Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a useful term. The guy who came up with it is a sociologist named Christian Smith. I haven't read a word the guy has written. I found out about him reading an article on the First Things site.

Here is how their writer—one Bradford Wilcox—defines it:

Smith contended, in his 2005 book, that most religious teens in the U.S. ...  believe that God exists, loves them, wants them to follow the Golden Rule, and comforts them in the midst of the emotional ups and downs of adolescence. 

 In my experience that covers quite a few adults too.

This is exactly the sort of contribution sociologists should be making. It's a helpful new category.

I have a couple of questions though, not about the term but about the implied strategy of those whose belief is founded on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. If we ask ourselves, what does someone who takes this approach to religion require of their belief? And the answer is two things: 1) motivation to act morally and 2) something to help them through life's crises.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I think both these expectations are wrong-headed and not very helpful to us.

As to the first‚—motivation to act morally—does anyone other than psychopaths require extra motivation to follow the Golden Rule? I think there is something else at work here.

The Golden Rule isn't a rule at all. It's a vague principle not unlike "always do your best" or "be polite". It needs content to work. A world in which everyone sincerely believed in kill or be killed would be a world in which everyone did onto others as they would have others do unto them. "Do unto others" means something much less than "Love others as ..." but even love is a vague concept.

To live a religious life is to commit ourselves to live a larger story wherein the Golden Rule does have some content. Where it has content because there are goals and purposes that give our actions moral meaning.

The second expectation is even worse. There are fewer more effective one-way tickets out of religious belief than counting on it to make you feel better. Your religion won't make your job loss, the death of your mother, your illness, your spouse cheating on you or leaving you one tiny bit better.

When someone tells us that they go to church in the hope that it will make them feel better, or that they are hoping to feel inspired by what they see there, that person is already gone. They are like the person who gets married for as long as love lasts. It won't and they'll be gone.

The moral challenges of this world are what they are. Any genuine religious conversion is made with a  full acceptance that none of the hard things about life will be any different as a believer.

If Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is really what is attracting teens to churches today then the best thing churches could do is drive them out. Otherwise, all we are doing is setting them up for failure.

I have good news, churches are driving them out. From the same First Things article:

A majority of today’s emerging adults do not regularly darken the door of a church; are largely indifferent or, in some cases, hostile to religion; and are similarly indifferent or hostile to religious teachings about the good life—especially as they relate to sex, drinking, and drugs. Furthermore, a majority of the 30 percent of this cohort of emerging adults who are regular churchgoers are “selective adherents” who “believe and perform certain aspects of their religious traditions but neglect and ignore others.”

 I love the bit that says young adults reject religious teachings about "the good life—especially as they relate to sex, drinking, and drugs". This, as anyone who has a remote familiarity with much recent Christian teaching on these subjects will know, is nonsense. The church teachings in question are mostly about how sex, alcohol and drugs do not relate to the good life.

I have nothing against prohibitions, actually I think some are necessary. But sex and alcohol have a place in the good life (drugs do not) and that is where the problem tends to arise. Christian teaching needs to present these as more than that things that can be tolerated in narrowly proscribed circumstances.

Some Catholics at this point will loudly insist that our teaching does this but the truth is that it only pretends to. Our teaching is that some alcohol probably won't do any harm but the person who totally abstains loses nothing and may even have a better moral character for doing so. Our teaching about sex, while different, also shares some strong similarities.

That's the part that doesn't wash. Any young adult can see that for most people (i.e. non-alcoholics) alcohol is a positive good. Even getting drunk together now and then is a positive bond between human beings. Sex is also a positive good.

Many young people have no problems grasping that an unrestricted drinking or unrestricted sex are not conducive to the good life and they hardly need the church to tell them about what they can see with their own eyes. What they cannot see is how the narrowly restricted sexual options current Catholic teaching presents them with is conducive to the good life.

All of this all stems from how we define the good life. If you believe that our purpose in this world is to suffer in order that we should be rewarded in heaven, then there is no logical problem. Similarly, if you believe that the sole rationally justifiable purpose of sex is procreation, there is no logical problem with the position.

For anybody who does not hold one of those two positions (and the Catholic church officially rejects both), there is a  huge moral problem because any position regarding the good that effectively holds that the good life life isn't good is a fraud. If we really believe that God meant for us to appreciate and enjoy his creation and that doing so plays a part in the development of our character as human beings then the church says nothing useful about the connection between these things and the good life.

It's not that the church couldn't say anything useful. It is simply that it has not for the most part.


Update: A later article on First Things, responding to the same 2005 book as above, makes a similar point to one I make above.

For the most part, the language of the young people did not reveal a faith that revolved around traditionally relevant Christian themes. The teens’ expressed belief systems did not center on being faithful to God, or repenting for sin, or building character through steadfastness. Instead, for most of them, what was essential to their faith was “feeling good, happy, secure, at peace”—what the authors term the “therapeutic benefits” of religious involvement.

More specifically, the authors report that the phrase “the grace of God” was mentioned by these 265 teens a scant three times. The same was true for “honoring God with your life” and “the importance of loving your neighbor.” Similarly, “the justice of God” was mentioned only twice, and several historically significant Christian themes—self-discipline, sanctification, social justice—were not mentioned at all. In contrast, 112 teens mentioned personally feeling happy or being made happy through faith, and 99 different teens discussed feeling good about one’s life. In fact, the specific phrase “feel happy” was used more than 2,000 times during the interviews.

I agree but can't help but notice that throughout his piece, author John Buri focuses on the culture as something that just happened to us like a storm that was not forecast.  Nowhere is there any recognition that the church itself played a significant role in the development of this culture.

This is not something that just happened to us, it is something that Catholic thinking helped pave the way for. When we Catholics talk about matters such as disordered desires, and we have been talking that way for a long time, we prepared the ground for the sort of therapeutic thinking rightly deplored above.