Young people today embrace a religion that could be labeled as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” So says a survey of several thousand teenagers documented in Soul Searching: The Religions and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, by Christian Smith, with Melinda Lundquist Denton. A review in the September 6 Christian Century summarizes the “creed” of MTD as follows:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. [!]
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God [sic] is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
Carol E. Lytech, What Teens Believe, in The Christian Century, Sept. 6, 2005, 20, at 21.
One thing we can say about this “creed” is that it’s certainly adolescent. Although, if we threw out point #3 and took #4 with a grain of salt, it wouldn’t be that awful.
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