A SUMMARY INTERPRETATION: MORALISTIC THERAPEUTIC DEISM

The themes and analyses explored in this chapter have followed varied topical trains of thought and sometimes pursued diversions and digressions. But what does the whole look like when one puts it all together? When we get past adolescent inarticulacy about religion, systematically sort through the myriad stories and statements about religious faith and practice, and pull apart and piece together what seem to be the key ideas and relevant issues, what might one conclude? Here we attempt to summarize our observations by venturing a general thesis about teenage religion and spirituality in the United States. We advance our thesis somewhat tentatively as less than a conclusive fact but more than mere conjecture: we suggest that the de facto dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers is what we might well call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews, sounds something like this:

• 1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human 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 does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
• 5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Such a de facto creed is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and Catholic youth, but is also visible among black and conservative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers, and even many nonreligious teenagers in the United States. Note that no teenager would actually use the terminology “Moralistic Therapeutic Deist” to describe himself or herself. That is our summarizing term. And very few teenagers would lay out the five points of its creed as clearly and concisely as we have just done. But when one sifts through and digests hundreds of discussions with U.S teenagers about religion, God, faith, prayer, and other spiritual practices, what seems to emerge as the dominant, de facto religious viewpoint turns out to be some version of this faith. We could literally fill another chapter of this book with more quotes from teen interviews illustrating Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and exploring its nuances and variants. Given space limitations, however, suffice it here to examine merely a few more representative quotes depicting this religion's core components.

First, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person. That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, at work on self-improvement, taking care of one's health, and doing one's best to be successful. One 17-year-old white Mormon boy from Utah said this very clearly: “I believe in, well, my whole religion is where you try to be good and, ah, if you're not good then you should just try to get better, that's all.” Being moral in this faith means being the kind of person that other people will like, fulfilling one's personal potential, and not being socially disruptive or interpersonally obnoxious. As more than one teenager summarized morality for us, including the Hindu boy quoted above, “Just don't be an asshole, that's all.” Such a moral vision is inclusive of most religions, which are presumed ultimately to stand for equivalent moral views. Thus, a nonreligious white girl from Maryland said, “Morals play a large part in religion. Morals are good if they're healthy for society. Like Christianity, which is all I know, the values you get from, like, the Ten Commandments. I think every religion is important in its own respect. You know, if you're Muslim, then Islam is the way for you. If you're Jewish, well, that's great too. If you're Christian, well good for you. It's just whatever makes you feel good about you.” Feeling good about oneself is thus also an essential aspect of living a moral life, according to this dominant de facto teenage religious faith.Which leads to our next point.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is, second, about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents. This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one's prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God's love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etcetera. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people. We have already examined numerous quotes to this effect in the pages above. A few more will help to complete the picture. One 15-year-old Hispanic conservative Protestant girl from Florida expressed the therapeutic benefits of her faith in these terms: “God is like someone who is always there for you, I don't know, it's like God is God. He's just like somebody that'll always help you go through whatever you're going through. When I became a Christian I was just praying and it always made me feel better.” Making a similar point, though drawing it out from a different religious tradition, this 14-year-old white Jewish girl from Washington State describes what her faith is all about in this way: “I guess for me Judaism is more about how you live your life. Part of the guidelines are like how to live and I guess be happy with who you are, 'cause if you're out there helping someone, you're gonna feel good about yourself, you know?” Thus, service to others can be one means to feeling good about oneself. Other personal religious practices can also serve that therapeutic end, as this 15-year-old Asian Buddhist girl from Alabama observed: “When I pray, it makes me feel good afterwards.” Similarly, one 15-year-old white conservative Protestant girl from Illinois explained: “Religion is very important, because when you have no one else to talk to about stuff, you can just get it off your chest, you just talk [to God]. It's good.” And this 14-year-old East Indian Hindu girl from California said of her religious practices, “I don't know, they just really help me feel good.” It is thus no wonder that so many religious and nonreligious teenagers are so positive about religion, for the faith many of them have in mind effectively helps to achieve a primary life goal: to feel good and happy about oneself and one's life. It is also no wonder that most teens are so religiously inarticulate. As long as one is happy, why bother with being able to talk about the belief content of one's faith?

Finally, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one's affairs—especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance. He is often described by teens as “watching over everything from above” and “the creator of everything and … just up there now controlling everything.” As one 15-year-old Arabic Muslim boy from California put it: “God is like an entity that decides when, if he wants to intervene with a lot of things. To me God is pretty much like intervention, like extreme luck. Say you're $50 away from something and you find $50 on the floor, then that's probably God's intervention or something like that. But other than that it just seems like he's monitoring. He just kind of stays back and watches, like he's watching a play, like he's a producer. He makes the play all possible and then he watches it, and if there's something he doesn't like he changes it.” For many teens, as with adults, God sometimes does get involved in people's lives, but usually only when they call on him, mostly when they have some trouble or problem or bad feeling that they want resolved. In this sense, the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking care of needs. As this 14-year-old white mainline Protestant boy from Colorado said, “I believe there's a God, so sometimes when I'm in trouble or in danger, then I'll start thinking about that.” Like the deistic God of the eighteenth-century philosophers, the God of contemporary teenage Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is primarily a divine Creator and Lawgiver. He designed the universe and establishes moral law and order. But this God is not trinitarian, he did not speak through the Torah or the prophets of Israel, was never resurrected from the dead, and does not fill and transform people through his Spirit. This God is not demanding. He actually can't be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good. In short, God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process. As one 14-year-old white Catholic boy from Pennsylvania, in response to our inquiry about why religion matters, said, “ 'Cause God made us and if you ask him for something I believe he gives it to you. Yeah, he hasn't let me down yet. [So what is God like?] God is a spirit that grants you anything you want, but not anything bad.” Similarly, this 17-year-old conservative Protestant girl from Florida told us, “God's all around you, all the time. He believes in forgiving people and whatnot and he's there to guide us, for somebody to talk to and help us through our problems. Of course, he doesn't talk back.” This last statement is perhaps doubly telling: God, being distant, does not directly verbally answer prayers, according to this girl, but he also does not offer any challenging comebacks to or arguments about our requests. Perhaps the worst the God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism can do is simply fail to provide his promised therapeutic blessings, in which case those who believe in him are entitled to be grumpy. Thus, one 16-year-old white mainline Protestant boy from Texas complained with some sarcasm in his interview, “Well, God is almighty, I guess [yawns]. But I think he's on vacation right now because of all the crap that's happening in the world, 'cause it wasn't like this back when he was famous.” Likewise, this 14-year-old white conservative Protestant boy from Ohio told us, “God is an overall ruler who controls everything, so like, if I'm depressed or something and things aren't going my way I blame it on him, I don't know why.” But few teens we talked to end up blaming God for failing them, because Moralistic Therapeutic Deism usually seems to be effective in delivering its promised benefits to its many American teenage believers.

We want to be very clear here about our thesis. We are not saying that all U.S. teens are adherents of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Some are simply disengaged from anything religious or spiritual, and others embrace substantive religious beliefs and practices that effectively repudiate those of this revisionist faith. Some teens do appear to be truly very serious about their religious faith in ways that seem faithful to the orthodox claims of the faith traditions they profess. We are also not saying than anyone has founded an official religion by the name of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, nor that most U.S. teenagers have abandoned their religious denominations and congregations to practice it elsewhere or under another name. Rather, it seems that the latter is simply colonizing many established religious traditions and congregations in the United States, that it is becoming the new spirit living in the old body. Its typical embrace and practice is de facto, functional, practical, and tacit, not formal or acknowledged as a distinctive religion. Furthermore, we are not suggesting that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a religious faith limited to teenage adherents in the United States. To the contrary, it seems that it is also a widespread, popular faith among very many U.S. adults. Our religiously conventional adolescents seem to be merely absorbing and reflecting religiously what the adult world is routinely modeling for and inculcating in its youth.