It is my goal to so bore any reader up front that my final conclusion gets missed. Since there aren’t that many people floating by, I’m taking a chance. Yet, I need to point out some things stirring in my heart.

MTD is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It’s reflected on in a column on the Christianity Today website. It’s the “disease” affecting our moral climate today. The basic beliefs are as follows:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Some feel this is a good new civil religion for America. It’s Oprah-like, and we all like Oprah. Let’s just have a nice, sane view of God and live comfortably. It’s that, or we risk being run over by those radical right-wing nuts! So, if we have to tolerate SOME talk of God, let’s tolerate these “tenets.”

One blogger puts it this way: Those with MTD don’t sing, “We Shall Overcome,” but “We Shall Accommodate.”

Some aren’t so sure we need to catch the MTD virus: “Unlike traditional Christianity, MTD naively underestimates evil and promotes selfish pursuit of financial gain.” Which is to say, we got ourselves in this current financial and economic mess because we’re so mushy!

When we are mushy in our beliefs, whether it’s economic or in faith, we allow people to impose regulation on us. For instance, we’ve been so soft on economic policy, we are ASKING for more regulation! What kind? Well, we really don’t care. Who wants to bother with those details? We’ll trust the current administration to get it right.

The column’s conclusions are good, but I want to divert at this point, hoping I’ve caused anyone actually reading this to have fallen asleep or just moved on to something much more exciting.

This week I watched an entire church body infected with a sister strain of MTD. I would not consider anyone in this body “mushy” in their love for God or their beliefs. As to true spiritual thinking… that would be another matter. But I would NOT say they had some mushy view of God’s love, etc.

Yet, there is a sister strain that is evident. We had a huge issue arise in the past few months concerning this body. It related to financial loss and what I would label “mismanagement.” Yet, the loss was not really explained, and then when the report came to the floor of this meeting, no one really reacted.

It was a matter that was so serious I had offered my help over the past few months because I felt I could shed some light on what had happened and then help develop new policy. I was ignored.

When I got up to address some key issues, there was just nothing going on. Later on I found out why. I got home and checked my facebook. There were multiple entries from people AT that meeting talking about being bored. Little jokes were flying around.

While this church body was facing a key decision, we were literally “twittering” it away. Our minds were mush.

And then, we took the same route that this country has decided to take. “We trust the other people. We don’t need to be bothered. I don’t understand this, hopefully the leadership does.”

It’s an alternative strain of MTD. I truly hope it doesn’t morph into full-blown MTD.

In the meantime, I’m trying to develop a vaccine for this thing before I get it!