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You may have read the recent CNN article, “More teens becoming ‘fake’ Christians,” which extensively cited the research of Kenda Creasy Dean and her book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. In the original article below, Dean expands on these ideas, clarifies others, and explains just how American teens are practicing their Christian faith.

By Kenda Creasy Dean

Have you heard this one? Mom is angling to get 16-year-old Tony to come to church on Sunday, and Tony will have none of it. “Don’t you get it?” he yells, pushing his chair away from the table. “I hate church! I am not like you! The church is full of hypocrites!” Dramatic exit, stage right.

This story sounds true – but it isn’t. Today’s parents and teenagers rarely fight about religion, according to the 2005 National Study of Youth and Religion – the largest study of teenage faith to date. Interviews with more than 3300 teenagers and their parents showed that American teenagers mirror their parents’ religious faith to an astonishing degree. Teenagers and parents seem to be on good terms about religion because 1) they believe pretty much the same things; and 2) religion doesn’t matter enough to them to fight about it.

3 out of 4 American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 call themselves Christians, yet most adhere to a default religious setting that does not truly reflect any of the world’s great religions. Instead, say NSYR researchers, American teenagers’ de facto religious creed is “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a view that religion is a “very nice thing” that makes us feel good but leaves God in the background.

How did that happen? Short answer: This is what parents and churches are teaching them.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism – the view that religion is supposed to make us feel good about ourselves and turn us into nicer people – appears in American teenagers of all religious persuasions. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing; at the very least, perhaps it is a corrective to abuses conducted in the name of religion.

Yet MTD is also a self-serving approach to religious faith. Moralistic therapeutic deist youth view God as a divine butler, invisible unless called upon, whose primary purpose is to make them feel good and to sanction things that they want to do anyway. Researchers were mum on MTD’s effects on other religious traditions (the number of non-Christian religious teenagers in the sample was small enough that researchers were cautious about their claims), but they were unsparing when it came to American churches. In Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, lead researcher Christian Smith claims that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is now the “dominant religion in the United States, having supplanted Christianity in American churches.”

I helped interview teenagers for the NSYR, an exercise that convinced me more than ever that parents, congregations, and pastors are operating on some pretty shaky assumptions about Christian faith and teenagers. Other religious leaders may comment on the implications of this study for their own faith traditions, but let me