(RNS) It’s no secret that the United States is falling behind other nations in Asia and Europe in teaching math and science — necessary subjects and skills if America hopes to compete successfully in the 21st century.

However, there was always one category where we remained a leader. Americans, as the most religious society among developed nations, knew more about the history and core beliefs of their faiths than our competitors.

Or so we thought.

At a moment in history when the world’s various religions are major players on the global stage, recent findings from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life are nothing short of disturbing. Pew’s U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey revealed our knowledge to be shallow, superficial, even simplistic.

Pew researchers asked 3,412 adults 32 questions about basic religious figures and history; the results displayed an extraordinary lack of basic information not only about our neighbors’ spiritual traditions, but also of our own.

Less than half of Catholics, for example, knew their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion become the actual body and blood of Jesus. In a real shocker, slightly more than half of Protestants couldn’t name Martin Luther as the man who inspired the Reformation. A disturbing 43 percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of Judaism’s greatest religious thinkers, was Jewish. Less than half of Americans knew the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist.

Nine of 10 Americans knew the Supreme Court prohibited public school teachers from leading prayers in the classroom, but only a third knew teachers are permitted to use religious texts in history and literature courses.

Three religious minorities scored highest in the survey: atheists/agnostics, Jews, and Mormons. In our religiously saturated society, it probably requires more knowledge to be a nonbeliever than a nominal member of a particular religious group.

Jews and Mormons, both historical victims of religious prejudice and bigotry in the U.S., need to know the major beliefs of the dominant Catholic and Protestant population in order to function effectively in society. The reverse, however, doesn’t seem to be true: Mitt Romney faced questions about his Mormon faith again and again during the 2008 presidential campaign.

The conclusion I took away — however discouraging it may be — is that many Americans lack religious curiosity and are intellectually lazy. Just because we invoke the phrase “the Bible says …” doesn’t mean we actually know what the Bible says. Likewise, aone-size-fits-all answer to every question of faith doesn’t actually answer very much.

I constantly encounter a stunning lack of accurate information about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Daoism — religions that together far outnumber Christianity and Judaism. Maybe Americans think they don’t need to know much about the faiths of Muslim countries, India, China, Japan, Thailand or other nations. In fact, they need that knowledge now more than ever.

More than anything, the survey is a failing report card for many of America’s religious education programs. If churches and synagogues fail to teach their members the core values of their faiths, if they persist in offering their members a mushy pabulum of “feel good” worship services and mindless catchphrases devoid of actual content, the only thing we’ll get is religious illiteracy and spiritual indifference.

And in an increasingly competitive global marketplace of ideas and ideologies, that’s simply not good enough.

Without even basic religious knowledge, Americans will not understand what motivates billions of people of other religions who share the planet with us. A lack of authentic religious knowledge is as much a threat to our national security as falling behind in science and math.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the forthcoming “Christians & Jews, Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future.”)