When The Gospel Gets Truncated

"A half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.”

I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “moralistic, therapeutic deism,” but as I heard that phrase described and unpacked, it brought some clarity that I found helpful.

The phrase originated with in a book called Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. The authors, Dr. Christian Smith and Dr. Melinda Denton, published the book two decades ago. It reported the findings of The National Study of Youth and Religion, which was, at the time, the largest and most detailed such study that had ever been undertaken.

Smith and Denton found that religion was, at that time, a significant factor in the lives of many American teenagers. But the religion these teenagers had embraces, the study found, was a hybridized variant of biblical Christianity. What these teens had come to believe were not the tenets that define the orthodox Christian gospel. Instead, they had come to embrace a more vague, more abstract spirituality that was built around the following ideas:

• There is a God. While these teenagers had no problem believing in the idea of God, their understanding of God was inexplicit, and shaped more by their own ideas about how God would think or act than by what the Bible teaches. This is why Smith and Denton called them deists.

• God wants you to thrive and succeed in life. These teens had heard from their youth pastors and in popular culture that God wants us to have our best life now. God had made it His aim to see to it that all His children would know and experience joy and peace and love. They hadn’t heard much about suffering or hardship. God was a life coach and the Holy Spirit was their counselor when things got bad. Hence the idea that the aim of religion is essentially a therapeutic aim.

• And finally, teens had been taught that the key to their experience of this abundant life that Jesus has promised was for them to follow the do’s and don’ts of the faith. God, they were told, would reward those who keep the rules. And He will punish those who fail. Living an upright, moral life was what would ultimately lead to joy and peace. This is how moralism became central to the way these teens saw their faith.

There is a God (Deism). He wants you to be happy and to thrive (Therapeutic). Your part is to keep the rules and don’t sin (Moralism). This is the “gospel” that many young people were embracing in the early 2000’s. It’s the “gospel” they had been taught. Maybe not explicitly. But it was the air they were breathing in the evangelical subculture.

This “gospel” of moralistic therapeutic deism is what JI Packer would have called a half-gospel masquerading as a full gospel, which, as he says, is really no gospel at all. These half-truths were being advanced as the complete picture.

Does God want us to experience joy and peace and the abundant life? Yes! Does He want us to live our lives according to His commands? Of course. Will does obedience bring blessing, and does disobedience bring consequences? Undoubtedly.

Is that the gospel? Most certainly not.

But because so many young people heard it as the gospel and believed it to be the gospel and tried to live their lives accordingly, only to find that what this moralistic therapeutic deism promised was a not what they had signed up for, we began to see a massive wave of young adults walking away from Christianity – or what they had been told Christianity is. It’s like they had been promised the Ritz Carlton and instead checked into a Motel 6 with a Ritz Carlton sign hanging out front, and checked out the next day saying “I’m never staying at a Ritz Carlton again! It’s not what everyone told me it would be!”

If you had to boil down the essential difference between biblical Christianity and the moralistic therapeutic deism imposter religion, it would be this (and I’m paraphrasing Jim Packer again here): The authentic gospel is designed to make us God-centered in our thinking and God fearing in our hearts. The imitation gospels, like moralistic therapeutic deism, have a different focus. Their aim is man centered. Their focus is to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction, with little or no regard for God and His glory.

Packer says “The subject of the (biblical gospel) was God and his ways with men; the subject of the (imposters) is man and the help God gives him… and a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.”

I thought about all of this last Sunday when we affirmed together the Gospel Way Catechism answer to Question 5: Who is the Son of God?” Our answer asserted, in part, that “He is not a life coach or therapist who affirms all our desires, but the Great Physician whose blood heals our sin-sick hearts.”

At the church where I serve as lead pastor, we make it our goal to keep the biblical gospel at the center of all we are and all we affirm as a church. While that message will shape our morality and speak to the longings of our soul, it will do so by putting God and his purposes for our lives at the center of our thinking.

Which is right where He belongs.