The eCrozier

Notre Dame Sociologist, Christian Smith, coined the term Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD) to describe the operative religious commitment of many people today in western culture. As Smith describes the term, MTD has these beliefs:

1. God created and ordered the world, and watches over it.
2. God wants people to be good to each other, as taught in all world religions.
3. Life’s goal is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God isn’t directly involved in life except when God is needed to solve a problem.
5. Good people go toheaven when they die.

While people are welcome to believe these four points and see them as summing up their creed, we must be clear: They aren’t Christian convictions and not by a long shot.

MTD basically renders God to be an idea that’s only operationalized when one has belief in this God. Such an “idea of God” never requires anything of the adherent. So, if having such a belief causes one to be unhappy or feel guilty about a wrong done, then one merely alters their belief to accommodate their perceived unhappiness. MTD turns God into a water faucet that one can turn on or off depending on one’s feelings at the time. MTD’s focus is on the individual’s personal journey through life, so their moral behavior is also fluid as long as they can rationalize it to be good and as long as it continues to make them happy and helps them feel good about themselves.

The Christian witness, however, is that God is more than an idea who can be reduced to only an object of belief. God exists outside of the material world, beyond our capacity to fully comprehend, and God can’t be controlled by human behavior. God has also, according to Christian witness, chosen to enter this world in the person of Jesus (see Philippians 2:5-11) in order to accomplish two goals: to reveal God’s nature to humans and to redeem those very same humans from sin and death.

MTD’s growth as a popular belief system is hardly surprising in an increasingly secular culture that also needs some sort of sense-making spirituality. Tom Holland, in his masterful work, Dominion, traces human history from the 6^th Century B.C. to the present. He contends that much of Christianity’s moral code has prevailed (e.g. all humans have rights, each person has an inherent worth and dignity, we’re responsible for caring for the less fortunate, etc.) so much so that secular persons now don’t even know the origin of these still relatively new claims in human history. Read ancient history. These claims certainly weren’t present in any society prior to Christianity.

What hasn’t prevailed for many is the other part of the Christian proclamation: the incarnation, crucifixion, & resurrection of Jesus that brings mercy and grace to humanity. So, secular culture has adopted, to some extent, Christian “practice” while rejecting the central contentions of the Christian faith. But there can’t be one without the other. Christian morality is all contingent upon the God who inculcated such practices specifically through the means of Jesus’s incarnation, crucifixion, & resurrection. Otherwise, we’re left to our own devices.

+Scott