In my upcoming book Memento Mori, Helping The Church Regain The Lost Art Of Dying Well, I address an increasingly prevailing worldview in America today – Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). In the early 2000s, researchers Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist interviewed thousands of American teenagers and identified the predominant worldview among teenagers as what they called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Rod Dreher concludes that teenagers simply adopted their parents’ religious attitudes and that MTD is in fact the de facto religion of most American adults.

MTD is the prevailing cultural worldview confronting the American church in the twenty-first century. What is MTD? In a nutshell it is Deism at its core – (1) God exists but is not particularly involved in people’s lives, (2) He wants people to be nice to each other, (3) The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself, and (4) Good people go to Heaven. Watch this video which traces the 20th century emergence of this worldview.