Fairytales of New York

Totally underwhelmed by the not-very-surprising news that American atheists know more about religion than American believers*.

After all, unlike most British folk atheists, standing in long traditions of couldn't-care-less-ness, most American atheists probably rejected religion and so are well informed about it. Also in an overwhelmingly Christian country like America, you'd normally assume that the atheists are more intelligent - not because they're right, but because intelligent people like to buck the trend. Which in the States would mean they're likely to be more liberal, more interested in the world at large.  And Americans generally seem to have a degree of parochiality more extreme than a frog stuck down a well. So you're not going to be competing with much.
For example, fewer than half knew that the Dalai Lama was a Buddhist. Well, if you're a Fundamentalist Baptist, you like to keep the surplus information to a minimum to save memory space. To these people, since Buddhism is of the Devil, who cares who actually is a Buddhist? Likewise the 50% of Protestants who did not know that Luther was the driving force behind the Reformation - why would they care? He lived neither in the 1st nor 21st Centuries.  And he was a German, which is a very dull European country: white Americans only claim to be descended only from the Irish and the Italians. And Luther lived 250 years before anyone invented their country. All in all, he's not very important is he?
But I'm curious about this statement: "Almost half of Catholics surveyed did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion actually become the body and blood of Christ." and would just want to know - did the survey get the wrong answer because the Catholics didn't "know"? Or because the question was so badly nuanced that only an atheist or extreme Protestant would get the "right" answer? Indeed, the Telegraph's nerdy blogger didn't understand the "when and where", let alone the "what" when he tried to comment on it.

* There's an interesting slant in the Telegraph's reporting, when it says that atheists know more about "religion". What doesn't come across from there (in fact they seem mysteriously to be trying to indicate the opposite), but does on the Pewforum site, is that it's actually Mormons and Evangelicals that know more about "Christianity" than anyone else, including atheists and agnostics. Again, they're a parochial lot. In my experience a Clearwater cat going missing is worth more airtime in Tampa Bay than a mudslide in Bangladesh.