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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, why do I need religion?” How do I respond to these objections?
Last month, we offered an initial response to this good question by use of sociologist Christian Smith’s findings that most Americans’ religious beliefs and practices can be summarized as follows:
- A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
- God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
- The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
- God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
- Good people go to heaven when they die.
Smith uses the concept of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD for short) to name this set of beliefs (“deism” is a philosophy that believes God exists, but not that he is significantly involved in human affairs; “therapeutic” indicates a focus on self and the removal of suffering; and “moralistic” speaks to a focus on how one acts).
This month, we’ll look more closely at MTD and how we can respond to it when we are trying to share our faith with others.
As noted last month, one of the difficulties posed by MTD is that it is very similar to (Catholic) Christianity; we do believe God loves us and wants what is best for us. But MTD is a distortion of the full truth of Christianity, but in such a subtle way that the average Catholic would not know the difference.
Remember, Smith’s proposal is that most American Catholics have inadvertently absorbed this distortion of authentic Catholicism; it’s certainly not the case that they have deliberately and consciously rejected Catholic teaching in favor of something called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. But this gets at an important point: The degree to which we all too often unreflectively embrace ideas that are not actually Catholic.
Now, one might legitimately ask at this point, “So what? As long as someone is still attending Mass and seeking to be a good Catholic, isn’t that what matters?” It’s certainly true that intention matters, but that actually gets to my point: We need to be more intentional about what we believe.
The fact of the matter is, what we believe does matter. If I really believe God is not distant (as the Deism in MTD holds), but rather that he is ever-present, always holding each one of us—and indeed, all things—in existence out of the depths of his divine love, this will have a real and profound difference on how I live.
The most important beliefs are not the ones I merely profess; the most important beliefs are the ones that govern how I live. And it is essential that we examine those life-guiding principles and ensure they are in fact the beliefs God has revealed to us in Scripture and Tradition as handed on by the Catholic Church.
To be clear, the struggle to bring our professed beliefs into alignment with our life is not new. In fact, in 1965, all of the bishops of the Catholic Church, together with Pope St. Paul VI, declared that, “[T]his split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.”
How, then, are we to respond to MTD? First, by attending ourselves to what we were just saying: Asking God for the strength and wisdom to bring our faith and our life into ever greater correspondence. How? Through prayer and reflection, asking God to illuminate any principles that guide our actions but are out of sync with our Catholic faith, and then also praying and reflecting on how our Catholic faith can more deeply guide our actions.
Second, by being ready in conversation to point out the differences between MTD and Catholicism. Here, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of Christian Smith’s book, “Soul Searching,” or any of his other sociological writings, as they shed greater light on what MTD is. And then on the other hand, by more closely studying our Catholic faith and what it means to live it out more fully. This dual approach will enable us to more easily demonstrate how MTD is a distortion and pale imitation of authentic Christianity.
In so doing, we can help our brothers and sisters come to a greater awareness of their own beliefs and a greater appreciation for how our Catholic faith can lead us to an abundant life.
