Is This You?
A recent survey by the George Barna Group found that the church in the USA has been massively weakened by a heresy that is both appealing and anti-christian.
The heresy goes by the name of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). That’s a mouthful so let’s break it down a little before examining the specifics.
• Moralistic means the belief that being a “good” person is the most important virtue.
• Therapeutic means that God wants me to be happy and feel good about my life
• Deism is a philosophy that originated in the 18th Century and acknowledges there is a Creator, but He is distant from the world and not interested in our personal affairs.
We can see how this would be a common point of view amongst many people who believe that God wants us to be happy and to be good, and that He won’t judge us. In fact this is at many points the exact opposite of the gospel.
Here are the specifics of this belief system first described by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in 2005. Smith and Denton identified several core beliefs that characterised the thinking and behaviour of this group of beliefs
Those components included:
• belief in a God who remains distant from people’s lives
• people are supposed to be good to each other (i.e., moral)
• the universal purpose of life is being happy and feeling good about oneself
• there are no absolute moral truths
• God allows “good people” into Heaven
• God places very limited demands on people
In the USA many people who believe these things identified as Christian, even though their belief system draws on multiple faiths (many believe in karma for example) and deny the existence of the Holy Spirit.
George Barna made these comments about his findings. “In this distorted version of Christianity the emphasis is on self rather than God, and on emotion rather than truth. Those who adopt MTD views believe in innate human goodness and kindness,”
“They view God as a powerful but dispassionate observer who remains detached from human experience, unless circumstances make Him the solution of last resort. They believe that life is about individual happiness and that action producing positive personal outcomes gives meaning and purpose to life.”
Barna continued, “MTD is more about believing in and promoting the best interests of self, based on currently popular cultural thinking. Its proponents are not likely to prioritise knowing, loving, and serving a transcendent God,” he said.
“In their view, the local church exists primarily to offer supportive and upbeat community rather than worship, service, holiness, or a genuine relationship with God. And MTD is abundantly pluralistic, encouraging people to do whatever works or feels good rather than that which fits with biblical principles.”
As such, Barna contends that MTD is a worldview that is defined and driven by current culture more than by historic religious truths or a comprehensive and coherent doctrine. Consequently, this approach to spirituality asks little of its followers while providing the comfort, convenience, and community that those followers long for.
“The fact that a greater percentage of people who call themselves Christian draw from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism than from the Bible says a lot about the state of the Christian church in America, in all of its manifestations,” Barna lamented. “Simply and objectively stated, Christianity in this nation is rotting from the inside out.”
If you believe that God is primarily about making you happy and that he makes no demands on your lifestyle, you are not born again. Jesus tells us that to follow Him, we take up our cross and die to ourselves. Christianity is not about feeling good, getting rich or justifying our sins. It is about giving our lives entirely over to Christ, to be a “living sacrifice” for Him.
More information about the survey can be found at https://www.arizonachristian.edu/culturalresearchcenter/