Today, Father Steve takes a look at a recent CNN article about the religious phenomenon among young adults that author Kenda Creasy Dean calls "fake" Christianity. He offers his commentary on this therapeutic "gospel of niceness," describing how we got to this point and where we go from here.
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story recently appeared on CNN which reported on the phenomena of “morally therapeutic deism” masquerading as Christian faith among teens and young adults. This “fake” form of Christianity is having a deleterious effect on the nation’s churches according to Kenda Creasy Dean, who has authored a study of this trend in a new book entitled
Almost Christian. Dean laments that in terms of three out of four American teens who call themselves Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, deem it important to their lives, and cannot talk coherently about their beliefs. The survey included Catholics and Protestants from both conservative and liberal congregations. Responding to critics who noted that teens and young adults cannot talk coherently about any deep subject, Dean retorted that this is simply not true. “They can talk about money, sex, their family relationships with nuance.” I would add to this from my own experience that teens and young adults can demonstrate at times rather sophisticated takes on everything from politics to entertainment to sports, but ask them about the content of the Christian Faith and its meaning, and there are usually two responses: blustery opinions about “religion” that parrot the mainstream media’s emphasis on whatever is trending at the moment and wide eyed silence...