Dr. Albert Mohler has a new podcast beginning today: “Thinking in Public.” Today’s show has guest Christian Smith, whose research leads him to believe many American young people who have grown up in our churches are less Christian than moralists. God to them is the distant author of a great self-help guide.
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That’s the Deist tradition, right? God is impersonal and distant. He makes no personal demands but simply embodies a kind of formal order, like the laws of physics. It’s a way of reconciling materialism with a need to explain why it’s possible for us to know anything or to have valid opinions about anything, which would be a difficult trick if the world were merely meaningless mechanical chaos.
Yes. Smith called the young people he came to understand through his research “moralistic therapeutic deists.” They’ve been taught about God in the churches they grew up in, so they probably belief by default, but they don’t believe in the personal, life-transforming God of the Bible, because of the poor teaching they received. They hold to a distant God would hopes to see them do well on their own strengths, a God who probably can’t help them when they pick up an addiction or get into difficult relationships.
Maybe I’m quibbling about words, but I wouldn’t attribute it to poor teaching. If children don’t believe in a personal, life-transforming God, it has to be due to poor modeling, doesn’t it? If their parents and the adults in their church have relationships, where God is active in their lives, the kids ought to see that, and even if the church has no sunday school at all, they ought to get along fairly well, shouldn’t they?
That’s a great point, but I can think of examples in which genuine but shallow believers have hindered their children’s spiritual lives by teaching them bad theology. On the other hand, there have been many good parents who have taught their children well and still seen them reject the faith at some point in their lives. In short, salvation is of the Lord.