Courtesy of Ben Gosden
Almost Christian
The book cover of "Almost Christian."
It’s rare that a book comes along that truly touches on the trigger of contemporary issues. Kenda Creasy Dean has done it with her book Almost Christian. The book is a commentary based on the National Study of Youth and Religion that is running from 2001 through 2013. This study is intended to follow a group of young people as they age and develop in the hopes that somehow the religious preferences of young people can be tracked and measured over a 12 year period. You can read more about the study itselfhere.
“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that…That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (quoted in 'Almost Christian,')
Kenda Creasy Dean offers a brilliant commentary in her book that I’m currently reading. One of the major points discovered early on in this study is that young people are largely influenced by those closest to them when it comes to faith. Further, when asked young people think Christianity is good, although it’s not that important.
So Dean pushes the study to this conclusion: “The religiosity of American teenagers must be read primarily as a reflection of their parents’ religious devotion (or lack thereof) and, by extension, that of their congregations”(p. 3-4)
Over the coming days and weeks I plan to blog about this book as I read it. The genius of Dean’s work is in her diagnosing American Christianity suffering from what she calls MTD Syndrome (Moralistic Therapeutic Deism). As we face a declining church it’s my belief that Dean’s work can help us identify many ways we’ve neglected or not lived up to our call to be the Church. You see, as much as we’d like to blame society and the external lack of interest in Christian faith for our decline (and believe me, there’s a lot of that), that’s not our entire problem. We have, in many ways, failed to live up to the calling of Church. Instead, we’ve grown complacent with a version of Christianity that remains intellectual (read: Just believe the right stuff) and non-threatening (read: We’d rather be political than Christian).
I hope you join me for this self-examining journey that promises to be both enlightening as well as somber. And maybe, by the power of the Holy Spirit, conversation can be stirred around issues I write about and we can take ideas back to our local churches. God’s not finished with the Church just yet…
Question: In what ways have you seen the Gospel watered down to fit particular cultural standards?