Ill-Informed or Just Kinda Ignorant?

There seems to be a current vogue for giving long-winded scientific and sociological explanations for why voters are so ill-informed, using the particular example of the number of Americans who think that Obama is a Muslim.

Certainly there are a number of people who believe this because of information illiteracy, which is a very real problem for our democracy. But many of the people who believe that Obama is a Muslim may think that because of a more general ignorance about the freedom of religion that may be impossible to overcome.

Typically, the people who believe the Muslim thing have no college experience. This could be related as much to the fact that college is the time when most people become fully aware that they are free to choose beliefs other than those of their parents as it is to education itself. (This worldview without a full awareness of religious freedom may be particularly strong among Catholics and other denominations where religious identity can be related more to family background than it is to the actual practice of religion, because they would impute this family-religion connection to others for whom religion is a matter of personal belief, rather than heritage.) And many people across all education levels are familiar with the fact that Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, etc. changed their names when they converted to Islam. A snippet of knowledge like this could cause confusion, especially among the uneducated, about the relationship that names have to Islam.

So, for many people, Obama may be Muslim simply because of his name and his father's background, regardless of where he goes to church, and without a huge amount of misinformation.