And, too, Americans in the 19th century began to embrace a nondenominational Christianity, sometimes in an effort to further social ends such as temperance and the abolition of slavery, and sometimes as a way to present a united front against "what many saw as a worrying wave of Roman Catholic immigration."

Eventually, "the lowest-common-denominator Protestantism once preached in public schools morphed into generic Christianity, then into generic moralism," he writes. Religion collapsed into values, and values into sexual morality, "which in turn functions via an odd sort of circular reasoning as a proxy for religiosity."

To people who suggest that religious literacy should be cultivated in churches and synagogues and mosques, rather than in public schools and universities, he argues that, yes, that could be done, but it's often not. And even when the details of their own religions are taught, there is rarely instruction about other people's religions.

Last year, in a course on "Death and Immortality" he teaches at Boston University, Prothero gave his students a religious literacy quiz. There were 15 questions, on topics ranging from the Ten Commandments to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Most of the students, he reports, flunked.

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