct answers, and Hispanic Catholics coming in last at 11.6 correct answers on average.

Less than 30 Muslim respondents were included in the survey but were not listed as separate respondents, however, with the foundation not counting them as a separate category because of their smaller size in the country, which was listed as less than 1% of the population according to the Pew Center’s 2007 survey on religious backgrounds in the U.S., although some have questioned whether the number is too small.

Questions were asked about the faith of Islam, however. Among respondents asked to identify the name of Islam’s holy book, only 54% of respondents as a whole correctly identified the Qur’an as the answer while only 52% correctly answered that Ramadan is the name of Islam’s holy month.

For the Ramadan question, the possible answers were “A Hindu festival of lights,” “A Jewish day of atonement, or “The Islamic holy month.” Respondents also had the choice of saying “I don’t know” as an answer.

While 68% of respondents were able to name Pakistan as a predominantly Muslim country, only 27% correctly identified that most people are Muslim in Indonesia, the country with the largest population of Muslims in the world, which many believe to be an example of the world’s lack of knowledge regarding Islam as a worldwide religion as opposed to simply being a Middle Eastern religion.

Regarding examples of respondents showing a lack of knowledge in regards to basic tenets of their own religions, about 45% of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion actually becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ as opposed to merely being symbolic items.

In addition, about 43% of Jewish respondents did not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish. Also, more than half of all Protestants surveyed (53%) could not correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity.

The survey was conducted in large part as a response to a 2007 book titled “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t” by Boston University Stephen Prothero in which he said that “Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion” while noting that there was no comprehensive national survey addressing the general religious knowledge among adults in the United States.

Because there hadn’t been a similar study conducted that the Pew Center could find except for a few questions asked by Gallup in the 1950’s, no conclusions were drawn on whether or not Americans’ knowledge had increased or decreased in recent years.

Jews, Mormons and atheists/agnostics were oversampled as part of the survey to allow analysis of the relatively small groups.

For more information and complete results or take a shorter online version of the quiz, visit http://pewforum.org/