Soul Searching
Last week I received the latest edition of the Mars Hill Audio Journal in my mailbox. Every two months Mars Hill Audio puts together a thought-provoking collection of interviews with leading Christian thinkers (and non-Christians writing on religious themes) designed “to assist Christians who desire to move from thoughtless consumption of modern culture to a vantage point of thoughtful engagement” (from their website http://www.marshillaudio.org/). This volume was one of the best that I’ve heard (including a nice interview with Eugene Peterson, the full one hour version of which can be downloaded for free from their website).
The interview that struck me the most was with sociologist Christian Smith. Smith, along with Michael Emerson, is responsible for one of the most important discussions of the relationship between evangelicalism and the problem of race in America in their book Divided by Faith (Oxford, 2000). The interview on this edition of the Mars Hill Audio Journal focused on Smith’s newest book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Oxford, 2005). What fascinated me about Smith’s comments in the interview was the fact that their research showed that the teenagers studied were very articulate but were, for the most part, completely ill-equipped to articulate the distinctives of their religious traditions. They knew very well the language of the culture, but hardly knew at all the language of the church (Smith illustrated this in the interview by talking about the fact that a word study of the interview transcripts revealed that a lot of young people used the word “grace” but the overwhelming majority of the uses of the word were in reference to Will and Grace). Smith said that what he found as he looked at the data was that while these teenagers were unable to describe the particulars of their respective religious traditions, they were nonetheless describing a coherent set of religious beliefs. Smith describes this set of beliefs with the apt phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism” – God exists, doesn’t want me to misbehave, wants me to be happy, gives me resources to cope with life and help me feel better about myself, but, for the most part, watches from a distance.
The key lesson learned from Smith’s research, it seems to me, is that American teenagers haven’t invented the religion of “moralistic therapeutic deism.” They have inherited it. They have inherited it from well meaning but misguided parents and (perhaps even more importantly) churches (more important because they nurture and form the religious life and language of both parents and children) who have far too often been shaped more by culture than by gospel. “Moralistic therapeutic deism” is marketable in a culture like ours, and many Americans, both young and old, have been catechized into its community. But it’s not the gospel. It doesn’t know words like depravity, redemption, communion, vocation – words without which the church cannot pass the gospel on to the next generation. I’m very much in favor of the church being able to speak the language of the culture, but I have long feared that in North America we’re losing the ability to speak our own language. Unfortunately, Smith and Denton have confirmed my fears.
