Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Christian Smith was the Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor  and associate chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when he conducted a study on the religious and spiritual lives of American Teenagers together with Melinda Lundquist Denton.

They were trying to discover what the bigger picture of the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. teenagers looked like when we stand back and try to put it all together.

What they discovered was sobering.  Among most American teens, from a variety of denominations within Christianity and also across faith boundaries to other faiths, there was a consistent belief system, which was not even Christian!  It was this:

“A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life and earth.

God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by 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 one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.

Good people go to heaven when they die.”

This religion is so out of sync with the truth of the Gospel in so many ways it is staggering, but Smith emphasizes that this is the tacit, de facto religion of the majority of American teens regardless of religious affiliation.  Somehow I think that Thomas Jefferson would be quite pleased with the results.

The sobering thing is that as my wife and I inspected our own core of beliefs and practices, we discovered this same trend running strongly though our own assumptions and it has forced us to reassess what God was saying to us through the Canon, and realign our understanding with the truth found in His Word.

So I am thanking God for Christian Smith for helping me recognize myself as a closet deist, and turn to the one true Trinity for truth and help.

Citation: Smith, Christian. “On “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith”, a version of “Summary Interpretation: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” from Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith and Melinda Lunquist Denton, copyright 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.