Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Companion volume: Smith and Denton, Soul Searching
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Referenced in: Generational Issues in Churches
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This is based on the data from The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), from which another book is also taken, Soul Searching. Soul Searching is broader in scope, although Almost Christian makes many of the research findings more accessible, especially through the appendices. She also summarizes five primary discoveries of NSYR:
- Most American teenagers have a positive view of religion but otherwise don’t give it much thought.
- Most U.S. teenagers mirror their parents’ religious faith.
- Teenagers lack a theological language with which to express their faith or interpret their experience of the world.
- A minority of American teenagers—but a significant minority—say religious faith is important, and that it makes a difference in their lives. These teenagers are doing better in life on a number of scales, compared to their less religious peers.
- Many teenagers enact and espouse a religious outlook that is distinct from traditional teachings of most world religions—an outlook called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. (17-21)
The last item is a chief concern. The research described Moral Therapeutic Deism in five tenets:
- A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
- God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
- The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
- God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
- Good people go to heaven when they die. (14)
Dean advances beyond the NSYR to pursue her central interest: How can the twenty-first-century church better prepare young people steeped in Moralistic Therapeutic Deism for the trust-walk of Christian faith? (22) The answers to this question are complex. To begin, we must be careful not to place the onus too squarely on teens.
Since the religious and spiritual choices of American teenagers echo, with astonishing clarity, the religious and spiritual choices of the adults who love them, lackadaisical faith is not young people’s issue, but ours. 3 Most teenagers are perfectly content with their religious worldviews; it is churches that are — rightly — concerned. So we must assume that the solution lies not in beefing up congregational youth programs or making worship more “cool” and attractive, but in modeling the kind of mature, passionate faith we say we want young people to have.
The National Study of Youth and Religion reveals a theological fault line running underneath American churches: an adherence to a do-good, feel-good spirituality that has little to do with the Triune God of Christian tradition and even less to do with loving Jesus Christ enough to follow him into the world. (4)
She borrows the term “Almost Christian” from early revivalists George Whitefield and John Wesley who both preached sermons by the same title to depict half-hearted spirituality and loveless faith. We have a similar malady in our day “after two and a half centuries of shacking up with the ‘American dream.’” The result is “a dicey codependence between consumer-driven therapeutic individualism and religious pragmatism” which “gnaw, termite-like, at our identity as the Body of Christ, eroding our ability to recognize that Jesus’ life of self-giving love directly challenges the American gospel of self-fulfillment and self-actualization.” (5) This may also be thought of as “diner theology,” a bargain religion, cheap but satisfying, whose gods require little in the way of fidelity or sacrifice.” It is “an agreeable porridge about the importance of being nice, feeling good about yourself, and saving God for emergencies.” (10)
Also, she is careful to point out that youth ministry is not entirely to blame. The entire congregation plays a part.
Most youth ministry is not accomplished by youth ministers. Neither young people nor youth ministry can be extracted from the church as a whole, any more than the musculature of the Body of Christ can be separated from its circulatory system. We have known for some time that youth groups do important things for teenagers, providing moral formation, learned competencies, and social and organizational ties. But they seem less effective as catalysts for consequential faith, which is far more likely to take root in the rich relational soil of families, congregations, and mentor relationships where young people can see what faithful lives look like, and encounter the people who love them enacting a larger story of divine care and hope. (11)
In this congregational context, what is it that our young people see? Dean poses that churches have done “an exceedingly good job of teaching…that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and the church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people focused primarily on ‘folks like us.’” She asks a haunting series of questions:
What if the blasé religiosity of most American teenagers is not the result of poor communication but the result of excellent communication of a watered-down gospel so devoid of God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ, so immune to the sending love of the Holy Spirit that it might not be Christianity at all? What if the church models a way of life that asks, not passionate surrender but ho-hum assent? What if we are preaching moral affirmation, a feel-better faith, and a hands-off God instead of the decisively involved, impossibly loving, radically sending God of Abraham and Mary, who desired us enough to enter creation in Jesus Christ and whose Spirit is active in the church and in the world today? If this is the case—if theological malpractice explains teenagers’ half-hearted religious identities—then perhaps most young people practice Moralistic Therapeutic Deism not because they reject Christianity, but because this is the only “Christianity” they know. (12)
Dean suggests that the tasks of the church is to help teens “know” a Christianity that is much deeper, back to her intent to “better prepare young people steeped in Moralistic Therapeutic Deism for the trust-walk of Christian faith.” She addresses this in three sections (as described on pages 22-23).
- Part 1, “Worshipping at the Church of Benign Whatever-ism,” explores the NSYR’s contention that American Christianity is being “colonized” by a substitute religious outlook that most American teenagers implicitly practice and that functions as the unacknowledged creed of American culture.
- Part 2, “Claiming a Peculiar God-Story,” places the sociologist Ann Swidler’s cultural toolkit theory in conversation with some of the most highly devoted teenagers in the study, who seem to share a consistent set of cultural tools that make faith meaningful. Specifically, highly devoted teenagers have an articulated God-story (their stated or unstated “creed”), a deep sense of belonging in their faith communities, a clear sense that their lives have a God-given purpose, and an attitude of hope that the world is moving in a good direction because of God. These tools seem to help young people resist Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and supply scaffolding for “consequential” faith — a faith that matters enough to issue in a distinctive identity and way of life.
- Part 3, “Cultivating Consequential Faith,” explores broad sets of practices that help congregations cultivate mature faith in young people— faith that is so infused with desire for God and love for others that it becomes generative. Here I introduce three categories of practices from missionary history that have become rusty from disuse in Christian formation, but that can help us refocus self-indulgent Christianity in the direction of missional faith: practices of translation, testimony, and detachment. …Translation provides us with a working model of catechesis, the “handing on” of lived faith from one generation to the next. Translation begins with those already integrated into “a community of practice” (in this case, adults in a congregation) who share their lives with youth to help them become familiar with the church’s language and practices, so young people can participate as fully integrated members of the faith community. Testimony helps young people articulate and confess their identity as Christians in the presence of those who are “other.” Testimony confesses; it does not convert. It points out God’s grace in the world without seeking to co-opt it. Detachment is an old word from ascetical Christianity that describes the experience of being de-centered by practices like outreach, hospitality, and prayer. De-centering practices open us to the Other, human or Divine, and cultivate empathy and reflexivity as we learn to focus on Christ instead of on ourselves.
From the Publisher
Based on the National Study of Youth and Religion—the same invaluable data as its predecessor, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers—Kenda Creasy Dean’s compelling new book, Almost Christian, investigates why American teenagers are at once so positive about Christianity and at the same time so apathetic about genuine religious practice.
In Soul Searching, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton found that American teenagers have embraced a “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” – a hodgepodge of banal, self-serving, feel-good beliefs that bears little resemblance to traditional Christianity. But far from faulting teens, Dean places the blame for this theological watering down squarely on the churches themselves. Instead of proclaiming a God who calls believers to lives of love, service and sacrifice, churches offer instead a bargain religion, easy to use, easy to forget, offering little and demanding less. But what is to be done? In order to produce ardent young Christians, Dean argues, churches must rediscover their sense of mission and model an understanding of being Christian as not something you do for yourself, but something that calls you to share God’s love, in word and deed, with others. Dean found that the most committed young Christians shared four important traits: they could tell a personal and powerful story about God; they belonged to a significant faith community; they exhibited a sense of vocation; and they possessed a profound sense of hope. Based on these findings, Dean proposes an approach to Christian education that places the idea of mission at its core and offers a wealth of concrete suggestions for inspiring teens to live more authentically engaged Christian lives.
Persuasively and accessibly written, Almost Christian is a wake up call no one concerned about the future of Christianity in America can afford to ignore.
About the Author
Kenda Creasy Dean is an ordained United Methodist minister and Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she works closely with the Institute for Youth Ministry. A graduate of Miami University (Ohio), Kenda and her husband Kevin taught at Ball State University before attending Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Before receiving her PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary, she was a pastor and campus minister in Maryland. She has two almost-launched children, and lives with her family in Princeton, New Jersey.
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