January 27, 2015
Dear St. Paul’s Family,
I feel like I am being haunted. And it is not a lot of fun.
What haunts me emerges from a book titled Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church by Princeton professor and United Methodist minister Kenda Creasy Dean. I first learned about it from a clergy colleague a few years ago, and subsequently heard Dr. Dean speak at a conference in 2012. It is based on the work of the National Survey of Youth and Religion, a ten-year survey led by noted sociologist Christian Smith, covering over 3,300 teenagers regarding aspects of their religious belief and behavior. It is the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind. Its conclusions have since resurfaced in my consciousness, prompting my re-reading of it last week.
I cannot seem to shake its indictment of the contemporary American Christian church.
First, the good news. One of its conclusions is that the typical American teenager is not “losing faith.” They are not walking away from religious identities, or even denominational attachments. They still readily and willingly identify themselves as belonging to one faith tribe or another, most commonly the same as their parents. Second, the typical American teenager cannot be accurately described as “spiritual, but not religious,” which has become the catch phrase often used to describe disaffected, non-religious people. The survey concluded that this label simply does not apply to teenagers today. They are not walking away from the faith.
So what’s the bad news? Well, there’s plenty. It turns out that while they have not left the Christian faith, the faith that they do claim is a watered down, anesthetized shadow of traditional Christianity. It is a form of Christianity so vastly different from that of the historic creeds that one scholar has termed it a modern heresy, clearly outside the bounds of the Christian faith, on the same scale as the heresies of the ancient church. [1]
This heresy is called Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. That’s a long, complicated sequence of words, so I really like Kenda Creasy Dean’s quick and portable way to describe what Moralist Therapeutic Deism (henceforth “MTD”) claims:
· My faith tells me to be nice. (“Moralistic”)
· My faith is nice to me when I need it. (“Therapeutic”)
· God exists, but doesn’t really interact with me in any vivid, personal way. (“Deism”)
That’s the simple version, but there are actually five tenets of MTD, outlined by Christian Smith:
1. A god exists who created and ordered 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 is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
Now, you might think to yourself, “Wait a minute. What is particularly wrong about any of that? Doesn’t our faith say that God created the world? (Of course.) Doesn’t God want us to live holy lives, and be righteous in our relationships with others? (Sure.) And don’t we believe in a God who wants to alleviate our suffering and help us with our problems? (Certainly.) And don’t we believe in heaven? (Yes.)
So what’s wrong with that?
Well, Kenda Creasy Dean uses the following exercise to illustrate what exactly is wrong with that. She invites her audiences first to consider the Apostles’ Creed, the traditional standard of Christian belief and teaching. (I won’t restate it here, since you ought to know it by heart.) What is the common feature in the Creed? Well, it’s all about who God is. It’s about the Trinity, and how the three persons of God have been uniquely expressed in the past, readily revealed in the present, and faithful into the future. It is about the nature of this mysterious and mighty God.
What does Moralistic Therapeutic Deism teach? Well, let me take the five points stated above and see if I can construct a “creed” based on those beliefs:
I believe in a God who is real, but is basically uninvolved in my daily life. I believe that I need to be nice to other people, treat people fairly, and work to make the world a better place to live. I believe that my faith is here to give me comfort when I’m hurting, and helps other people cope with the struggles of their lives. And I believe that at the end, things will all work out all right for those who do good.
Do you see the difference? The Apostles’ Creed is all about God. The MTD Creed is all about us. That’s what makes it so heretical.
But here’s the real kicker. Teenagers today did not construct this “creed” on their own. They didn’t consciously go out to water down the Christian faith to little more than self-soothing pablum. Do you want to know where they got it?
According to the Christian Smith and Kenda Creasy Dean, they got it from us.
· They got it from their parents, who have consistently demonstrated with their lack of zeal and passion for the faith that Christianity really need not make much of a difference in their lives.
· They got it from churches that tend to only pray for things like illness and death, thereby portraying a God who is little more than a doctor in a M.A.S.H. unit.
· They got it from hearing repeatedly that it is permissible to use their reason and intellect at church – which, of course, is not only permissible, but encouraged – but do so to the point that they have lost their ability to wonder, to be in awe of God, to leave room for mystery, and even allow for the possibility of miracles.
And here’s the part that has been haunting me the most: they get it from preachers like me, who consistently preach sermons that focus more on “how to live the best life” and “how to be comforted in times of trial” rather than challenging people to live a passionate, risk-taking, costly kind of faith. They get it from one to many sermon series that are designed to be more like marketing ploys to get people into the pews, but wind up doing very little to change them while they are sitting there. They get it from messages that closely resemble books they could just as easily find in the popular psychology section of the bookstore. And they wind up hearing about a life that is virtually indistinguishable from a secular life of activism and do-goodism, tempting them to simply live a decent life apart from religious attachments.
No, they are not walking away from the Christian faith. But they are clinging to a form of the Christian faith that is a pitiful shadow of its former self.
That’s what’s haunting me.
It’s haunting me because I can see that it is true. I can see it in the lives of people I interact with regularly, in the secular world’s portrayal of religion, and in the way that many people – teenagers and adults alike – take a look at what the Christian church has to offer today and respond with the one word that summarizes it all:
“Whatever.”
So, there you go. That’s where I am right now, and I know it’s not where God wants us to be. There has to be a way out of it. There has to be a means through which God is leading the church to reclaiming a vital faith, but still uniquely expressed to be relevant to today’s culture. Maybe what I’m talking about is some kind of rejuvenating energy from the Spirit, the kind that our ancestors used to experience when they talked about “revival.”
And, do you know what? Maybe John Wesley and the United Methodist Church have the keys to leading that charge.
I believe there is, and I believe there is something at the heart of the Wesleyan faith that holds the keys to just such a revival. Not just of our denomination, but of the American church.
Want to know what I think that is? Well, here’s a cliffhanger. Stay tuned. I’ll share it with you in next week’s Mid-Week Message.
Grace and Peace,
Magrey
The Rev. Magrey R. deVega
St. Paul's United Methodist Church
531 W. Main St.
Cherokee, IA 51012
Ph: 712-225-3955
Email: mdevega@sp-umc.org
[1] The scholar I reference here just wrote a book on church heresies, which I have been asked to review and for which I have been asked to write a supplemental study guide. Because it is not yet out for publication, I have been asked by the publisher not to disclose the author or the work.
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