Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Now that’s quite a term if I’ve ever heard one. But arguably this is the number one religion amongst youth in America today.1 So the question is, what is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD for short)? And where did it come from?
What is MTD?
MTD is a vaguely religious worldview in which people are expected to be “good” (by who’s standards?) and believe in the existence of some type of god or higher power who is uninvolved in a person’s life unless specifically needed. This term originated from the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led by researcher Christian Smith. After researching the religious beliefs of over 3,000 students, Smith outlines the five core beliefs of an MTD adherent. Those are:
- “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.”
- “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”
- “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
- “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”
- “Good people go to heaven when they die.”2
Where did MTD come from?
This question is a little harder to answer than the previous one. Some may trace this vague religious belief back to the founding fathers of America and their pseudo-Christian beliefs (See the Thomas Jefferson Bible). Others may point to one cultural trend or another and the development of a postmodern society. I am not here to say that any of those observations are wrong. What I do want to point out is something I have observed on my own through the last decade-plus of serving in youth ministry.
Are you ready for it?
We created MTD. We did it. We developed a generation of students who are Moralistic Therapeutic Deists.
How is that?
Look at the typical Kid’s ministry at a typical church. Or even Youth Ministry. What are we teaching about God? Who is He? Why did He save us? Why do we pray? What is our role?
If you were to ask a child in your church’s ministry, how would they answer those questions?
Kids and Teens can handle deep spiritual truths if presented in the right way. The problem is, they are an afterthought. We stick an unwitting volunteer in Children’s Church and tell them to watch the kids while the adults go to “big church,” and what happens is they play games and sing songs until the volunteer can’t take it anymore. Then a VeggieTales video is popped in the DVD player so the kids are pacified until the parents can pick them up. Essentially, we just have a babysitting service with some Jesus dust sprinkled on top.
Our children’s ministries should not just be a babysitting service with some “Jesus dust” sprinkled on top.
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Youth Ministry isn’t much better. We have a Youth Pastor who is cool and fun and plans exciting activities to attract teens and their friends, building a mini church-within-a-church. To justify the ministry there are motivational speeches seasoned with enough Bible to make it passible for a church setting. Every “talk” is brought back to what this means for them and being “relevant” so that the student thinks they are the center of the universe and that the Bible is about them and their lives.
Conclusion
This sounds harsh, and it is. Obviously, this is not representative of every church or youth ministry. There are many who volunteer to produce excellent discipleship environments for kids and teens and work tirelessly to train the next generation in the Word of God. But when MTD is so prevalent in our culture and amongst professing believers, there is obviously somewhere we are missing the mark.
So what can be done?
Here is a short (and by no means exhaustive) list of places you can start.
- Train solid leaders
One of the shortfalls of kids ministry is in the area of volunteers. Usually, it is thrown to the old ladies and young teens looking for service hours. Not that either of those groups is bad at all! But your ministry is only as good as your leadership, so spend time training solid leaders. Send them to conferences. Do recurring training in-house. Teach them to share the Gospel.
I fully believe our youth ministry leaders should be some of the best trained in the church. That’s why I went and got my Master’s Degree. I don’t plan on being a Senior Pastor, but I wanted to be as well prepared as possible to teach and develop my students. No, not everyone needs formal theological education from a Seminary. But we do owe it to our kids and families to put well-prepared leaders in those ministries. And that can even come in the form of “on-the-job” training under the mentorship of a solid leader (2 Tim. 2:2).
- Develop a comprehensive scope-and-sequence
Training isn’t enough. Your leaders need solid tools!
There is this general aversion to using curriculum in Youth ministry (not so much kids ministry) and I am not sure why. Maybe because their trained youth pastors assume that because they went to Bible college they should develop their own material? But that is just crazy! Curriculum developers spend countless man-hours writing, editing, and producing high-quality material so you can spend less time on lesson prep and more time developing relationships. That is a good thing!
Another reason to use curriculum is that most of these publishers create material that integrates across grade levels! Take Lifeway’s Gospel Project as an example. They have curriculum that walks through the Bible so that every person in a Church (read… “whole families”) is studying the same passage at the same time. Or my favorite is the Youth Ministry material developed by Word of Life Fellowship. They take each age group through an age-appropriate cycle of Bible Survey and Bible Doctrines so that by the time a student graduates from High School they will have worked through every area of theology and every book of the Bible.
You need a roadmap. You need a plan. That way, you’ll know where you are going, and nothing gets lost on the way.
- Invest in the future
I teased this earlier in option 1, but you need to start training tomorrow’s leaders today. That teen that needs service hours? Jump at that! Put them with a mature leader who can develop them. Give them increasingly more responsibility and opportunities. Get them invested and using their gifts so that when they graduate, they are not floundering and disconnected but already know how they are a part of the Body of Christ.
As I said, this is by no means an exhaustive list. This is a place to start. Invest in the next generation and in the leaders who pour into their lives!
- https://www.christianpost.com/news/moralistic-therapeutic-deism-the-new-american-religion-6266/ ↩︎
- Smith, Christian (2005). Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. With Lundquist Denton, Melina. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019518095X.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-803997-6. ↩︎
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