What Christians Really Believe: “I Must Try Harder”

  (Ed Welch) Hello, I am a moralistic therapeutic deist.” That’s the word from a number of evangelical teens.
I really liked that phrase when I first read it, though it seemed a little clunky. It was introduced by the 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. After listening to about 3,000 interviews the authors suggested that evangelical teens describe their beliefs this way:

God created
God wants us to be happy
God waits around until we have a problem then jumps in to help
Good people – people who are nice – go to heaven

In other words, they are moralistic therapeutic deists. MORE