For previous generations, religious faith was sometimes a thing that fortified, and sometimes a thing to rebel against. Either way, in American life religion has always been a shaping force.
This generation, though, has come to see faith in a different way.
Christian Smith, the Notre Dame professor and sociologist, has contributed volumes of research into the burgeoning study of the Millennial experience. His recent book, “Souls in Transition,” is a coherent and illuminating study of what we actually believe.
According to Smith’s research into Millennials as teens, most people of this generation, regardless of their nominal faith, hold a strikingly similar religious conception: There is probably a god, he probably wants us to play nice, and he certainly wants us to be happy.
Smith calls this conception — vaguely Christian, painstakingly inoffensive — Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
Rod Dreher, the former Dallas Morning News columnist and current publications director at the Templeton Foundation, argues that emerging adults are “lost without a map;” in other words, that they drift from experience to experience without a lens through which they can interpret the world. All that is verifiable is your personal emotions; all you can know is what you feel.
This peculiar rootlessness may not be fully attributable to the changing religious views of this generation, but it’s exceedingly possible that the phenomena are related.
Smith said this ubiquitous view of faith has not weathered the first years of adulthood or the trials of the current economic and political world with absolute serenity.
According to Smith, the faith experience necessarily becomes more complicated as Millennials reach adulthood. The Moralistic Therapeutic Deism that seemed to explain life when the hardest of hardships involved math tests and rebuffed prom invitations begins to pale in the light of struggles with finances, disappointed expectations, and sometimes marriage and parenthood.
Nevertheless, Smith said, emerging adults are battered, but not fully deterred from seeing faith as simply an amorphous path toward a generalized and personally fulfilling “goodness.” And this system of belief is not unique to young people anymore.
In fact, in religion (as with pop culture, social networking, Barack Obama), it seems like what young people think is cool is catching on with their elders.
If, as Smith hypothesizes, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is quickly becoming the default American religious experience, what’s the problem? Damon Linker, writing online for The New Republic, argued that such a creed is perfect for America, “thoroughly anodyne, inoffensive, tolerant.”
But, as Dreher and Ross Douthat, then of The Atlantic, rejoined, perhaps the rush to embrace some mushy approximation of public faith is hasty.
If Americans can no longer practice a public faith of restraint, virtue, and some measure of self-denial, something must replace it.
In the last few years, that something has been harmful enough. But while the economics of irrational optimism and therapeutic spending was bad, and the politics of I Want It Now was bad, the rage with which we may someday, disillusioned and adrift, cast aside our happy-faced faith for something immeasurably more damaging, could be worse.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
