MUST READ - American Youth's Religion

Al Mohler's blog (there is a permanent link on the menu to the right) is an absolute must read. Yesterday he wrote about a significant study on the religious views of young people.

The study itself states:

"...A significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually [only] tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but is rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism...The language, and therefore experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, . . . and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward."

Christians have conformed to the world by moving away from a God-centered universe to a self-centered one.

Even more alarming is this emphasis on "an earned heavenly reward." That is a false gospel. It is heresy.

Mohler delivers a stunning conclusion. It is not a surprising conclusion, but it is clear, stark, and backed up now by hard information, and Mohler states it articulately.

"...We face a succession of generations who have transformed Christianity into something that bears no resemblance to the faith revealed in the Bible. The faith 'once delivered to the saints' is no longer even known, not only by American teenagers, but by most of their parents. Millions of Americans believe they are Christians, simply because they have some historic tie to a Christian denomination or identity.

We now face the challenge of evangelizing a nation that largely considers itself Christian, overwhelmingly believes in some deity, considers itself fervently religious, but has virtually no connection to historic Christianity. Christian Smith and his colleagues have performed an enormous service for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in identifying Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the dominant religion of this American age. Our responsibility is to prepare the church to respond to this new religion, understanding that it represents the greatest competitor to biblical Christianity. More urgently, this study should warn us all that our failure to teach this generation of teenagers the realities and convictions of biblical Christianity will mean that their children will know even less and will be even more readily seduced by this new form of paganism. This study offers irrefutable evidence of the challenge we now face."