Kenda Dean wrote a provocative book some years ago, Almost Christian, describing the faith of American teens and young people, a faith which they imbibe from their parents that she calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. This term, borrowed from sociology, describes a religious attitude that cherishes niceness as a basic value, emphasizes religion as means to heaven for “good” people, and whose deity is a pop psychologist, interfering little and demanding almost nothing.
MTD has been around a long time. It used to be called Liberal Protestantism, which H. Richard Niebuhr famously described as “A God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” He blamed a church that is captive of the age:
The captive church is the church which has become entangled with this system or these systems of worldliness. It is a church which seeks to prove its usefulness to civilization, in terms of civilization’s own demands. It is a church which has lost the distinctive note and the earnestness of a Christian discipline of life and has become what every religious institution tends to become — the teacher of the prevailing code of morals and the pantheon of the social gods. It is a church, moreover, which has become entangled with the world in its desire for the increase of its power and prestige and which…
