Dealing With Some Adverse Philosophies

 I am thinking about maybe developing this into a series, so we'll see where this goes first.  Today, I got my replacement copy of Christian Smith's and Melinda Denton's book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).  I have touched some in the past on Smith's and Denton's analyses, but felt it was important to revisit them due to my own experiences teaching the past couple of years at a highly secularized Jesuit high school in Baltimore.  The key to this whole book is Chapter 4, which begins on page 118, and it deals with something called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (hereafter referred to as MTD).  After compiling their findings based on a number of interviews, Smith and Denton crystalized MTD as essentially consisting of about 5 basic points in a creedal system that they list on pages 162-163.  Here are those five points:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, which proponents believe summarizes the Gospels but also is a thread running through most world religions as well.

3. The central goal in life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.

4. God does not particularly need to be involved in one's life except when conveniently needed to resolve a problem.

5.  Good people go to heaven when they die.

A few things become evident about this whole thing, and one of them is that none of it is original.  You see things here drawn from universalism, traditional Deism, some New Thought (al a Oprah and Joel Osteen) ideas, and a hefty dose of postmodern automatism.  The basic way to summarize this mentality further is that God just is, and that we just need to be good people to ourselves and each other.  While it all sounds good, and indeed there is a bit of truth in some of it (such as objective principles of natural law) it is really not exactly Christian, but rather forms the foundation of a new faith tradition - a tradition essentially of anti-tradition, if you will.  It also forms the basis for some radical things we have been seeing in recent years regarding DEI policies in the workplace, the whole "woke" nonsense, and the quasi-Gnostic subjectivism of reality is what also enables people to identify as "transgender" and other stuff.  The problem with a system like this goes back to something fundamental I have beaten to death in many earlier discussions.  I will now pivot to that.

We established many times that you cannot have true faith without justice, and visa versa.  In the case of a faithless justice, the concept of justice becomes an arbitrary mantra that can be invoked to justify tyranny.  As I have said before, many of the worst tyrants in recent history have all shouted the word "justice" over and over, but then they perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in the history of humanity based on their version of "justice."  Oddly too, a lot of them to some degree utilized many of the things that comprise MTD,  Some - like Hitler - espoused a form of deism that at its root was pantheistic (the whole volkisch obsession with Blut und Boden, for example, was pantheistic at its core).  For this, Hitler's personal religious views were described by noted historian Richard Weikart as being essentially a utilitarian pantheist who used religious language when it suited him without believing in it - this has a moralistic quality that makes his audience feel good, because in Hitler's world the whole concept of "God" gets redefined as essentially the blood in one's veins and the soil one stands upon.  In many aspects, many of the MTD crowd are probably much closer to Hitler in their views than Jesus ever was, and when you add some other aspects of this - the Nietzschean "struggle of will" for instance - it has created the volatile political environment we see now in the early 21st century.  This is a reason why I have argued that National Socialism in Germany was more of a left-wing than a right-wing movement, and when you look at BLM, Antifa, and some other more terroristic movements we see today, there are some very stark similarities with the Freikorps in 1920s Germany. Now, they both even share a vitriolic antisemitism as well.  That should give us cause for alarm.  

While that would be the subject of a whole other discussion, let's get back to MTD for now.  I tend to agree with Dr. Albert Mohler's assessment of this when he wrote on it that "The casual 'whatever' that marks so much of the American theological and moral landscapes - adolescent and otherwise - is a substitute for serious and responsible thinking.  More importantly, it is a verbal cover for an embrace of relativism" (Albert Mohler, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: The New American Religion," at www.albertmohler.com/2005/04/11/moralistic-therapeutic-deism-the new-american-religion-2/  April 2005 - Accessed 8/7/2026).  What Dr. Mohler is saying essentially - and he is correct - is that none of this is new, but is rather the same prepackaged postmodern nonsense we have been seeing in culture for a while.  However, in the 21 years since both Smith's book and Mohler's article were authored, this has gone nuclear - the ideology that has MTD as its foundation is now called "wokeism," and it is the inevitable consequence of a growing ambivalence toward traditional values and moral absolutes.  It reduces God to basically a stage hand in human affairs, and in many ways it encapsulates much of what Spinoza and Machiavelli wanted to do with the status of religious faith.  So, it is an Enlightenment fruit. It also has ties to another term I wanted to introduce, that being the idea of proportionalism. 

Back when I was doing my Master's program at Steubenville, one of the books for a course I took was Christopher Kaczor's analysis of proportionalism, and unfortunately I lost that original book.  I will reorder Kaczor's book in the future because I feel it is a valuable resource to have, but for now I am going to rely on some other source material I found concerning the topic.  Proportionalism is a concept within moral theology which asserts that certain moral positions can be revised in lieu of their rightness or wrongness.  Later, I am also going to talk about graded absolutism as proposed by Evangelical scholar Norman Geisler, but the two are not the same despite similar questions each poses.  Proportionalism, if taken to its ideological conclusion, actually is the goal of what such writers as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, as well as the Frankfurt School, proposed as "cultural Marxism."  There is also a healthy dose of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinian theory as an undertow to this as well.  The more recent term coined for this is "critical theory," and it applies a similar mentality to proportionalism in that it seeks to revise what is "good" vs. what is "bad."  Combine that with some aspects of MTD, and you get a religion then which rewrites morality in such a way that now "gay marriage" and transgenderism are considered to be a "blessing" rather than as a propensity for sinful behavior, and it gets worse.  If then added to this volatile toxic recipe is a hefty dose of Nietzschean "supreme will" and "the struggle," you get anarchism that ushers in tyranny.  It is what we come back to about the concept of justice as well - if we divorce justice from faith and basic natural law (which was authored by God anyway, as natural law has a supernatural origin), we get something confusing, chaotic, and ugly.  In other words, the Democratic Socialists of America and their Antifa foot soldiers.  This is why there must be a set of absolutes in place, as there do need to be boundaries to all that.  So, in the next part of this, I will talk about what an actual perspective of absolutism entails, and it should clarify a few things about why many of us do oppose radical leftism now.