About 20 years ago, two sociologists presented a view they called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (see this excellent GotQuestions article on MTD) that seems to be the baseline American belief system. This view can be summarized as the beliefs that God is good, God wants people to be good, and if you are a good person then God will solve your problems and you will go to heaven when you die. I bring up MTD not to be nerdy, but because I have found in nearly two decades of work as a pastor that it I run into this framework so often in working with people that I feel confident saying it is the prevalent American religion.
A major problem of a MTD viewpoint is that it is not biblical, and a catastrophic practical problem with it is that it is neither true nor realistic. What do I mean? Where I come into contact with MTD is when it doesn’t work in people’s lives. If you believe that God is good and exists to provide you a good life as long as you are a good person, your world can come crashing down when you feel you have been a good person and you find yourself in a place where bad things are happening. I have met more people than I can count who have experienced a crisis of faith, become angry at God, or given up altogether on the existence of God when their MTD framework failed to explain their personal experiences and the actual world they live in.
I believe the Bible and historic Christianity offer a more truthful and realistic framework than MTD. Yes, God is good, but the Bible portrays God as far more than a benevolent caretaker. God is holy, meaning he is much more than an idealized grandfather figure. God created the world and charges humanity in specific ways to join him in creating the kind of world he wants (I talked about this in a previous article). God is strong and powerful, but he also has chosen for his own reasons to limit his own power and uphold the importance of human choices. God is not portrayed in the Bible as keeping people from trouble, although the Bible does portray God as being with his people and ultimately bringing them through hardship and suffering. It is impossible to square the Bible with a viewpoint that God will under all circumstances keep good people from experiencing bad things.
The American church (yes, I’m going to generalize a lot here) typically offers a more biblical view than MTD, more in line with the previous paragraph. But the problem with the American church is that does not take into account how strongly formed many people are by a MTD framework. So what happens in a lot of churches is that they portray a more realistic view of God, but they inadequately confront the assumptions of MTD. What happens practically is that people still understand the basic challenge of life to be a good person, who will in turn experience good things if they are a good person. They simply add to the idea of being a good person with some more specifically Christian elements, substituting church norms and rules for what it means to be a good person. So now the concepts of sin and salvation come into play, but people are still swimming in a framework of be a good person and you will have a good life. I believe most American Christians do not have a different religion than MTD, that they are in fact working within that flawed framework.
To Be Continued