Rhetoric Race and Religion
I’m not an expert in or scholar of “youth ministry,” but many of my students are either doing youth ministry or plan to. For some time now I’ve been hearing a lot about something called “Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism” (MTD for short). From 2003 to 2005 sociologist of religion Christian Smith and his colleague Melinda Denton carried out a massive study of youth religion in the United States. It was called the “National Study of Youth and Religion” (NSYR). They summed up the overall results with this shocking conclusion:
We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian religion. … It is not so much that U.S. Christianity is being secularized. Rather, more subtly, Christianity is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by quite a different religious faith. (italics added) (quoted in Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian, p. 3)
This sounds like a “the sky is falling!” doomsday prophecy—only not about what will happen but about what has happened. Of course, neither Smith and Denton nor interpreter Dean thinks this is a total picture; they are talking about a massive trend allowing many exceptions.
The religion that is replacing “actual historical Christian religion” in America, especially among young people, is labeled MTD. Dean, a professor of youth culture and ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, summarizes MTD with five beliefs: 1) A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over 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 is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem, and 5) Good people go to heaven when they die. (p. 14)
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