Found this one at a blog called fors clavigera
The kids are not all right. That is the evidence-based, data-driven picture that is emerging from sociologist Christian Smith’s National Study of Youth and Religion. His account of the paucity of moral reasoning among twentysomethings can’t be chalked up as mere grumpy-old-man harumphing about “those damn kids” or a reactionary conservative harangue about godless “secular” America. Smith’s longitudinal study provides a deeply worrisome snapshot of the state of spiritual maturity and moral reflection among millenials. Indded, I found the first chapter of his latest book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, to be positively harrowing in its account of how these young people are “morally adrift.” But as Smith is at pains to emphasize: the point isn’t to demonize twentysomethings; the point is for the rest of us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we produced this generation.
Earlier volumes (Soul Searching and Souls in Transition) did the same with respect to religious understanding and spiritual maturity. While the study considers young people from various religions and those without any, the implications for Christian ministry were especially challenging (explored with verve and wisdom by Kenda Creasy Dean in Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teens is Telling the Church). The “faith” that young Christians were learning (often from age-segmented youth ministries) was not trinitarian Christian faith but rather “moralistic therapuetic deism”: a strange deity who embraces antimonies and paradox, who is both a legalist and a great big bubble gum machine in the sky–the perfect god for American civil religion, who judges premarital sex but is enough of a big teddy bear to also let it slide, because really, he just wants you to be happy. The god of moralistic therapeutic deism is a lot like Oprah, it turns out.
And if that’s the god that our young people worship, we need to ask ourselves: What have we done? As Dean puts it, this is an indictment of the church, not teenagers.
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