Marginal Christianity

Faith Formation in a Secular Age Vol.1                                                                                                                                  Andrew Root [1] Preface We live in a secular world. But the nature of that secularity is widely misunderstood. When Charles Taylor, author of the magnificent A Secular Age , says “secular,...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/05/a-shocking-conclusion-about-american-christianity/ May 19, 2014 By  Roger E. Olson   27 Comments A Shocking Conclusion about  American  Christianity I’m not an expert in or scholar of “youth ministry,” but many of my students are either doing youth ministry or plan to. For some time now I’ve been hearing a lot about something called “Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism” (MTD for short). From 2003 to 2005 sociologist of religion Christian Smith and his colleague Melinda Denton carried  out a massive study of youth religion in the United States. It was called the “National Study of Youth and Religion” (NSYR). They summed up the overall results with this shocking conclusion: We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant  part  of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian r...