12 The Scriptures Testify about Me
Although the church has always had those who have simply disappeared from us, evangelicals in our day recognize that a frighteningly large number of young people are leaving. This should cause us to ask some important questions. The most important and fundamental question is why? In two recent books, Christian Smith and his team have described the spirituality of young people in America.2 In their first study, they engage in a massive research project on what these young people actually believe. They define this belief system in terms of three words that should now be classic in our imagination: “moralistic therapeutic deism.” These young people believe that God wants his creatures to behave, that God wants his creatures to feel good about themselves, and that God exists but is not involved in individual lives. Then, in the second work, Smith and his colleagues look at a large sample and focus on evangelicals who are now young adults—“emerging adults.” Kenda Creasy Dean, doing further research out of this same project, suggests in Almost Christian that many of these young people are not really Christian at all—at least not by any normal biblical, theological definition.3 They are “Christian-ish.”4 Dean provides a severe indictment that almost certainly applies to more than just the younger generation in the United States. No wonder they leave—what is to keep them? We wonder how this happened. How did we as evangelicals do this to ourselves? Looking closely at what these young people believe, one discovers that they have evidently never been taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. The absence of biblical, gospel preaching explains how we have created in our churches a generation of moralizing, therapeutic, practical deists. We also minister within a context of very real challenges from 2 Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Smith, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 4 Ibid. “Becoming Christian-ish” is the title of chapter 1.