The idea of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a compelling one. The authors are right to put it on a level with Civil Religion, and their chart on p. 169, while confusing, is a useful way to understand the levels of belief that are operating in the minds of teenagers. It’s very helpful to have a diagram like that, though I’m sure it’s difficult to construct, but I indeed feel like it’s accurate that there are causal factors like that working in our minds.

What a sentence: “Christianity is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith” (171). I’m glad they include their feelings about the matter, and I feel like it has interesting implications. The authors do seem to have their own feelings about what they’re reporting, and I think it informs their conclusions. One could say that it’s not particularly strong, and that they’re still essentially doing work in the social sciences, but upon reading that sentence, I felt a lurch in how I was reading the book. No longer was the book a lens through which I could see some objective realities. It suddenly became another subject for me to study. What are the authors hoping to gain from this work? How are their intentions affecting what they are seeing? What are the authors’ invisible religious beliefs? I guess, living in this postmodern world, I should never have presumed that the lens could escape consideration, and I certainly did detect plenty of their biases, but that sentence just threw my full attention onto the authors, rather than the subjects. Of course, their presentation is still quite objective, and will yield a lot of helpful information.