The facts are symptomatic. If, as you suggest, people knew the important details, the rote knowledge and trivia might be something easily dismissed. On the other hand, every time someone focuses on the "important stuff", both end up disappearing. There is no reason for soldiers to know how to march, or needing to obey their superiors all the time. The apocryphal origin of the military salute, as a gesture of submission that would render the subordinate vulnerable, and give the superior first crack at him in a contest of arms, almost certainly no longer applies, so why bother having soldiers salute? Because in the military, people die when you get it wrong, and long institutional experience has taught them to keep from getting the big stuff wrong, you have to drill on the small stuff.

The supposed ready availability of information requires people to be drilled in the process of looking it up. No one looks up Obama's religion, they just make wild-ass guesses. That ignorance IS the result of not being taught by rote and drill, to value having facts for their own sake. It's not like things have changed, either. No one speaks Latin, but there is no debating the efficacy of learning it on other language skills, in one's own native tongue. People have been complaining about the lack of need for this or that subject as long as they have been going to school, but for the longest time, generational experience made them turn around and teach the same way when the choice of curricula devolved onto them. It has only been in recent generations where there was sufficient cultural impetus to make ignoring tradition (i.e. time-tested, multi-generational experience) fashionable, people have had the opportunities to act on it.

The theoretical ideal of people knowing the basics about the important presidents as opposed to being able to recite a list might or might not be a real thing, but in my experience, people who best fit that description don't know as much as they think they do, and in discussions of the topic, I find myself having to explain all sorts of things to them. Not everyone who knows all the presidents is going to be an expert, but it's a basis for expertise. I forgot many of the lists and so forth myself, after learning them in grade school, but the knowledge came back when I began studying history in depth and as an adult. No one is bemoaning the ignorance of the states or Presidents or kings of England, for their own sake, but because the general ignorance of those details means that people lack reliable and important knowledge of social studies. A man with only one foot might be able to run, but you wouldn't be smart to bet on it, and any practical athlete worth his salt almost certainly has two.

Well, aside from the Jeremiah Wright scandal which has been hushed up as much as possible with so much independent media, and long forgotten for the most part, by the opposition in light of an actual track record to attack now, there really is nothing to indicate one way or another what religion he is. With all that in mind, someone named "Barack Hussein Obama" is mostly like to be a Muslim. In fact 50% of all known people with that name HAVE been Muslims.