I know I said I wasn't going to be posting this week but I came across this during one of those increasingly more frequent study breaks and wanted to pass it on.
Gene Veith reflects on the study that gave rise to the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. He suggests that the prevalence of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism among church-attending teens may not be due to their ignoring what's being taught. It may be an indicator that they're just obeying. Veith calls us to a three-fold consideration:
Consider how many Christian publications, sermons, and teachings are nothing but moralism. Sometimes morality is reduced to the simplistic MTD commandment "be nice," though often real morals are inculcated. But the common assumption is that being good is easy, just a matter of knowing what one should do and trying harder. The biblical truth that bad behavior is a manifestation of sin, a depravity that inheres in our fallen nature, is skimmed over. And so is the solution to sin: a life-changing faith in Jesus Christ.
Consider how many Christian publications, sermons, and teachings are primarily therapeutic. It is true that Christ can solve many of our problems. But much that passes for Christian teaching says nothing about Christ. Instead, it consists of pop psychology, self-help platitudes, and the power of positive thinking.
Consider how many Christian publications, sermons, and teachings talk about God in a generic way, but say nothing about the Father, who created and still sustains the world; the Son, who became Incarnate in this world to win our salvation; and the Holy Spirit, who works through the Word of God to bring us to faith.
The psychologizing of the faith is a topic never too distant from my mind. I intend to share some thoughts in the not too distant future. OK, back to the books.
I just got around to reading an article that appeared in Easter Sunday's New York Times Magazine called "The Soul of the New Exurb." What are exurbs? Once small counties experiencing rapid growth "into dense communities of subdivisions filled with middle-class families likely to move again and again, settling in yet another exurb but putting down no real roots." The piece highlights Surprise, AZ and the megachurch of 5,000 that has grown in its midst. If the writer's description is accurate, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see why the authors mentioned in my previous post on "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" believe that the unorthodox theological beliefs of American teens don't differ all that much from those held by adults. Describing Lee McFarland, the church's senior pastor, Jonathan Mahler writes:
McFarland works under the assumption that people don't want to be intimidated by their pastors, that modernity has punctured the myth of the morally superior religious leader. He is replacing the sinner-be-damned fundamentalism that once characterized much of evangelical Christianity with forgiveness. McFarland never talks about transforming your life though struggle, surrender or sacrifice; he talks about being happier by accepting Jesus -- into your office, your kitchen, your backyard, your marital bed, everywhere. "People aren't looking for the elevated holy man who's got all of the answers," he told me one afternoon. "They want someone to be real with them."
There are more false dichotomies in that one paragraph than I know what to do with. Fortunately, we don't have to choose between taking a morally superior stance and telling a fellow sinner that he, just like us, is guilty of sin and in need of receiving God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It is exactly because I am under God's condemnation that the message of forgiveness is such good news. The pronouncement of forgiveness through faith in Jesus is not meant to replace the declaration that sinners will be damned but rather, presupposes it. Have we so imbibed the cultural concept of tolerance that we now think it self-righteous to preach the gospel?
The article notes that the church was built on Rick Warren's "Purpose-Driven Church" techniques. This included polling residents to find out what kind of music they listened to and why they believed people didn't go to church. The answers to these questions were then used to structure the services. Fuller Theological Seminary professor Eddie Gibbs, author of Church Next, warns: "The danger though, is that you end up with a Gospel that endeavors to meet your needs without challenging your priorities." He notes in his book that "Worship is designed not to make people feel good about themselves . . . but to make them holy" and offers the following caution concerning limiting worship music to sentimental praise songs: "Intimate worship that degenerates into a casual overfamiliarity is both presumptuous and embarrassing to those who see God from a transcendental perspective."
The current online issue of The Revealer contains a review of the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, the product of the largest sociological study of adolescent religious beliefs and practices ever conducted.
According to authors Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, the majority of American teens believe in God and the majority of them are Christians. That may sound like good news but don't start shouting just yet. It seems that the theological beliefs held by America's youth are pretty much the same across religious divides. The authors refer to the common set of assumptions as "moralistic therapeutic deism" (MTD). The reviewer, Scott Korb describes the major tenets of MTD as follows:
Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism's ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising's influence on their subjective feelings." And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.
Korb reports that according to the authors, MTD is not just a teenage affliction:
What Smith and Denton call a parasitic creed affects religious American adults, as well. Though subtle, Smith and Denton's insistence that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree becomes a sharp indictment of America's religious grown-ups who may well speak, understand and think as adults , but cannot bear the thought of putting away their childish beliefs.
The authors conclude that American Christianity is "either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or ...is actively being colonized by a quite different religious faith." When asked to articulate their faith, not one of their interviewees mentioned self-discipline, working for social justice, justification or sanctification, and 112 of them described the purpose of religion in terms of "personally feeling, being, getting, or being made happy" (using the "specific phrase to 'feel happy' well more than 2,000 times").
