A nation of deists

The dominant American religion is a far cry from Christianity | Gene Edward Veith

Sometimes recognizing a problem requires finding the right words to name it. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton have coined a phrase that describes perfectly the dominant American religion: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Those authors are researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and have written up their findings in a new book: Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press).

After interviewing over 3,000 teenagers, the social scientists summed up their beliefs:

(1) "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."

(2) "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."

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