Easter Sunday seems like as good a time as any to blog about something I've been thinking about for some time now: how Christian literacy is an unspoken component of American cultural literacy, especially when you're in a conversation with a bunch of atheists.

My mother raised me Buddhist, though in Northern Arizona, there's no Buddhist temple (even if there was, I doubt I'd have turned out any more religious than I am right now).  Religion, as a vehicle for spirituality, has never been a big part of my life.  I can count on one hand (maybe two hands) the number of times I've been to a Christian church service of any kind.  This is in contrast to most of the kids around me growing up, who were all different kinds of Christian, and who spent their Sundays (and Wednesdays) obtaining a vocabulary and knowledge base that I didn't even know I was missing.

The moments in my life when I did realize this void of knowledge were all deeply embarrassing moments that remain ingrained in my memory.  Each one caught me completely off-guard, as the people around me sought to bring me into a world that to them, was normal, and to me, was utterly foreign.

When I was 5 years old we moved from Oregon to Arizona and I was temporarily placed in a private Christian preschool.  (I'm not sure why this was; I should ask my parents!)  On my first day there I followed the other kids into the lunchroom, where bowls of food were waiting for us at our chairs.  I started eating.  Everyone else gasped and stared at me.  Some other 5 year old kid hissed at me in a scolding tone that we all had to say grace first.  I didn't know what grace was.  I also vividly recall an evening several years later, when my friend's sister asked me to say grace before dinner, and my friend and her mother also pleasantly encouraged me to do so.  I knew by then what grace was, and I was happy to follow along with everyone and say "Amen," but I had no idea how to lead grace.  I just kept declining until they gave up on me, and I sat there, totally embarrassed.

Along the path of life there's been other moments etched in my mind, such as mispronouncing a Biblical name and eliciting laughter, or not getting a joke because it relied on knowledge of some famous Bible story I'd never happened to learn.  I own several Bibles, and I've read a fair amount of it, and I have had some wonderful conversations with my Christian friends over the years.  Furthermore, it's also undeniably a fact that a person can't grow up as a fully acculturated American without some basic understanding of basic Christian beliefs and Bible stories.  The metaphors, allusions, aphorisms, and practices are everywhere.  American cultural literacy is Christian cultural literacy.

So why blog about this?  Because I wonder to what extent the expectation of total Christian literacy makes sense.  If I, as an advanced graduate student at Stanford University (who I guess is supposed to know a lot of stuff), slip up on some fact about Christianity, is it appropriate for the room to laugh at my gaff?  Should I continue to swallow my pride and learn more about this religion which isn't my belief, but is my ambient culture?  (Because isn't it one task of a social scientist to at least understand their own ambient culture?)  Or is there any justification for the annoyance I'm tempted to feel, the little voice that says, "Hey, I was raised to follow a different religion, so why am I expected to know more about another religion than my own?"

A few months ago I was in a work meeting with several other academics, and I accidentally referred to a community by the wrong Christian denomination.  (I don't even want to repeat it here, because the difference between the two denominations is quite large, and the fact that I made this mistake was deeply embarrassing -- which I guess is the point of this blog post.)  The other people in the room laughed uproariously at my mistake, and all of a sudden I was 5 years old again.  Except the difference these days seems to be that Christians are never the ones laughing at me anymore, rather, it's often the most atheistic of academics.

Why is that?

As a member of the Acoustical Society of America, I receive their quarterly newsletter, cutely/appropriately entitled Echoes.  It's fun, since instead of just being about speech (which I'm used to reading about), there's information on all sort of research in acoustics: bioacoustics, underwater acoustics, musical acoustics, all sorts of neat stuff (you may remember my trip to one ASA meeting, during which one of the plenary speakers was a professional yodeler)!

Anyway, Echoes appeared in my mailbox today with this little story in their "In the News" segment.  Maybe you'll find it interesting, too:


It kind of reminds me of another news story I heard a few months ago that was about police cars switching from sirens to a low, rumbling droning sound that's supposed to be felt, rather than heard (in case your radio is on too loud).  Since I live in earthquake country, that particular idea strikes me as a bad one.  But the smoke alarm findings are kind of cool.  Or hot. 

Sigh, if only speech research was this useful...