Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

“If it feels good, do it”: Chicken Soup for the Capitalist Soul.

By Scott Korb

They are not running away. They are not rebelling. They may not actually know, or be able to articulate, what they believe, but almost every one of them — ninety-seven per cent — believes in God. The vast majority of them — like the vast majority of us — are Christians. Very few are what might be called spiritual seekers; hardly any of them know what it means to say (or be) “spiritual but not religious.” When prompted, nearly all of them speak positively about religion, yet with each other they hardly ever talk — much less argue — about it at all. They are conventional and, according to Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, they “may actually serve as a very accurate barometer of the condition of the culture and institutions of our larger society. Far from being alien creatures from another planet, American teenagers actually well reflect back to us the best and worst of our own adult condition and culture.”

From July 2002 to March 2003, with Smith as principle investigator, the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) conducted 3,290 national, random telephone surveys of American teenagers. Then, in the spring and summer of 2003, the NSYR followed up by conducting 267 in-depth interviews with a subsample of those telephone respondents in forty-five states. The results comprise the largest sociological study of adolescent religiosity ever conducted. Smith and Denton’s book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), is the first publication to present the results. Others, they say, will follow.

While the data presented in Soul Searching are at once too sweeping and too specific to consider here — as with a review of any in-depth sociological study — the above generalizations may suffice as a summary of what Smith and Denton believe to be the most surprising findings of the NSYR. Least surprising, perhaps, is the fact that the United States is predominantly Christian, and the authors are unapologetic (and perfectly justified) in making Christianity their chief focus. More than thirty Protestant denominations are broken down into three categories — Conservative, Mainline, and Black — representing more than half of American teens. Catholics represent nearly another quarter. Alongside these majority Christian affiliations, the authors present Judaism and Mormonism as the two largest minority religions, representing 1.5% and 2.5% of the U.S. teen population, respectively. Given these numbers, the authors dismiss as simply false (“as a matter of empirical religiodemographic proportions”) recent claims that the United States has become the most religiously diverse nation in the world. And Christian congregation leaders should rest assured: you are losing hardly any teens at all to Wicca, Buddhism, or anything at all New Agey.

This is not to say, however, that Christian leaders have nothing to worry about. All those Christians who feel under siege may not, in fact, be wrong. Yet, their teenage children are almost all conventional believers who follow their parents in matters of faith. According to the data, something far more insidious than Wicca is stealing them away.

Smith and Denton’s most significant contribution to our understanding of American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives begins when the authors attempt to explain why teens believe what they believe — in a sense, why they are so conventional. The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that “powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States.” Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: “Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings.” And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.

Blessed.

These beliefs are killing American religion. The authors call it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The creed is simple and, yes, conventional — but, where the authors find that it matters, MTD is not traditional. Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy. Good people will be even happier in heaven after they die. The religious beliefs of American teens tend to be — as a whole, across all traditions — that simple. It’s something Jews and Catholics and Protestants of all stripes seem to have in common. It is instrumentalist. “This God is not demanding,” say the authors. “He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good.”

Finally, it’s no wonder to Smith and Denton that adolescents don’t seem to argue much about their faiths — when it comes down to it, they all believe pretty much the same thing. And it gets worse. MTD is not as strictly childish as it sounds. What Smith and Denton call a parasitic creed affects religious American adults, as well. Though subtle, Smith and Denton’s insistence that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree becomes a sharp indictment of America’s religious grown-ups who may well speak, understand and think as adults, but cannot bear the thought of putting away their childish beliefs.

While adults may have found a way to articulate their beliefs in a way that sounds convincingly Christian (or Jewish or Mormon or Muslim, etc., etc.), what the authors have found is that the teens can’t really talk about faith. (Perhaps they are simply too young to make sense, or rationalize, between one moral system that emphasizes self-sacrifice and another that emphasizes self-esteem.) Yet, teenage inarticulacy, the authors argue, is not a matter of mere adolescent bumbling, or the result of nerves brought on by interviews with a stuffy sociologist in the study room of the public library. In interviews (with those same stuffy sociologists in those same study rooms), teens were able to speak with real fluency on other matters of ethical, cultural and social significance — from the impact of HIV/AIDS, drug use, and drunk driving, to “television characters and pop stars.” Nor are teenage episodes of verbal faltering harmless. Referring to Charles Taylor’s arguments that “inarticulacy undermines the possibilities of reality,” the authors warn that “religious faith, practice, and commitment can be no more than vaguely real when people cannot talk much about them.” Such arguments are not, of course, just theoretical musings; these are the exact findings of the NSYR. Teenage religion is nothing, if not vague. Yet, even nonreligious teens do not tend to be hostile to religion; their reasons for being nonreligious are often as vague (or nonexistent, in some cases) as the explanations religious teens give when asked what or why they believe. Having already established just how conventional teenagers are when it comes to religion, just how much they actually depend on their parents (and other trusted adults) for their faith formation, Smith and Denton resume their general indictment of the American religious establishment for its basic failure to teach. Still, it’s important to ask, what would they be teaching anyway?

The authors conclude that American Christianity is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or…is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” When asked to articulate their faith, not one of their interviewees mentioned self-discipline, working for social justice, justification or sanctification, and 112 of them described the purpose of religion in terms of “personally feeling, being, getting, or being made happy” (using the “specific phrase to ‘feel happy’ well more that 2,000 times”). Yet, for all the trouble they see, the authors do not turn their backs on American Christianity. Whether or not teens recognize it, the data suggest that in a wide range of life outcomes — from the formation of community and leadership skills to the accumulation of social and cultural capital — the more religious a teen, the more successful she will tend to be. By interspersing within their book of empirical findings a series of discursive passages that draw the distinction between a morally significant and morally insignificant universe, or that speculate on the deleterious effects of U.S. mass-consumer capitalism on American religion, Smith and Denton make plain that their interest in American spirituality is not a dispassionate one. The authors really seem to care about these kids, who, in being treated by most adults like rebellious aliens, have been entirely misserved. The instrumentalist parasite of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is killing off the “historically key ideas in America’s main religious tradition, Christianity”: “repentance, love of neighbor, social justice, unmerited grace, self-discipline, humility, the cost of discipleship, dying to self, the sovereignty of God, personal holiness, the struggles of sanctification, glorifying God in suffering, hunger for righteousness.” And this is lamentable.

But rather than simply lamenting, the authors mean their book to stimulate conversations about teens and religion, how better to take them seriously by rejecting the generalizations that tend to misunderstand the role teenagers play in American religious life. Teens are not aliens. Their inarticulacy is a problem. Most of them are teachable. And since they tend to follow parents more than anyone seems to admit, conventional wisdom suggests that parents would be indispensable teachers. Of course, it’s not the point whether or not Smith and Denton believe in God. They believe in religion. They believe in teenagers. And for good reason. The data suggests that America would be better off if we all believed as they do.

Scott M. Korb is books editor for The Revealer and last wrote about Randall Sullivan’s The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions. He’s also an editor of Killing the Buddha, and plays holy basketball in Brooklyn.

19 Replies to “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”

  1. Jeff Sharlet @ The Revealer

    Here’s proof that The Revealer is not of one mind: I wanted to be the first to comment on my fellow editor Scott’s elegantly-written essay to disagree with it, vigorously. Or, perhaps, I’m disagreeing with Smith and Denton.
    The statement that for these allegedly shallow teens, “truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem” strikes me as a rather shallow reading of language, a reduction of “happy” to meaning everything the authors dislike. But, of course, one person’s “happy” is another person’s fundamentalism.
    What’s intriguing to me about the present moment is how many of the teenagers I talk to — evangelical and unaffiliated — have incorporated aspects of fundamentalism into their beliefs. Take sexual abstinence, a popular belief (if not practice) among millions of teenagers. Many of those teenagers would conform exactly to Smith and Denton’s diagnosis; but they are hardly “killing American religion.” Rather, they are transforming it into a rigorous, and rigid embodiment of an imagined past of purity.
    And then there are the millions of teenagers who are not religious in any explicit sense, but who have also embraced abstinence as somehow morally superior to non-marital sexual activity. They can’t explain why, as Smith and Denton argue; but the diluted religion they express is nonetheless more potent than the moral preachiness of the past.
    Smith and Denton write: “religious faith, practice, and commitment can be no more than vaguely real when people cannot talk much about them,” a claim Scott buttresses by arguing that this statement is not “theoretical” but sociological fact.
    But there is nothing factual about Smith and Denton’s Christian intellectual conception of what makes faith, practice, and commitment real. Tell me, if a Morally Therapeutic Deist who belongs to a megachurch thinks it’d be fun to go on a mission to Uganda does so and does “mission work” by playing soccer with poor Ugandan kids, how is the faith that informs that decision less real? If this MTD missionary convinces a fellow student not to have sex, but lacks the ability to explain why, how is that practice not “real”? If that MTD missionary decides to break up with his girlfriend because she wants to have sex, and, like, that’s not cool — is his commitment not real?
    Denton and Smith, in Scott’s accounting, seem to equate the conventionalism of the teens they studied with their inarticulacy. I’d argue that these kids are very articulate, fluent in a currently popular language predicated on not asking too many questions, on accepting authority, on a kind of unreflective moral “purity.”
    The narrowness of Smith and Denton’s sociological concerns, however, prevents them from reading the signs of a language that doesn’t express itself in conventional terms.

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  2. Doctor Science

    I happen to have a teenager handy, so I asked her for a native opinion of the review & Jeff’s comments.
    On MTD she says: “Yes, that pretty much sums it up”. On “97% believe in God” she says “only at test time”. That is, part of MTD is that belief in God is conditional: if he’s not making you happy, maybe he isn’t there at all.
    Now admittedly, we live in a very religiously diverse part of the US: my teen’s public school classmates include various flavors of Protestant, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans-by-birth, and rabid atheists. She thinks Smith&Denton are right, that despite the denominational differences most of teens are really WTDs, but she thinks the depth of their belief really depends on how well it’s working for them.
    I wonder to what extent Smith&Denton’s finding
    that in a wide range of life outcomes — from the formation of community and leadership skills to the accumulation of social and cultural capital — the more religious a teen, the more successful she will tend to be
    — is inverted: that teens who are more successful find MTD a better “fit” and are more likely to stick with it. At the very least, their findings suggest to me that MTD (theologically vapid or not) *works* as a religion in this society, it reflects the needs and longings of contemporary Americans, it helps with their problems and answers their most pressing questions.
    As for your comments, Jeff, my particular teenager finds the idea of a pervasive fundamentalism among teens . . . unpersuasive.
    And then there are the millions of teenagers who are not religious in any explicit sense, but who have also embraced abstinence as somehow morally superior to non-marital sexual activity. They can’t explain why, as Smith and Denton argue; but the diluted religion they express is nonetheless more potent than the moral preachiness of the past.
    Um, no, it isn’t “more potent”, because the kids still have sex. Her view from the ground does not see teens embracing true abstinence for its moral superiority, but rather that they are more likely to choose forms of sex that “don’t count” (cybersex, oral sex), for a combination of moral, emotional, and safety reasons. Again, there may be regional/class differences: in our community getting married before age 21 is seriously frowned upon, but I’m told that in some areas of the US there is still considerable pressure toward early marriages. “No premarital sex” seems plausible if you expect to marry at 18 or 19, much less so if you won’t marry until you’re 25.
    fluent in a currently popular language predicated on not asking too many questions, on accepting authority, on a kind of unreflective moral “purity.”
    My teenager says she doesn’t recognize this at all — or at least that it’s if anything less true of teens than of other human beings. I wonder if regional differences are operating, or if teens aren’t telling you what they really think. Or if when you ask about “religion” they think the question covers a very narrow field, where they only feel comfortable quoting authoritative adults, because my native guide thinks teens are *more* inclined than adults to bring forward counter-arguments and -examples.

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  3. Jim Rovira

    I’m curious about the socio-economic cross section represented by the study, and the geographic as well. My wife teaches high school and is amazed at her kids’ conservatism, but at the same time has two or three pregnant girls in her classes at any given time. I kinda suspect, like Jeff, that there’s more going on here.

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  4. Steve Nicoloso

    Dr. Science’s observation:
    teens who are more successful find MTD a better “fit” and are more likely to stick with it. At the very least, their findings suggest to me that MTD (theologically vapid or not) *works* as a religion in this society, it reflects the needs and longings of contemporary Americans
    is, I’d have to say, spot on. MTD is this nation’s civic religion. So of course its most devout practitioners will in general have greater success, by almost any objective metric. Theological vapidity is the first and highest virtue for nearly every leader, whether in politics or the corporate world (like there’s a difference).
    Jim, I’d have to wonder whether extant teen pregnancies might not be a pretty good sign of an essential conservatism… The girls are, after all, still pregnant. Conservatism may not be strong enough to prevent the causes, but might very well affect how one deals (rightly in this case) with the consequences.
    Cheers!

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  5. Jeff Sharlet

    I’ve been interviewing some smart young guys from a very conservative, very Christian town in central California. In their 20s now, they’re all committed to remaining virgins until they marry. They’re all graduates of True Love Waits, as are many of the kids they grew up with. And one of these men reports that fully half of the women in his church youth group — all of whom “believed” in abstinence — got pregnant in their teens.
    I think Steve is right — teen pregnancy is a sign of a conservative culture, one that disapproves of birth control and educating kids about sexual realities.

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  6. jeffy3000

    Lamentable to lose “repentance, love of neighbor, social justice, unmerited grace, self-discipline, humility,” perhaps, but can anyone really believe “the cost of discipleship, dying to self, the sovereignty of God, personal holiness, the struggles of sanctification, glorifying God in suffering, hunger for righteousness,” is a positve force for humanity or the individual soul? Seems medieval, which may be one reason why Americans in general do not want to engage in religious discussions. However, I think the overriding reason people do not want to disucss religion is ideas disrupt “their childish beliefs.”

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  7. Doctor Science

    Steve —
    Of course teen pregnancies reflect conservativism: they reduce young women’s freedom of choice and movement, and are thought of as the natural punishment for having sex.
    I wonder about those conservative, Christian guys you’ve been interviewing, Jeff. Does their particular twist on the “cult of virginity” still reinforce different standards for males and females, or is a guy who breaks the vow and has sex despised as a “slut”? Do the young men see themselves as either virgins or whores, or is that standard really enforced just on women?

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  8. Scott Korb

    I’ve been very interested in what’s been said over the past few days, and I’ll be pleased to post something longer soon — a comment that tries to synthesize my responses to the various comments shared thus far. But immediately, when Jeffy3000 says this — “the cost of discipleship, dying to self, the sovereignty of God, personal holiness, the struggles of sanctification, glorifying God in suffering, hunger for righteousness,” — sounds medieval, I felt obliged to ask him to think about Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, MLK, the Berrigans, Bonhoeffer, et al.

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  9. Jeff Sharlet

    The double standard seems to have, for the most part, disappeared from the virginity movement. As has, for the most part, language like “slut.” It’s all upbeat, focussed on staying “pure”; if one fails, one simply repents and revirginizes. Well, not “simply”; it’s a complicated spiritual process, but the movement is not nearly as punitive in tone as emphasis on abstinence once was.

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  10. Doctor Science

    As has, for the most part, language like “slut.”
    I’m boggling, because the word “slut” still exercises great & deadly power over teenage girls, who fear any accusation of sexual agency. Frankly, I would have to see an actual study of both males and females in the virginity movement before I’d believe that girls aren’t being (at least implicitly )told that they’ll lose their value and be sluts & whores if they have sex.
    It’s all upbeat, focussed on staying “pure”; if one fails, one simply repents and revirginizes.
    more boggling. Of course, when I was a teenager/college student (approximately the Eocene era), the question “can a guy be a virgin?” was still hotly debated, and the answer was usually “No”. So the general acceptance that yes, guys can be virgins is already a sizable defeat for the double standard.

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  11. Scott Korb

    One this is clear: Smith and Denton worry over the results of the NSYR. Their argument is historical; they know well the religion that stands to be killed by MTD. Doubtless, they have seen what Jeff has seen: some conservative teens, those without the historical perspective that results from religious education, are shaping a belief around a

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  12. jeffy3000

    With the exception of Thomas Merton, the other religious leaders cited are revered for their work in obtaining social justice, not glorifying God in suffering. Although they may have suffered for trying to bring social justice to their cultures, I do not believe their suffering was for the purpose of glorifying God. The suffering was done to alleviate a social/cultural injustice. No doubt a psychological process transforms people into accepting personal suffering in order to bring about social justice, and it may very well come from “dying to self,” but most who desired equal civil rights were engaged for their own personal gain, because equal rights makes us all better off. To desire any culture embrace these ‘medieval’ virtues of self-sacrifice for righteous ideology is dangerous, because they create social conditions which create crusades, jihads, genocide, and totalitarianism.

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  13. Scott Korb

    I’m not sure how the self-sacrifice of Merton’s asceticism, Day’s voluntary poverty, King’s or Day’s civil disobedience (leading to imprisonment), Bonhoeffer’s plotting against Hitler (leading to imprisonment and his execution), and so on, are necessarily linked to crusades, genocide, and totalitarianism. It was not a matter of righteous ideologies for these people, but of right behavior, which often demands self-sacrifice. We commit little acts of self-sacrifice every day, by providing for our children, the poor, the sick, and so on, not because of any righteous ideology, but because it is right to do so. What Smith and Denton seem to be worried about is that religion is beginning to value less and less the attitudes and beliefs that might lead to this kind of self-sacrifice, that our children are not learning how to articulate that they belong to communities where obligations abound.

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  14. Jeff Sharlet

    As a matter of preference, I’m in complete agreement with Scott; his heroes are my heroes, too. But as a matter of history — and of definitions — I have to ask for more information on the golden age of rigorous religious study for the masses.
    I’ll take it a step further and ask: Are you not engaging in the same fetishization of “purity” — intellectual rather than sexual — as teen virgins without a cause?
    I’d argue that you’re claiming the broad word “religion” for religions you (and I) admire, and “rigor” for disciplines that you (and I) aspire to. But there is inherent bond between religion and rigor, and neither “offers” (creeping consumerism — MTD!) the virtues of King or Day or Berrigan or Bonhoeffer. It doesn’t require a morally relativistic stance to say that “religion” and “rigor” are neutral terms.
    (And, just to be contentious, I’d argue that theological “rigor” is not a term that applies well to King; I mean that as praise, though.)

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  15. Scott Korb

    In a sense, Jeff, that you and I can find religious heroes in our past — and very, very few in our present (esp. in America) — is more or less my point, and maybe the point that Smith and Denton would make as well when asking for more traditional religious education.
    As for rigor: I’ve been sloppy, and I apologize. (Clearly, I’m less rigorous than Jeff.) I’ve used it to suggest a certain depth of thought and commitment, rather than as it ought to be used, to suggest fixity, or systemiticity, of thought. In this way, Jeff is quite right: King may not have been rigorous, and that was much to the benefit of the cause. King’s religious heroics, then, were mainly in action and organization of energy and, well, the masses. Niebuhr undoubtedly can be considered a rigorous theologian. Taking notes and writing theological essays from prison, Bonhoeffer perhaps — undoubtedly a rigorous academic (and yes, I admit, not American) — holds a middle ground; his organization of conspirators was necessarily much smaller than King’s movement, and his theology less known than Niebuhr’s (he died before he was 40, though).
    While Day’s CATHOLIC WORKER was by no means meant as a place of obvious academic rigor, she and Peter Maurin founded it as a “newspaper for clarification of thought” (a type of rigor) — and yes, for the masses, selling for a penny. Maurin’s “Easy Essays,” not to mention Merton’s contributions, etc., were basically popular versions of Catholic social teaching, which has been subject to much systematizing over the years.
    I think a good question to ask is to what use can we put our religious heroes. Does it pay to remind MTDs [hand played: I agree with Smith and Denton] of figures like King or Day or Merton — if doing so could inspire a bit of self-sacrifice? Does it pay to remind secular liberals that some of the most successful Vietnam-war resisters were Catholics and Quakers (Christians of different breeds, I admit, but on many social issues, quite similar)? Does it pay to remember publicly today that Pope John Paul II, no doubt rigorous (if not always right), opposed the war in Iraq?
    While “rigor” may be, “religion” is not a neutral term. Perhaps it may be someday. By calling to mind these religious movements and leaders who valued self-sacrifice and dying to self, e.g., I’m not conjuring a golden age of purity, but hoping to remind people that there are other forms of religion that promise more social justice than feel-good MTD, which, according to Smith and Denton, is hitting everyone’s house of worship, and hard.

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  16. Tom Breen

    I tend to side more with Scott’s view on this than Jeff’s, because I wonder whether any of the MTD believers know what they’ll do when God stops making them happy, however they define that word. I don’t know that MTD has any room for theodicy, which is why I think America seems like a thoroughly theist country constantly skating on the edge of atheism. The book, and the study, sound fascinating; I’ll definitely check them out.

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  17. Doctor Science

    Tom Breen wrote: I don’t know that MTD has any room for theodicy, which is why I think America seems like a thoroughly theist country constantly skating on the edge of atheism.
    That may explain why the NSYR found such a surprisingly low level of atheism/agnosticism among teens, only 3%. Barna, for instance, finds that about 10-12% of American adults are atheist/agnostic, so either the NSYR study is drastically underestimating the number of teens who don’t believe in God, or many people stop believing in God somewhere around the age of 17-21.
    I agree with Scott Korb that MTD rejects historical depth, but I think that’s one of the reasons it *works*: this is America, where “history is bunk”, where people are always moving on geographically, emotionally, and spiritually.
    Indeed, this may explain the particular problems the NSYR study found with Catholic youth (which I gather from some of the Amazon.com reviews): Catholicism is an especially historically deep faith, traditionally fond of, well, tradition, and the external structures of faith. Maybe this recipe isn’t as emotionally workable for American teenagers as MTD. Teens have to deal with capitalist consumerism as a first priority, just as fish have to deal with water; Catholicism may be “too last millenium” to give them what they need. Or what they think they need, which is going to be pretty close to what they *do* need in the short run.

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  18. jeffy3000

    I do not think MTD is new. Most believers accept their religion on faith learned from socialization. This faith is then transformed into a simplistic view the social ‘scientists’ find lamentable. I only say this because my wife and mother, not to mention father, who was once president of the church council, seem to have this point of view and are well educated adults. Lamentable that more people do not rigorously study theology, Mr. Kolb’s view, and/or they do not want to suffer God’s grace, the book’s view. Regarding the suffering bit, I argue that for every Francis of Assisi a Peter the Hermit coexists. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and hanged by his antithetical counterpart, who happened to write a book called My Struggle while imprisoned. For every MLK there is a Jim Jones. I used to be proud of my idealism, but now want to be pragmatic and utilitarian because righteousness is dangerous.

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