Moralistic therapeutic deism is a term that was first introduced in the 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. The term is used to describe what they consider to be the common beliefs among U.S. youths. The book is the result of the research project the "National Study of Youth and Religion".
Definition
The author's study found that many young people believe in several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions. It is not a new religion or theology as such, but identified as a set of commonly held spiritual beliefs. It is this combination of beliefs that they label moralistic therapeutic deism: These points of belief were compiled from interviews with approximately 3,000 teenagers.
Authors' analysis
The authors say the system is "moralistic" because it "is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person." The authors describe the system as being "about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherent" as opposed to being about things like "repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one's prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering ..." and further as "belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one's affairs—especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved." The remoteness of God in this kind of theism explains the choice of the term deism, even though "the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking care of needs." It views God as "something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he's always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process." The authors 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 tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." CNN online featured an article, "More Teens Becoming Fake Christians" on Kenda Creasy Dean's 2010 book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church.. 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. A more faithful church is the solution .... Maybe the issue is simply that the emperor has no clothes."
Criticism
One criticism of moralistic therapeutic deism is that it is more of a general worldview than a religion or theology in itself. The above-mentioned moral concepts of MTD are not unique to any particular religion or spiritual practice. They can, however, be seen as principles extracted and generalized from orthodox Christianity, but devoid of specific doctrines about God and humanity. A second criticism is that the term is tendentious rather than descriptive, since, as even the originators admit, "no teenager would actually use the terminology 'Moralistic Therapeutic Deist' to describe himself or herself". The expression could be used to denigrate a set of beliefs less traditional than one's own.
