This study was done some time back, but a post by a friend on Facebook alerted me to this study. The new religion is called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: 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.”

This is interesting because I am going over Galatians for the New Testament class I am teaching. Compare those tenets of “faith” with these words of Paul:

“If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted (at the beginning, from Paul), let that person be under God’s curse!” (Gal. 1:9, TNIV)

There is a need to CONTEND for the faith. There is a rampant unwillingness to do just that.