Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
Up working early to plow through an enormous amount of stuff
But wanted to share this challenging article from my alma mater, Fuller, on youth ministry about a phenomena that I somehow missed:
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
Christian Smith, Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that the average youth worker across the country should recognize these statements almost immediately. According to the research he and his colleagues have been doing in partnership with the National Study of Youth and Religion , these are the core religious beliefs of youth aged 13-17 today.
God exists and has created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good and nice to each other and to be moral, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in life except when needed for a problem.
• Good people will go to heaven when they die.
Smith coined the phrase: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to describe this set of beliefs
Moralistic: This means that youth generally think it is important to be a good person (and that this a major goal of being “religious”).
Therapeutic: Religious experience, indeed religion itself, exists to help us through life’s problems and makes us nicer people. In this approach, religious participation will often be defined around how religious experience has helped someone overcome personal difficulties.
Deism: God exists, had something to do with the creation of the world, but generally isn’t terribly active or demanding of God’s creation, especially in terms of the actual, spiritual experience of youth. It’s an explicit rejection of Christian orthodoxy.
If you can’t tell, this religion (and we should call it a religion) is not particularly grounded in a set of thoughtful traditions. It’s not even particularly theological as much as it is theopersonal , i.e., how God, the Heavenly Divine Butler, benefits the person, the individual.
And our kids are riddled with it. But where do they get it? Where could such a self-centered, consumerist, egocentric remaking of Christianity have come from? Smith says kids learn this behavior from the adults around them, strongly suggesting that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) is the pop religion of American families.
While Smith is reflecting upon his experience of American Christian kids as a whole, I must say that this fits what we are encountering as we talk to Catholics adults around the country.
95% of all Catholics I've talked about issues of salvation to are de facto Pelagians, 99% are de facto universalists, and huge numbers are working deists. Even those who are most enthusiastic about evangelization often freeze when asked to contemplate the mere possibility that not everyone is automatically "saved".
You know, given eternal life completely independent of some conscious response to the grace of God in whatever form it has reached us.
Last year I tried to sum up for myself the heart-level assumptions of regular life-long Catholics in ordinary parishes that I've encountered. it went like this:
All of us are saved
And all of us have earned it
but none of us are saints
because that wouldn't be humble.
'Cause most older cradle Catholics still know that they are supposed to be humble.
The upshot: Most of us are humble where what is called for is magnanimity (the aspiration to accomplish great things for God and others) and we are presumptious where we desparately need a dose of humility. (Just how good am I, really, and what does Jesus Christ have to do with any of this?)
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It isn't just for teens anymore.
If we don't get it, how do we expect our children and grandchildren to get it?
posted by Sherry W @ 6:22 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Sherry, this exactly matches my experience as well.
I have found that those Catholics who are reasonably well educated about their faith know that "Vatican II said that non-Christians can be saved". (They often are unaware that this wasn't a novel teaching, of course.) And they won't say that all people are saved, or that all people must be saved.
But as you suggest, they almost always assume that all people are saved. Or at least, all the "basically decent people" that they know must be saved. Or at the very least, there is nothing that they as a Christian can do to help other people be saved.
The author of the Disputations blog phrased this in a wonderfully concise way:
It seems to me that there are three possibilities:
1. My neighbors can go to hell for all I care.
2. I don't think believing in Jesus makes much of a difference in terms of salvation.
3. I've got to preach Christ to my neighbors.
None of these is especially appealing, but the first is unneighborly and the third means taking on work with a high risk of humiliation. So it's in my own interest to massage the second possibility into a form that's more or less consistent with my understanding of the Catholic Faith.
His "option # 2" is a perfect description of what most of the educated and active Catholics I know tend to assume most of the time. In fact, even though I am very active in evangelization, I tend to assume this much of the time as well -- which is a bit worrisome.
Hi Larry:
It's great to hear from you! How's life at the DSPT?
But as you suggest, they almost always assume that all people are saved. Or at least, all the "basically decent people" that they know must be saved. Or at the very least, there is nothing that they as a Christian can do to help other people be saved.
Bingo. It's a sort of incredibly watered down version of the anonymous Christian thesis.
The longer I'm in this business, the more I think it is because we never hear anyone talk about being concerned about salvation: their own or some one else's. And human beings aren't that original - most of us simply can't think about what we never hear other people acknowledge or talk about in a significant way.
And if no one ever talks about the in and outs of salvation - how can it be an problem? We approach evangelization as though it was the promotion of a product. Jesus in the midst of His Church as the Best possible product on the market but if you choose another product, the only impact in your life is that you are making do with a lesser (or defective) product.
There's no sense that it is more like high stakes medicine for a life-threatening disease: the wrong treatment not only won't be best - its not the difference between Tylenol or Advil for a headache. The wrong treatment could could kill you because it doesn't successfully address your real illness.
But the idea that we are all seriously, life-threateningly ill - with sin and its consequences (spiritual death, anyone?)- simply isn't on the horizon.
So we see embracing the faith not as a Stage 4 cancer patient considers possible treatments but as an wealthy businesswoman considers her vacation options. Which will add the most to my life? What will be most fun, most fulfilling, most meaningful, most memorable?
Not what will save me?
The DSPT is great, especially since I just finished my master's thesis!
I think your point about approaching evangelization as a product is very true. I would even concede that there are many involved in evangelization who honestly believe that Jesus, and Jesus alone, can give us inner joy in this life. Then, when we die, Christians are taken to heaven with the Jesus they already know, while non-Christians are taken to heaven and meet Jesus for the first time.
Yet even this view -- which would be considered too "triumphalist" by, say, Peter Pham's standards -- tacitly assumes universalism.
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