In her book Almost Christian, Kenda Creasey Dean, Associate Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, presents her belief that, "American young people are, theoretically, fine with religious faith - but it does not concern them very much, and it is not durable enough to survive long after they graduate from high school." (p. 3) And...she puts the responsibility on us, the adults, parents, "big people" because we have been feeding them a half-hearted, weak, watered down, passionless, and anything goes faith. We have not taken our own spiritual development seriously and it shows in the spiritual life, or should I say lack of spiritual life of young people.
We have turned Christianity into what Dean calls, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" (that's a mouth full...but it's not the Christian faith and it's not a faith that will sustain us.)
Guiding Beliefs of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:
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.
These are "nice" things, but not the transformational life giving power of the Gospel. Our kids want something with substance not a faith of anything goes. Dean writes, "youth are unlikely to take hold of a "god" who is too limp to take hold of them." (p.36)
This holds true for all of us - young and old alike. Maybe our faith and our God simply have become "too limp." Why invest our time, our lives, our souls, our energy in a limp faith and limp God?
Fitness folks often speak of developing a strong core. If you have a strong core it will increase your overall strength and vitality - so too with our life of faith. We need to work on developing a strong core. A core built around faith in the Risen Lord. A core shaped by our baptismal covenant. A core sustained by scripture, prayer, service and the sacraments.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is "nice", but nice will not sustain us, nice will not save us.
In Christ,
Paul+
Deist tenet #4 is wrong. I don't know where Dean got the information from, but (we) deists believe that God's creative spirit is so perfect that he made the universe exactly as he envisioned on his first try. As each living (and non-living) thing is his creation, He surely lives through everything around us. That being said, we believe God is ALWAYS present, and never more at one time than another. We do not treat him like a vending machine in the sky.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a more free-form concept of spirituality is my generation's backlash towards our parents' divisiveness. We see that they're so hung up on the details of their particular religion that they've lost sight of its purpose (some of which you mentioned in the post). Young people, as I see it, are tired of living in an America that can't agree on anything and focuses more on its differences than similarities. We're just getting back to the basics. Spirituality is about morality, not doctrine.