Almost Christian: Is God just Mr. Fix-It?
Editor's note: This is the third in a series this week by Dr. Baker about the book "Almost Christian" by Kenda Creasy Dean. Go to Our Values to read the earlier posts in this series.
Minnesota artist Albert Belleveau shows his sculpture called The Tool Box.
Photo by David Crumm
Here is how she puts it: “God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.” God “grants wishes” and hands out “hall passes” in life. In general, Dean says, “American young people are devotees of nonjudgmental openness, self-determination, and the authority of personal experience. Religion stays in the background of their lives, where God watches over them without making demands of them.”
Does this fit with what you see around you?
Do teens in your faith tradition see God as a supernatural Mr. Fix-It?
Dean’s book is both a sociological investigation and a sermon. She relies on gold-plated sources of research that contain reliable data on what teens think, believe and do. But she doesn’t shy away from telling us who is responsible for the soft-serve version of Christianity: Us.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Dean’s sermon is Pogo’s theory applied to American Christianity. American adults are to blame for the sugary-sweet version of Christianity that teens embrace. America’s churches, she says, “seem to have offered teenagers a kind of ‘diner theology’: a bargain religion, cheap by satisfying, whose gods require little in the way of fidelity or sacrifice.”
Do you buy her sermon?
Do you agree that the blame should be placed on Christian adults and the churches?
If you are in another faith tradition, does Dean’s sermon ring true for you?
Dr. Wayne E. Baker is a sociologist on the senior faculty of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Dr. Baker blogs daily at Our Values and can be reached at ourvaluesproject@gmail.com.