CNN on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

CNN online recently featured an article on Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telliing the American Church (Oxford University Press, 2010). Dean is a professor at Princeton Seminary who participated with Christian Smith and others in the National Study of Youth and Religion. The CNN article discusses the theme of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a phrase used liberally by WHI hosts for the past few years and coined by Christian Smith to describe the religious and spiritual lives of today’s teenagers. Dean discusses this problem at length in her new book, and argues that teens have received this “fake” view of Christianity from their parents. She writes, “The problem does not seem to be that churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe, namely, that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and the church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people…” She goes on to say that “if churches practice MTD in the name of Christianity, then getting teenagers to church more often is not the solution (conceivably it could make things worse). A more faithful church is the solution….Maybe the issue is simply that the emperor has no clothes.”
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