In 1984, Marvel Comics created a new nemesis for Spider-Man. The character would be a symbiote, inspired by what parasitologists call the weaker of two organisms inhabiting the same space. The weaker organism can draw life from the stronger, and in the most dramatic cases it siphons off its host’s nutrients before the host realizes what’s happening. The symbiote survives, but the host is seriously weakened.
Once Marvel Comics had a new symbiotic character, that character needed a host. It struck a bargain with another character named Eddie Brock: the symbiote would give Brock its power in return for Brock’s life energy. But of course symbiotes from outer space cannot be trusted. Once the symbiote had inhabited Brock, it absorbed his life energy and morphed into the evil Venom.
Has something similar happened in American Christianity? Has a symbiote taken up residence without our knowledge? Yes, say Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, who are principal investigators for the National Study of Youth and Religion (a study of congregations in seven denominations). They’re seeing an alternative faith in American teenagers, one that “feeds on and gradually co-opts if not devours” established religious traditions.
“Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
I have never heard this term before, but what a wonderful description of the heresy that has infected the Episcopal Church, other mainstream Protestant denominations, and even some factions of the Catholic Church.
I like this description, too:
“An alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.”
What an indictment of modern Western Christian thinking! The irony is that its proponents probably could not even understand that the description is meant as a criticism.
A God who reveals himself through Scripture and tradition has become a God who reveals himself through my personal sense of what sort of God I wish he would be. Bland is not the word for it. This movement proposes to trivialize and ultimately dismiss ~1975 years of Christian thinking and teaching on the grounds that such thinking and teaching does not feel good to me– ergo, it must be wrong.
Rick H (#1): Christian Smith’s [i][url=http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Searching-Religious-Spiritual-Teenagers/dp/0195384776/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2]Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers[/url][/i] is really a great read and well worth the time. This is where the term “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” was coined. I know of no other work that helps youth workers understand the religious and spiritual landscape of American adolescence. The research was done in the 90s, I believe, but they continue to conduct studies and update findings.
I had never thought of MTD in terms of a symbiote, and Dean is right on in this respect. When students are around, we take that to be a success. We’re happy that they’re in church, that they come to our lock-ins, that they have spiritual experiences on mission trips, and that they sometimes bring their friends. So we don’t always notice what they [i]really[/i] believe about Jesus.
FWIW, Kenda Creasy Dean is one of the best mainline youth ministry thinkers around, and I highly recommend her book [i][url=http://www.amazon.com/Godbearing-Life-Tending-Youth-Ministry/dp/0835808580/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281710875&sr=1-1]The Godbearing Life[/url][/i] written with Ron Foster.
Thank you, ub (#2).
This is what happens when one becomes a consumer of religion. One tells the religious Madison Avenue what one wants, they find a manufacturer, and the customer buys the product. In the case at hand, the religious Madison Ave. is a trendy church or the egocentric Facebook world of adolescents. They broadcast what they want, the mirror gives them back their own image, and they buy what they have sold themselves.
At last, such trends are destructive of faith and religion because they are planted in soil that will be blown away by the next trend wind. No church should bother with such people; let them go elsewhere. To think that by inviting them in and “listening” to them, their shallow waters can be somehow made to run deep is as improbable as hoping that rock music can be made to sing the harmonies of the divine, Larry