Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? Umm... What? (with Stanford Gibson, Miriam Hamilton, and Peter Nittler)

Your Pod and Your Staff

It’s the podcast conversation you didn’t know you wanted! “What comes to mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you.” AW Tozer said that in The Knowledge of the Holy and in many ways it’s the beating heart of this conversation. What do we think about God? That’s a distinctly different question than “who is God?” and it has massive implications for just about every aspect of our lives and how we view the world. This conversation centers around one prevailing answer Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton discovered from their groundbreaking sociological study uncovering the religious identities of young people. What they found is that many people, without even knowing it, believe what they called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Here are its 5 basic tenets.

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

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

In this episode, we talk about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: What is it? How do we see it in our lives? And how does it compare to Christianity?

And, of course, Quarantine Corner.

If you’re interested in learning more about the topic:

· Read Soul Searching or Souls in Transition by Christian Smith

· Read Almost Christian by Kenda Creasy Dean

And, it’s the last week to send in questions for our Q&A podcast coming up in two weeks. Email Peter at [email protected]. We’ll be thrilled to read them!