GENOVA, ITALY - MARCH 5, 2023: The fresco of Creation of the Human in the side cupola of the church Basilica di Santa Maria delle Vigne by Giuseppe Passano (1786 - 1849).
Q. As I’ve tried to share my faith with other people (including fellow Catholics), I keep running into objections like, “Isn’t the important thing to be a good person?” and “I feel close to God already, so why do I need religion?” How do I respond to these objections?
This is an excellent question as it gets at a reality that is pervasive across our society and that makes sharing our faith particularly difficult. In short, that reality is that many Americans who identify as Catholic or another Christian tradition (or an entirely different religion such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) in fact hold to a religious perspective other than the one they identify as, a religious perspective coined as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Now, that’s both a mouthful and a “mind-full,” so let’s unpack what Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is, why many Americans “practice” it (all the while identifying and even practicing as a member of another religious tradition), and how we can best respond to it.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (“MTD” for short) is a term developed by the sociologist Christian Smith in his 2005 book “Soul Searching.” That book offered the findings of a massive sociological study Smith undertook of the religious beliefs and practices of American teenagers at the time.
What Smith found is that the deepest religious beliefs and practices of those teens weren’t the doctrines and rituals of the religious tradition they identified by, but instead, were best characterized as MTD.
It’s important to note that there is no “MTD Church,” and no American teen in the early 2000s told Smith or his team that their religion was MTD. But what Smith and his fellow researchers found was that most American teens at the time held to a common set of religious beliefs best characterized by MTD. And many others observed that this same set of beliefs was held by older Americans as well, such that one could fairly say that the dominant religion in the United States was (and is) in fact Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
So what are these beliefs that characterize MTD? In his book, Smith identified the following beliefs as typifying MTD:
1. A God exists who created and ordered 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.
These beliefs help us to understand the terms of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: “deism” is philosophy that believes God exists, but not that he is significantly involved in human affairs (beliefs 1 and 4); “therapeutic” speaks to belief 3, which indicates a focus on self and the removal of suffering; and “moralistic” speaks to how one acts and behaves (beliefs 1, 2 and 5).
Smith went on to summarize these beliefs with some evocative metaphors: from the perspective of MTD, there is indeed a God, but God is best understood not as a loving Trinity of persons who calls us to turn away from sin and toward him, entering with others into the depths of God’s all-consuming love. Rather, in Smith’s description, the God of MTD is more akin to a “cosmic butler” or a “divine therapist.”
Think of a butler: His job is to come running when we need something, but otherwise, he is out of sight and out of mind. Certainly, God loves me and wants what is best for me, but these two images capture a significant error in MTD: In effect, it’s as though God exists for me, rather than the other way around.
One sees here the relevance of Smith’s findings and his idea of MTD to the original question we began with; it’s fair to say that these five beliefs are in fact held by the (vast) majority of Americans, including many Catholics. The problem is that these beliefs do not neatly correspond to what God has actually revealed to us through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as taught and interpreted by the Catholic Church. So while there may be some similarity between (Catholic) Christianity and these beliefs, MTD is really a serious distortion of what we actually believe.
The reality is this: God is not distant; he is ever-present, always holding each one of us—and, indeed, all things—in existence, out of the depths of his divine love. The god of MTD is a pale shadow of the true God, not only because it makes God out to exist primarily for my benefit, but even more, it makes him out to be removed and mostly disconnected, when in fact he is always near, nearer to me than I am to myself.
Next month we’ll look more at MTD and how we can respond to it, especially when so many of our fellow Americans, in effect, hold to it.
