Moralistic – therapeutic deism

In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton researched American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives from a wide variety of backgrounds. They found that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a vague pseudo-religion, which they described as moralistic-therapeutic deism (MTD). MTD has five basic principles:
1. There is a God who created and rules the world and oversees man’s life on Earth.
2. God wants people to be good, kind, and fair to one another, as the Bible teaches, and most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about yourself.
4. God does not have to be especially present in a person’s life, except when needed to solve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven after death.
They found that such a creed is particularly prevalent among adolescents belonging to Catholicism and the mainline of Protestantism. Evangelical teenagers performed measurably better, but they were still far from the historical biblical, orthodox faith. Smith and Denton claimed that the MTD was colonizing existing Christian churches, destroys biblical Christianity from within, and replaces it
pseudo-Christianity, which is “only loosely associated with a true historical Christian tradition ’. MTD is de facto the religion of not only American teenagers but also American religious adults. Young adults have remarkably taken over the religious attitudes of their parents. And when many of us were disguised, we had been a nation of MTD for some time. “America has long-lived off its thin Christian façade, which the Cold War partly forced, “Smith told me in an interview. “This façade is finally torn down by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism. “

Data from Smith and other researchers make clear what many of us desperately want to deny: the flood rises to the American church’s trusses. Every congregation in America must alone ask herself whether she has not gone so far in compromising with the world to compromise her own fidelity to learning. It is the Christianity that we have lived and continue to live in our families, congregations, and communities, as a means of deeper conversion or as vaccination as we take faith as seriously as the gospel requires?
Rob Dreher, Benedict’s Choice