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The Religion of Youth—and Many More??
By Rev. Michael DeVries
From the Standard Bearer Volume 81 - Issue 21 All Around Us
Rev. DeVries is pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church in Wingham, Ontario, Canada.
The Religion of Youth—and Many More??
This is scary—a book by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), entitled, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press). Cultural Editor of World Magazine, Gene Edward Veith, explains in the June 25, 2005 issue of World:
After interviewing over 3,000 teenagers, the social scientists summed up their beliefs: (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.”
Even these secular researchers recognized that this creed is a far cry from Christianity, with no place for sin, judgment, salvation, or Christ. Instead, most teenagers believe in a combination of works righteousness, religion as psychological well-being, and a distant non-interfering god. Or, to use a technical term, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
Ironically, many of these young deists are active in their churches. “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe,” conclude Mr. Smith and Ms. Denton, “or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.”
Another possibility is that they have learned what their churches are teaching all too well. It is not just teenagers who are moralistic therapeutic deists. This describes the beliefs of many adults too, and even what is taught in many supposedly evangelical churches.
Mr. Smith and Ms. Denton recognize this. MTD has become the “dominant civil religion.” And it is “colonizing” American Christianity. To the point, these secular scholars conclude, “a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but is rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
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.
Christianity is about grace, not moralism; changing lives, not making people feel better about themselves; the God made flesh, not an uninvolved deity. And that is better news than Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
What a simple, convenient religion! Be nice! Feel good! And God is there to help out in a pinch. No wonder it is so popular, not just with the youth, but with much of the modern day church. But as Veith correctly points out, this is a far cry from Christianity. And it is scary, from a spiritual point of view, that, as co-author Christian Smith asserts, even a good proportion of Protestant teens articulated their faith in these terms.
God forbid that it become so with us and our young people! May the chief mark of the faithful church, the pure preaching of the gospel, be manifest in our churches. May we be diligent in the catechizing of our youth. May the systematic, thorough program of catechism be maintained in our Protestant Reformed Churches. And may God’s grace sustain our religion, in young and old alike, that it be characterized by true faith that is “not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in His Word, but also an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart, that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness, and salvation are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits” (Heidelberg Catechism, Answer 21).
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