Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton introduced the term ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’ (MTD) in their 2005 book, “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers” to describe what they see as the common beliefs among American youths. Yet it seems to echo a distinction between religion and spirituality that can be traced back to the thought of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which has been in print since 1902. In Part 1 of this article, I looked at the meaning of MTD and here will examine how it emerged from the sense of ‘spiritual not religious’ belief in Alcoholics Anonymous that grew out of James’ Gifford Lectures on the psychological study of individual religious and spiritual experience.

In “’Being Religious’ or ‘Being Spiritual’ in America,” Marler and Hadaway looked at five different surveys done between the late 1980s and 2000 that asked respondents whether they considered themselves to be “religious” or “spiritual.” Are Americans less religious and more spiritual? They concluded the studies could not give a definitive answer. “The most significant finding about the relationship between ‘being religious’ and ‘being spiritual’ is that most Americans see themselves as both.” When potential change can be traced by examining successive age groups, or by comparing more with less churched respondents, “the pattern is towards less religious and less spirituality.”

The net effect is that among less churched and younger Americans there is less agreement about religiousness and spirituality, and change is observed more in the decline of those Roof (2000) identifies as ‘strong believers,’ the religious and spiritual, and the increase in ‘secularists.’

Nevertheless, the Pew Research Center said “More Americans now say they’re spiritual but not religious.” In 2017, Pew noted that 27% of U.S. adults think of themselves as spiritual but not religious, an increase of 8% since 2012. This growth was broad-based, increasing among men and women; Republicans and Democrats; across race/ethnicity; and people of different ages and education levels. It seems to have come mainly at the expense of Americans who considered themselves to be spiritual and religious. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they are spiritual and religious fell by 11 points between 2012 and 2017. See the following graphic to the left taken from the Pew article.

While many of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”, most actually do identify with a religious group. Many in the “spiritual but not religious” category have low levels of religious observance, saying they seldom or never attend religious services; and that religion is “not too” or “not at all” important in their lives. Yet others say they attend religious services weekly and 27% say religion is very important to them. See the following chart to the right taken from the Pew article.

Smith and Denton acknowledged the widespread sense of “spiritual seeking” by people who consider themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” They are people who have an interest in spiritual matters but are not devoted to one particular historical spiritual faith or denomination. They are reportedly exploring many faiths and spiritualities in order to find what works for them, that meets their needs. They are open to a multiplicity of truths, willing to mix and match traditionally distinct religious beliefs and practices. “And they are suspicious of a commitment to a single religious congregation.”

They operate, whether self-consciously or not, as religious and spiritual consumers by defining themselves as individual seekers, the authoritative judges of truth and relevance in faith according to how things subjectively feel to them. Such consuming seekers are not religiously rooted or settled but are spiritual nomads on a perpetual quest for greater insight and more authentic and fulfilling experiences.

When Smith and Denton looked at whether American teenagers consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious, only 8 percent said it was very true of them. Forty-six percent said it was somewhat true and 43% said it is not true at all. They also presented data that broke this down further by religious tradition. In the following chart, CP stands for conservative Protestant, MP for mainline Protestant, BP for Black Protestant, RC for Catholic, J for Jewish, LDS for Ladder Day Saints/Mormons, OR for other religions, and NR for not religious.

Smith and Denton would likely explain the difference between their research with teenagers and that from the Pew Center with adults as a product of the teens not understanding the meaning of “spiritual but not religious.” The majority of the teens they interviewed for their study said they had never heard the term before. And if they had heard of the term, they had no clue what it meant. “Although the slogan ‘spiritual but not religious’ can be seen on many bookshelves, read in many newspapers, and heard on many talk shows, very few American teenagers have heard of it, much less learned to what beliefs and lifestyles it refers.” So, they coined the term ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’ to capture what they saw as the basics of teen-centered belief system and suggested it operated as a distinct level within American Religion.

While they acknowledged how the thought of Robert Bellah was incorporated into their level of American Civil Religion, they failed to note the correspondence of their levels of Organizational Religion and Individual Religion to William James’ distinction between institutional and personal religion. See the chart for Figure 2 in Part 1.

In VRE, James said worship, sacrifice, ritual, theology, ceremony and ecclesiastical organization were the essentials of institutional religion. He defined personal religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of [the] individual . . . in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” James’ sense of institutional religion fits with Smith’s and Denton’s sense of organizational religion (as formal religious institutions and organizations), as his sense of personal religion fits with their sense of individual religion (as the idiosyncratic, eclectic, “lived” beliefs and practices of individuals).

James said that if someone thought the word ‘religion’ should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution typically called the church, he invited them to refer to what he called personal religion whatever they wanted. Alcoholics Anonymous began calling it spirituality, where Smith and Denton referred to it as moralistic therapeutic deism.

We live at a time when religious belief in America, particularly Christian religious belief, has been increasingly questioned and challenged as too rigid or doctrinaire. This is especially true for conservative Christians, who are attempting to live by and apply what they see as the teachings of Scripture to their lives during this turbulent time. In “Religious Alcoholics; Anonymous Spirituality” I suggested that the Jamesean distinction of religion and spirituality fails to separate a Christian expression of religion from a non-Christian one, and a biblical sense of spirituality from a nonbiblical one. A richer and nuanced distinction would be between true spirituality and mere spirituality and true religion and mere religion, remembering that “true religion always contains true spirituality.”

In True Spirituality, Francis Schaeffer rejected the possibility that true spirituality could be devoid of biblical content. There cannot be a leap-in-the-dark faith for a Christian; there is no “faith in faith” encounter with the divine. Schaeffer said, “It is believing the specific promises of God, no longer turning our backs on them, no longer calling God a liar, but raising empty hands of faith and accepting that finished work of Christ as it was fulfilled in history on the cross.”

As Smith and Denton said with regard to moralistic therapeutic deism, under the influence of mere religion and mere spirituality, Christianity is degenerating into a pathetic, misbegotten stepcousin of itself. Or worse, it is being displaced by a different religious faith.

I’ve previously described how the sense of ‘spiritual not religious’ found in Alcoholics Anonymous emerged from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in several other articles on this website. Search for ‘spiritual not religious,’ on this website. You can start with three related articles, beginning with “What Does Religious Mean?” There are links to the remaining two articles at the end of the article.

Meditation, Pixabay

Until I listened to a five-and-a-half minute excerpt from the podcast Ask Christian Counseling Associates, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism vs Traditional Christianity,” I had never heard of the term. I was surprised to know it has been around since 2005, when “moralistic therapeutic deism” was introduced by Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton in, “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.” It reminded me of the spiritual, not religious distinction made by Alcoholics Anonymous and the recovery-based support groups that use A.A.’s 12 Steps. Smith’s conclusion in “Soul Searching” was that “a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian” and has “rather substantially morphed into” it’s misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The similarities between being the “spiritual, not religious” sense of the 12 Steps and this misbegotten stepcousin of Christianity are worth unpacking.

“Soul Searching” was the result of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a research project on the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents. It was conducted from 2001 to 2005 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The NSYR did a national, randomized telephone survey of U.S. households with at least one teenager. Then 17 trained project researchers organized 267 in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a subsample of these telephone survey respondents in 45 states.

Building upon the thought of Robert Bellah in his 1967 essay, for the journal Daedalus, “Civil Religion in America,” Smith and Denton theorized that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism operated on an analogous, but different level of religion to Bellah’s sense of American civil religion. See Figure 2, scanned from “Soul Searching” below.

The bottom level is the eclectic, idiosyncratic, personal beliefs and practices of Individual Religion. Formal religious institutions and organizations of the more systematized and coherent faiths operate on the plane of Organizational Religion. At the peak is the nationally unifying political faith of American Civil Religion. Smith and Denton see Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) existing on a plane between Individual and Organizational Religion.

Like American civil religion, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism appropriates, abstracts, and revises doctrinal elements from mostly Christianity and Judaism for its own purpose. But it does so in a downward, apolitical direction. Its social function is not to unify and give purpose to the nation at the level of civic affairs. Rather, it functions to foster subjective well-being in its believers and to lubricate interpersonal relationships in the local public sphere. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism exists, with God’s aid, to help people succeed in life, to make them feel good, and to help them get along with others—who otherwise are different—in school, work, on the team, and in other routine areas of life.

Suggesting that religion in the U.S. operates on those levels includes interaction and influence on each other, according to Smith and Denton. Individual beliefs are shaped in part by the teachings of organized religions, as well as horoscopes, talk shows, etc. American civil religion is affected by both liberal religious activism as well as the Religious Right (or in more current terminology, Christian Nationalism), operating at the level of a formal religious organization. “The same observation about interlevel interaction and influence is also true of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It helps organize and harmonize individual religious beliefs below it.”

It also mirrors and may very well interface with American civil religion at the highest level by providing the nation’s inhabitants a parallel and complementary common, unifying, functional faith that operates at a more apolitical, private, and interpersonal level of human life.

Smith and Denton said the “creed” of moralistic therapeutic deism can be codified into five beliefs (pp. 162-63):

1. A God exists who created and orders 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.

MTD is about instilling a moralistic approach to life. “Central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral, person.” This includes being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, working on self-improvement taking care on one’s health, and doing your best to be successful. MTD is about providing therapeutic benefits. It’s not a religion of repentance from sin, of saying your prayers, of keeping the Sabbath and holy days, “of living as a servant of a sovereign divine”, of building character through suffering.

It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people. . . As long as one is happy, why bother with being able to talk about the belief content of one’s faith? Lastly, MTD is about a particular understanding about God. God exists, created the world and defines our general moral order, but is not one who is particularly personally involved in one’s affairs—especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance.

Anyone familiar with the teachings and beliefs of conservative, biblical, Christianity can see the problems with this so-called “creed.” It seems to equate biblical teaching and that of other religions, blurring an important distinction between special and common grace. It has a self-centered focus, ignoring that humanity’s “chief end” (according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism) is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever. He is not the Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist.

This God is not demanding. He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good. In short, God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist; he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.

Ultimately, it is Christless. The self-sacrifice of Christ in order to sanctify and cleanse us is not necessary. Saying he was the way, the truth and the life; that no one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6) was a misstatement. In their Conclusion for chapter four, “God, Religion, Whatever,” Smith and Denton said:

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 tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. This has happened in the minds and hearts on many individual believers and, it also appears, within the structures of at least some Christian organizations and institutions. The language, and therefore the experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist, and heaven and hell appear, at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward. 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 a quite different religious faith.

A Google search of the term found over 35,000 references to “moralistic therapeutic deism.” There have been many different reflections on the implications of MTD. It is more than simply a problem in youth ministry. Writing for The Gospel Coalition, Brian Cosby said MTD runs counter to the gospel of Jesus Christ. God is not the divine genie, dispensing wishes, but Immanuel—he became human “to seek and save his bride.” By faith alone, through his life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ has accomplished everything God has required of us. And only those who come through him will see the Father in heaven.

Albert Mohler said the radical transformation of Christian theology and Christian belief in MTD replaced the sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of self. Human problems are reduced to pathologies in need of a treatment plan. “Sin is simply excluded from the picture, and doctrines as central as the wrath and justice of God are discarded as out of step with the times and unhelpful to the project of self-actualization.”

We now face the challenge of evangelizing a nation that largely considers itself Christian, overwhelmingly believes in some deity, considers itself fervently religious, but has virtually no connection to historic Christianity. Christian Smith and his colleagues have performed an enormous service for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in identifying Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the dominant religion of this American age. Our responsibility is to prepare the church to respond to this new religion, understanding that it represents the greatest competitor to biblical Christianity.

I would disagree with Dr. Mohler that MTD is a new religion in the sense that it has existed with individuals saying they are spiritual, not religious which can be traced back to the thought of William James over 100 years ago. He distinguished institutional religion from personal religion in his seminal work, The Varieties of Religious Experience. See part 2 for how MTD emerged from the sense of spiritual, not religious belief.