Davison's Doodle

“The almost Christian formation of teens.”

This article by Kenda Creasy Dean offers an interesting review of the symbiotic relationship of culture and Christianity.  Some of her words convict as well as resonate with me.  Though she is more Christocentric than I, nevertheless, her critique of what is happening in many congregations is on point, dare I say prophetic, as well as the work of the National Study of Youth and Religion and the primary investigators Smith and Denton.  They identify what they call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as the symbiote devouring host Christianity that is more about consumption than spirituality.  This is a lengthy read for an online article, but worth the time.

Faith, nice and easy
The almost Christian formation of teens
by Kenda Creasy Dean

In short, the study provides a window on how American young people have learned a well-intentioned but ultimately banal version of Christianity that’s been offered to them in American churches. Most youth seem to accept this bland view of faith as all there is—as something nice to have, like a bank account, something you have in case you need to draw from it in the future. What Christian adults have not told them is that this account of Christianity is bankrupt. We have not invested in their accounts: we “teach” young people baseball, but we “expose” them to faith. We provide coaching and opportunities for youth to develop and improve their pitches and their SAT scores, but we blithely assume that religious identity will happen by osmosis and will emerge “when youth are ready” (a confidence we generally lack when it comes to, say, algebra). The result? Teenagers who don’t have the soul strength necessary to recognize, wrestle with and resist the symbiotes in our midst—probably because we lack this strength ourselves.