Eve Tushnet explains why Mormon parents do a better job than most of keeping their children from the “mutant creed best understood as ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.’”
Parents who show, by their words or their actions, that the tenets and practices of their faith are vague, unimportant, or only tenuously related to daily life, produce teenagers whose faith is vague, marginal, and unlikely to shape their actions and plans in any significant way. Parents who ask little of their children in terms of faith formation, but a great deal in terms of, say, getting into a good college, make a statement about priorities which their children trust and follow. Churches, youth ministries, and similar groups that trade “send[ing] young people out” for “rop[ing] young people in” wind up with teens who think church is fine, a good place to be—“nice.” And who then leave church to act just like all of their friends.
Mormons, by contrast, challenge their teenagers and require a lot of time, study, and leadership from them. Mormon parents rise at dawn to go over their church’s history and doctrine with their children. More than half of the Mormon youth in the study had given a presentation in church in the past six months. They frequently shared public testimony and felt that they were given some degree of decision-making power within their community. They shape their plans for the immediate future around strong cultural pressures toward mission trips and marriage. Whatever one thinks of the actual beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it seems obvious that both adult Mormons and the teens who follow them really, really believe.
December 15th, 2010 | 10:41 am
“But the deeper question is, do you want your children to be Christians at all? Would you be proud to raise a Mother Teresa, even as your heart trembles for her and you wish she’d come home? Do you want your child to be a saint, even if it might mean she’s less normal or less happy or less materially successful or less like you?”
Our Catholic universities suffer from the same peer pressure. They prefer to keep pace with the Joneses…the Ivy League and large research universities.
December 15th, 2010 | 1:25 pm
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
6 “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
December 15th, 2010 | 2:11 pm
In August, Stanley Hauerwas spoke at my church and among the many challenging and provocative things he said was this: “The great enemy of Christianity in America is not atheism, it’s sentimentality. And the deepest form of sentimentality is the presumption that you want to be able to have children and raise them without them suffering for your convictions. You simply cannot do that. Our children rightly have to suffer for our convictions.” And, “If you want to know why Christianity is having a hard time,” it’s because, “we don’t produce martyrs.”
December 16th, 2010 | 9:17 pm
I agree that Mormons do a very good job of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” and so do most Jewish families I know.
And yet there are gay Mormons and gay Jews. How do you reconcile that?
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