15 years ago a book called Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. It is a summary of findings from a large survey of teens in America and what they believe. Their key finding is that young people believe in what they label “moralistic therapeutic deism”. This term sums up these beliefs:
A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.
They also found that most young people did not believe in repentance, Christian salvation through the grace of Jesus, etc. As is the case with all too many Americans (including Catholics in the USA), we care more about what God can give us than we do for God himself.
Yet Christianity is about the giver, not the gifts.
We have entered an era where most self-described Christians (including Catholics) hold heretical beliefs that are far from the truth about who God is, his plan of salvation, and how we are to follow him. We will explore these issues below.
GOOD OR BAD NEWS?
The Gospel is the Good News of Jesus. This Good News is at the very center of what it means to be a Christian. In fact, without the Gospel, our faith is meaningless, because our message loses its very power.
Yet we have turned this message of Good News around and made it about being a “good” person. But, the Gospel is not about being a good person. It is about being a new person.
God wants to make us new. He wants us to be reborn. He wants to change us. He wants transformation on the inside that is lived out on the outside.
NOT ABOUT BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION
We undersell Jesus' Gospel when we just try to get people to merely act according to Catholic rules and doctrines. Look at your average Catholic parish and our culture betrays us. What are most parishes aiming for? Is it powerful encounters with God’s merciful love, forgiveness, and grace, so that hearts are made new? Or is it in behavior modification? I will argue it is mainly in behavior modification. Here are a few examples:
We should be more passionate about people encountering the grace of God than we are about getting others to stop sinning. The interior desire to stop sinning comes when a heart that loves God seeks to do his will. But even then, sin won’t be wiped out completely until the next life in heaven. Remember that God saves us even while we are still sinners, not after we stop sinning. This is the Gospel and in many places we aren’t acting like it is Good News.
LIFE TRANSFORMATION
Which one sounds like truly Good News?
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” -Gal 2: 20
“When you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” -Eph 4: 21-24
“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” -Col 2: 6-7
Once made new, then you will live, choose, and act differently.
ACTIONS FOLLOW BEING
Jesus entered into relationships with others, regardless of where they were, spiritually (or morally, socially, etc). He befriended tax collectors, prostitutes, and others. Once they had this encounter with Jesus, he would then invite them to follow Him, to believe. After they chose to believe, he would ask them to behave a certain manner, so they could live an abundant and fruitful life.
This is like any relationship. When I dated my wife, we built a sense of friendship first. We decided that we wanted to be more, so we made a conscious decision to solidify that relationship, once we believed in one another. Only after we fell in love, did we want to start to be better people for one another.
A similar dynamic happened during my initial conversion in college. I had a group of friends, who loved me enough to be my friend, despite all my sins and problems. They eventually invited me to a retreat where I had a conversion and decided to follow Jesus. After that I started to change my life, because I fell in love with Jesus.
When we get this process of life transformation not behavior modifications reversed, it leads to problems like we are dealing with today. Get it right and we have a chance to "make disciples of all nations".