I wouldn't call myself a Dad of Faith. But I do hold religious and moral/ethical community ans an important element in my daily life.

Being part of a Christian church and working in that realm has been thought provoking. I'm going to ramble a bit about how I got immersed in this topic of MTD so if you want to skip down a bit, go ahead.

I've been a religious scholar for a long time. My college degree is in Philosophy and World Religions and Philosophies (double major). I worked as a camp director for a church in Toledo. I only didn't go to seminary because of a fundamental disagreement between the pastor of my family church while I was in college (I was indisputably right but he sent a negative recommendation to the seminary) and because a week before graduation from college, I was informed of my severe learning disabilities. So it's taken a turn toward hobby for more than a decade. Last year I volunteered to be on our church's Christian Education committee. Our full time minister of CE was being let go at the time, putting that part of our congregation in a bind.

Well, that's been an experience. One outcome is that I've taken on the task of amplifying the adult program. To that goal, I went to a conference of CE people from the Great Lakes region a couple months ago. There, the keynote speaker focused on Kenda Creasy Dean's book, Almost Christian, and the study that it is based on, The National Study of Youth and Religion.

What this study found among teenagers who self identified as Christian, Mormon, and Jewish was disturbing. The largest portion of these kids share a common faith dressed up as the faith they identify as their own, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The merits of that can inspire their own discussion. What is of consequence is tha tMTD is not Christian, Jewish, Mormon or anything. It's something new and it is being called all of those other things. What's worse is that parents and faith communities are 1) spreading and growing it and 2) unable to distinguish it from their stated faith's beliefs and doctrine. The study says that because of this MTD running rampant, teenagers have a feeling of "benign whateverism" regarding their faith and the faith community. It does show Mormons to have a better resistance to this, but even they have problems in this regard.

I'll let you look all this up. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the analysis.

So I'm in a spirit to combat MTD and maybe help some people get something better out of their religious traditions. Starting with my own congregation and then wherever it takes me. Should be fun. Interestingly, what the pastor who helped keep me out of seminary was arguing for was MTD unfiltered. The irony is that MTD may end up sending me to seminary.

Bon Voyage on this journey, Ben. Your convictions encourage me. There is certainly good left to be done.