Seriously, what is the point?  I think there is one, but the evidence of our age is that most churches and other religious institutions don't seem able to invest enough attention and energy in it to teach their members to be "native speakers" of the tradition, however they would construe what it means to be a "native speaker."  It seems we have by and large all become baptists--people willing to allow the youth we know to be educated by other forces and socio-cultural structures--commercial advertising, politics, and the general stochastic churn of cultural accident--in the hopes that, when they are thereby (mal)formed into a minimal kind of adulthood, they will by some miracle find their way back to a religious faith that they might have been educated into from infancy; so that we want to make, at best, belated believers.

This is too strong, and maybe I am jeremiading against myself, among others.  But it seems the case that religious institutions don't seem to have a good solution to what formation looks like in our world, especially when so many other forces have so much money and intelligence (which is simply money distilled into brainpower) at their behest.

But pieces like this don't make me hope.  I wonder, first, if the Roman Catholic church, which probably has one of the strongest and most well-designed structures of religious education out there, cannot convince more than one third of its members of a position that is simultaneously (a) abstract (and thus not immediately existentially costing an adherent anything) and (b) pretty doctrinally central (especially important in a religious tradition, such as Christianity is, that privileges doctrinal orthodoxy--remember, lots of religions don't privilege it), then what is it teaching them?  What is religious education doing?  

Clearly Roman Catholics are gaining a particular identity from being Roman Catholics; they have distinct identities in many different ways.  But maybe not in the explicit doctrines of the church.  What then?  In whiteness?

What's also interesting here is that the people who dissent from this teaching don't even seem to know that it is a central teaching of their tradition.  But it is.  I mean, it's one of the most important differences between Roman Catholics and a lot of Protestants, especially those coming from more Reformed perspectives.

It's not helped by some Roman Catholic thinkers urging us that "there's nothing to see here, move along, move along" as this piece by Thomas Reese, which tries to impugn the Pew Researc Center (which apparently has "an impoverished idea of what the Eucharist is really all about," according to Reese) while also, without noting the fact too clearly, acknowledging that their data does point to a problem of ignorance.  

(Reese's point was called out by Greg Smith, of the Pew Research Center, but instead of noting the intellectual evasiveness of Reese's piece, he simply reiterated the data, which, in this case, doesn't lie. 

Behind all of this is a vast and powerful problem, one that has haunted theologically-minded Christians since at leat Augustine, and certainly has had many thinkers elsewhere vexed for a long time: what sort of "training" in religion ought our institutions to undertake for their members?  For "religious education" seems to me among the very most important things of all, for these institutions.  And they quite obviously aren't do it very well.