We’re reflecting on an excellent essay by Christian Smith, “On ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ as U.S.Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith,” which I found at the website for the Princeton Theological Seminary.
Christian Smith wrote Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers
, with Melinda Lundquist Denton.
So what on earth is wrong with Christianity being moralistic? Aren’t we for morality? Could we possibly be against morality?
Well, it’s not so much wrong as the wrong direction. You see, for very good reasons our youth ministers and youth volunteers spend a lot of time teaching our teenagers about morality. After all, they have to deal with some very serious temptations and they need to know right from wrong, and they need encouragement to resist the wrong. Of course.
But it appears that our moral instruction has resulted in our teens seeing Christianity as the same thing as morality. In other words, they tend to conclude that all God really wants from us is good, moral living. He wants us to be good people — and if we’re good people, God will take us to heaven when we die.
The teens then notice that their Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and atheistic friends are often just as moral as they are — maybe even more so. And so the teens figure that God will save them, too. After all, it would be so unfair to save a Christian for being good when even better people are left behind.
It actually makes quite a lot of sense — if you think Christianity is all about morality — and it’s no surprise that our teens often reach exactly that conclusion.
In many churches, preaching is mainly about moral issues — divorce, abortion, homosexuality, fornication, etc. It’s about how to avoid sin. And, of course, such instruction is important, even vital.
But if we’re not careful, we can let our zeal for morality become legalistic, that is, we can make it appear that we earn heaven by our good moral choices. And that leads not only to univeralism but to legalism, which leads to a certain arrogance that we’re truly good enough to earn heaven — or it leads to a very destructive fear that we’ll never be good enough and church is therefore pointless.
So if moralism is wrong, what is right? Well, faith. Grace. The Holy Spirit. The cross. Jesus. We often afraid to teach grace to our teens for fear that they’ll turn it into license and so sin in reliance on grace (a very, very dangerous path indeed). But if we deny our teens the comforts of grace, we necessarily teach them legalism, which is even worse than license. (The New Testament condemns both license and legalism, but spends far more effort in resisting legalism, perhaps because legalism seems so very Christian to many of us.)
You see, it’s only when we realize that no one earns salvation and that it cannot be earned that the pieces start to fit together. When we realize that God rewards our faith, not our obeidence, that we realize that being “good” does not and cannot earn heaven. It’s not the best who go to heaven, it’s those with faith in Jesus.
Now, we could go into this in great depth, and have done so here many times before. For now, just reflect on this. God’s goal in saving us is for us to become like Jesus. Jesus was, of course, highly moral. But there are many moral people who aren’t remotely like Jesus. Jesus was much, much more than moral.
Jesus’ emptied himself for others. He didn’t just resist sin — he actively worked to be transforming presence among others. He didn’t just empty himself. He emptied himself for others. He didn’t just obey God; he obeyed God as a servant of all he came into contact with. He taught and he preached. He touched and he healed. He brought change. He showed the world the true nature of God by being the true nature of God.
This requires morality, but it requires something far bigger and better. And so when we aim for mere morality, we aim too low. Even the pagans do that. They may disagree about what is and isn’t moral, but they try to obey their own sense of right and wrong. And that’s just not good enough.
Rather, having received grace, we must learn to give grace to others. We must be conduits of God’s love to the world. We must be on mission for Christ.
Now, Christian teens are often excited to raise money to defeat world hunger or human sex trafficking — but so pagan teens often do the very same things. Rather, when we Christians clean up a creek, we do it not as good people but as broken people redeemed by Jesus to transform this world for Christ. We do it in the name of Jesus, for his sake. Sometimes, that will conform to the world’s sense of right and wrong, and sometimes it’ll take us in the very opposite direction. But we can’t just do good for goodness’ sake. We have to do good in the name of Jesus — and that’ll invite persecution.
And that’s the difference. You see, real Christianity invites persecution — not always, but often enough to make the price quite high for many. And if we’re practicing a religion that is always applauded by our pagan, atheistic neighbors, well, we’re not practicing Christianity.
