Faith communities love acronyms. There are landfills full of WWJD? bracelets to prove that acronyms distill complex ideas down beyond a catch phrase to a few letters and allow a certain hyperlinkedness to vast amounts of data. In many ways, acronyms are a gift, but they also can be a distraction by offering a seemingly summative and all-encompassing certainty. The latest acronym to take youth workers and many church leaders by storm is MTD, short-hand for Moral Therapeutic Deism. Launched into the world via their book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers, which resulted from an in-depth study of American teenagers self-reporting about what makes up and sustains belief through the National Study of Youth and Religion. The findings of the study distilled in Soul Searching hold that what is religious belief for teenagers in America across ethnic and religious backgrounds is what Smith and Denton term MTD or Moral Therapeutic Deism, which sees belief as a code of right and wrong behaviors (moral) centered on the question of what a person needs to feel better about him or herself (therapeutic) and organized by a view of the divine as completely separated from the realm of lived experience completely at a distance and only there to consult and affirm (deism). After the study was released and the book published five years ago, a flood of reactions and later sub-industry has arisen around this model of MTD. Churches are worried, parents are feeling guilty, and youth workers are frantically seeking new models to change this trend. To be sure, Smith and Denton have some great data and the wake-up call to get serious about working with youth toward a deep and abiding sense of what makes up belief should be addressed. That said, I worry that many are adopting this MTD mantra without a critical examination of what is at stake and if the course correction proposed in Soul Searching and the MTD concern truly what we need.
In short: Is the supposed cure potentially worse than the disease?
Critiques of Christian Smith’s Soul Searching:
1. There is a danger of a one-size-fits all view to what is considered biblical literacy and deep faith that plots toward rationalism over and against embodiment and practice:
Smith and Denton argue that “all religious groups seem at risk of losing teens to nonreligious identities, which assumes there is an easily quantifiable religious identity is out there that we can appeal to that is somehow counterpoised to so-called secular identities. I have to admit being puzzled by this notion of nonreligious identities and deeply suspicious of what the religious persona that is the background for this assessment. As someone watches a generation of young people grab hold of all the consumerism that evangelicalism had to offer to mark its faith as real—shirts, hats, CDs, messenger bags, etc.—as well as use catch phrases and social behaviors valued in certain circles but which are foreign to others, I am not sure I am buying what Smith and Denton are putting on the table. They go on to say “a number of religious teenagers propounded theological views that are, according to the standards of their own religious traditions, simply not orthodox.” To that I would say, come to a Youth Specialties conference and see if you can find the orthodoxy that is being romantically idealized. Here are people who work with teens and draw from the breadth and height of the Christian tradition—contemplative Celtic prayers mixed with various social networking platforms and funded by sociological and theological reflection. One of the MTD critics who voices a similar concern to what I am reflecting on is theologian Tom Beaudoin at Fordham University. In the chapter “The Ethics of Characterizing Popular Faith” from his great book Witness to Dispossession, he underscores the fact that faith is complex and not an easily reducible thing:
[T]heology itself is discovering with ever greater complexity, the particular beliefs that are “sanctioned” by religious leadership, at any particular time and place, are deeply implicated in “nontheological” or “nonreligious” political, social, cultural and economic factors. The very opposition between “picking and choosing” and “accepting the whole” is itself a recent way of imaging, often for the sake of an intended control, what the options for belief are today—much like the opposition between fundamentalism and enlightenment or relativism and moral fundamentalism.
2. The study that Smith and Denton offer in Soul Searching doesn’t sufficiently allow for the inherently inarticulate nature of real faith.
The last time I checked, faith was not certainty. Following on from the fact that religious vs. irreligious identities are difficult and possibly problematic to view as a goal of our work with young people, the core of Smith and Denton’s work is a concern that youth cannot articulate what they believe with clarity and certainty. As they say: “The bottom line is, when it comes to their religious belief about God, U.S. teens reflect a great deal of variance on the matter and perhaps in some cases more than a little conceptual confusion.”
Again, I would ask who actually has a lack of variance in regard to his or her faith story and can offer a clear picture of belief.
As noted by Nancy Ammerman in Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, faith is known through and practiced as fragments, side plots and tangents more than systematically theorized and rendered. Ammerman puts it this way: “A person may recognize moral imperatives that have a transcendent grounding without ever having a religious experience or being able to articulate a set of doctrines about God.” Think for example about the man born blind in
3. The problem and later solution seems to revolve all too conveniently around institutional religion and doesn’t take into account the Pandora Effect of social media, the Internet and globalization as a good thing.
According to Smith, institutional representatives are the agents of religious socialization and as such should bear the burden of righting the wrongs of MTD to a large degree. That is fine on one level: Churches, synagogues, mosques and other institutional locations should continue to seek new ways of spurring conversations for and about faith. Yet what Smith and Denton don’t take into account is the role other networks play in framing faith that in many ways serve to remind us that God moves in mysterious ways. Tom Beaudoin makes the following comment in regard to this aspect of Soul Searching: “The authors imagine religious beliefs as starting from pure official teaching, stewarded by contemporary religious leaders, well or poorly, through official channels, such as programs of religious education.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but faith is a messy thing; and how anyone comes to some understanding of God and what fuels our belief is anything but clean. When I was in high school, I had a lot of questions about what belief was supposed to be and thought most things about Christianity were more in line with the Marxist critique: an “opiate for the masses,” a balm for those unwilling to embrace the horrors of life. So I read everything I could get my hands on from Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain to The Tao Te Ching, trying to make sense of what meaning actually is. Yes, I count myself as a Christian; and yes, I situate myself within the orthodox understanding of the faith as framed in the ecumenical creeds and Scripture canonized by the apostolic faith. However, did my starting point begin with the church? Not really. Is church the resource and answer my need for a deeper and more abiding faith, particularly the church within which I find myself? Somewhat. Am I clear and articulate about what faith is for me? I suppose better than some. Does this cause me anxiety? Not at all. This leads to my last comment.
4. Eclecticism is not necessarily a bad thing.
Piggybacking on the last concern, there is the assertion within MTD that eclectic approaches to faith development is something of an aberration and that authentic faith is to be found in categorical resolute allegiance to a particular faith tradition. When Smith makes the statement that “U.S. teens as a whole are thus not religiously promiscuous faith mixers” he is seeing this as a good thing.
Is this a good thing?
Smith and Denton go on to say, “based on our experience talking through these issues face-to-face with teens around the country, we estimate that no more than 2 to 3 percent of American teens are serious spiritual seekers of the kind described above: self-directing and self-authenticating people pursuing an experimental and eclectic quest for personal spiritual meaning outside of historical religious traditions.”
In many ways, I don’t find comfort in this at all. When did seeking manifold resources in which to ground and release a faith that is larger than institutions, larger than reason, more compelling than rote recitation of dogma and more enlivened than an appeal to a dead past? Students I know find common grace flooding through the music they listen to, the books they read in comparative literature courses, in the art they study from the 16th century, and even in the characters they follow on TV shows as ephemeral as “Glee,” as gritty as “The Wire,” as bizarre as “Lost” and as ridiculous and ironic as Monty Python movies. This is in keeping with St. Paul’s response to the world as he spoke to the Athenians in
So, what do you think? As you listen to the cry of concern voiced by MTD calling us to a deep state of alarm and fear for the sake of our teens, can we temper that fear and concern with knowledge that faith always has been a messy thing that is difficult to articulate, and often drawn from a crazy and seemingly random set of sources?
