What are we teaching our children?

Parents have a tremendous responsibility to communicate the truths of God clearly to their children. Deuteronomy 4:9-10 says, "Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. Remember the day you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb, when he said to me, "Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children." This is echoed in Deuteronomy 11:18-19 - "Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up."

As we look at the way our children perceive God we can gain incredible insight into who we are communicating Him to be. No, I'm not saying that we can blame all the mistakes of the children on their parents. There is a big stretch between their perceptions of God and their reactions to God. But I am saying we can learn a lot about the fruit of our faith from the way they conceptualize God.

Maybe that's why a new book intrigues me. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers was written by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. It is a presentation of the findings of almost a years worth of research. I haven't read the book yet, but am planning on checking it out. The Revealer has an excellent review of it here.

Here is an excerpt.

In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings." And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.

These beliefs are killing American religion. The authors call it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The creed is simple and, yes, conventional -- but, where the authors find that it matters, MTD is not traditional. Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy. Good people will be even happier in heaven after they die. The religious beliefs of American teens tend to be -- as a whole, across all traditions -- that simple. It’s something Jews and Catholics and Protestants of all stripes seem to have in common. It is instrumentalist. "This God is not demanding," say the authors. "He actually can't be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good."

Fascinating thoughts. Could the problem with the world's conception of God be the fact that we've done a poor job presenting who He truly is to those around us?