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Joe examines Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, why it’s a huge problem in modern society, and how this applies to the recent Jesse Ridgeway news.
Transcript:
Joe:
This week, a YouTuber named Jesse Ridgeway announced that he and his wife had decided that she would abort their child because the baby had down syndrome. Once they saw the size of the cross being laid before them, they decided it would be better for their child not to live. But honestly, I don’t really expect Jesse Ridgeway to have room for accepting suffering into his comfortable life as a successful secular YouTuber. I think the bigger story in some ways is how many Christians quietly behave in the same way. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about the false gospel that all too many Christians actually believe in. And it’s a false gospel they often believe in without realizing that it’s a denial of Christianity. About 20 years ago, the sociologist Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist-Denton interviewed a few thousand teenagers about their beliefs about God.
And what they discovered was that frequently, despite whatever religion the teenagers claimed to be Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Jewish, whatever, what they actually believed in was often quite similar and radically different than the beliefs that they professed to have. So what were their actual beliefs? Well, Jen Oshman has a pretty good summary here.
CLIP:
And what we found is that teenagers were believing basically that there is a God and he wants us to be happy and he wants us to be nice. So anything that you don’t need God unless anything infringes on one of those two goals. So as long as you’re pursuing happiness and as long as you’re pursuing niceness, everyone’s going to go to heaven. Other than that, you don’t really need the Lord.
Joe:
In their book, Soul Searching, Smith and Denton coined a term for this belief system. They called it moralistic therapeutic de- ism or MTD. So you might be wondering why we should care today in 2026 about a sociological study of teenagers from the early 2000s. Well, first, those teens are now haggard looking elder millennials like me and their milk toast creed is the one that many modern people live by today, including people we might be in the pews with, perhaps some of you watching this right now. But second, those teens had themselves gotten that bad theology from somewhere. But even though we recognized it in teens in the early 2000s, as we’re going to see, C.S. Lewis had called out the seeds of this all the way back in 1940. So what are the core beliefs of MTD? Smith and Denton suggests that its creed has five basic tenets.
Number one, a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. Number two, God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. Number three, the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. Number four, God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. And number five, good people go to heaven when they die. Now, as Smith and didn’t point out, nobody calls themselves a moralistic therapeutic daist. Rather, MTD is an attempt to summarize what is really a strange hodgepodge of Christianity with secularism, relativism, maybe some self-help culture thrown in for good measure. But precisely because this mix of Christian, non-Christian, and even anti-Christian elements, it can sometimes be tricky to see what it gets right and when it gets wrong.
So I want to take it apart piece by piece affirming when it gets right and calling out what it gets wrong by comparing it to authentic Christianity. Let’s take it first the M. Smith and didn’t call it moralistic because at its core, it’s the teaching that central to living a good and happy life is being a good moral person. That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, at work on self-improvement, taking care of one’s health and doing someone’s best to be successful. Now some of you may be wondering, what is wrong with that? Don’t Christians want people to be moral? Absolutely we do. But morality is not the actual core of Christianity, particularly not this understanding of morality. Once you reduce Christianity to being a nice, upstanding member of society, you actually take away the reason for Christianity’s existence. After all, as William Lynn Craig has pointed out-
CLIP:
Certainly it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers do not also often lead good moral lives. In fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame.
Joe:
So if you reduce Christianity to being moral, particularly morality understood in this way, you immediately make it vulnerable to unbelievers who say that they can be good without God. Now, of course, an important distinction needs to be made here from a Christian perspective. On the one hand, you have what are called the cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, and then you have a host of related virtues. These are all moral virtues. And if you mean that by moral, you mean those kind of morals, then absolutely. Unbelievers can certainly be moral. But authentic Christianity is about so much more than that. As St. John says, we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love and he who abides and love abides in God and God abides in him. Those mysterious words are expressing the true heart of Christianity. In the words of Benedict the 16th, this being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon in a decisive direction.
In other words, we encounter Jesus and we receive him in baptism and in the Eucharist and he unites us to his own body in some mysterious way. And it’s only with this kind of Christological and sacramental basis that we can make sense of Jesus’ two great commandments that we love God and love our neighbor. He’s not just saying be nice. He’s not even just telling us to love with a human love and he’s certainly not giving us a simple matter of morality, something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental reactualization. Rather, he is calling us into this life of faith, hope, and love that is literally impossible without God dwelling within us because it is a call to love God and love neighbor with truly divine love. So that’s the M in MTD. What about the T, therapeutic? It’s the idea that religion exists to provide therapeutic benefits to its adherence.
Instead of a focus being upon sin and redemption or divine grace or even things like social justice, Smith and Denton instead found that what appears to be the actual dominant religion among US teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure at peace. It’s about attaining subjective wellbeing, being able to resolve problems and getting along amiably with other people. Here again, there’s something half true to what those then teenagers were recognizing. God does in fact want us to be happy. He desires our beatitude just as he wants us to be moral. What’s the problem with this view? Well, partially it’s that it has a superficial understanding of happiness. It’s a kind of happiness that’s inconsistent with suffering, particularly with voluntary suffering. And so it offers its adherence no way to live out Jesus’ call to deny themselves and to take up their cross and to follow him every day.
I like Jinoshman’s take here.
CLIP:
We’re looking to God sort of as like a pie in the sky. Just make me healthy, just make me wealthy. Because I’m a Christian, things are going to go well for me. I shouldn’t expect too much hardship. I shouldn’t expect to endure too much suffering because God wants me to be happy. He wants me to believe in myself. He wants me to be nice. He wants me to be good. Well, this kind of gospel is not the gospel at all. This is actually a false gospel and it has really infiltrated our churches. It’s really especially infiltrated, I feel like, and I’m most concerned about women’s ministries and women’s ministry materials that tell you to believe in yourself rather than to turn your gaze up on our Almighty God.
Joe:
Leon Blue once suggested that the rich are incapable of understanding the cross of Christ. In his words, they were capable of giving alms perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare. They’ll be moved to the sound of beautiful music at Jesus’ sufferings, but his cross, the reality of his cross will horrify them. They want it and they want the cross all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight, pleasant to see hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat. That is, I think, a popular understanding of Christianity in the cross today. Now, none of us would want to claim that because it’s a pretty ugly description, but I suspect that many of us today are guilty in this way. We like the idea of the cross, but the reality of suffering is horrifying and we run from it. And what’s more, our conception of God can be such that, well, he wants us to be happy so surely he’d never call Christians to radical self-sacrifice or suffering or even martyrdom.
In this way then, MTD says something true. God wants our beatitude, but it twists it in such a way that while appearing Christian, it robs us from the mysterious good of being united to the cross of Christ. I was reminded of that this week. A YouTuber named Jesse Ridgeway announced that he and his wife had decided that she would abort their child because the baby had trisomy 21 Down syndrome, concluding that if the baby is just a little so intellectually, then we’ll make it work. But once they realized the whole host of serious physical and mental developmental issues associated with down syndrome, once they saw the size of the cross being laid before them, they decided it would be better for their child not to live, calling it a difficult decision that we believe in the long run will be beneficial for our family. It was horrifying.
It was tragic and I wish more people would recognize and be appalled at the idea of these kinds of eugenic abortions. But honestly, I don’t really expect Jesse Ridgeway to have room for accepting suffering into his comfortable life as a successful secular YouTuber. I fully believe that he and his wife thought they were doing the right thing by snuffing out the life of their child so that they and their baby wouldn’t have to suffer. I think the bigger story in some ways is how many Christians quietly behave in the same way. Ridgeway himself pointed out that something like 90% of women abort their children when they find out they have Down syndrome, a number that even he was shocked by. Now admittedly, that number might be artificially inflated in one way because pro- lifers often don’t bother getting prenatal genetic testing because it’s not going to change whether the baby’s allowed to have a birthday or not.
Speaking personally, we did have the genetic testing and our son George tested positive for at least having an increased probability that he had trisomy 21. Sadly, he died in the womb before we could ever find out for sure. But even tweaking the numbers slightly, the point remains. The Lutheran Pastor Hans fine is right. The numbers suggest that many, if not most of the people who find Jesse Ridgeway’s tweet repulsive would do the same thing if they discovered they were carrying a child with down syndrome. He’s not endorsing abortion there. He’s calling us to recognize that many of us pro- life Christians crumble when presented with the cross. So what does an authentic Christian response to this look like? St. John Paul I seconds encyclical on the Christian meaning of human suffering. Savichi Dolores is worth reading in its entirety. A friend of mine was a Protestant youth minister and his own wife died of cancer at a young age and in the mourning process and in searching for the deeper meaning of suffering, it was this theology that he discovered that ended up leading him to the Catholic church.
Now JP2 begins by unpacking St. Paul’s own teaching on sufific suffering. When he says in Colossians one, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake. And in my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ’s affliction for the sake of his body that is the church.” Now for many Christians, that line is absolutely mysterious even baffling. How in the world can Paul rejoice in suffering? But John Paul II explains this joy accompanies an authentic understanding of human suffering in the light of the cross. In the Pope’s words, “Man perishes when he loses eternal life. The opposite of salvation is not therefore merely temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering, the loss of eternal life being rejected by God, damn nation. In other words, the gospel really does exist to help us avoid suffering, but particularly it’s to help us avoid the definitive suffering of damnation, to help us avoid the loss of God.
That’s the suffering we ought to be worried about the pangs of hell and the joy we should be focused on are the joys of eternal life, because look, we will absolutely accept short-term pain and suffering for long-term joy. That’s true even of non-believers provided they have even the basics of human development. If you know that investing a litle bit now is going to pay off huge in the future, you’re likely to accept that short-term loss for the long-term gain joyfully. If you know that working out is going to help you get the girl of your dreams, chances are you’ll hit the gym with a smile. Every morning when you and I get up and go to work, we voluntarily take on ourselves an inconvenience, but we do it for the sake, hopefully of the good of the work that we’re doing, but also for the good things that we know long-term that paycheck will provide.
But once we see the entirety of our life on earth in the same way as a brief moment in time in which we can invest in our eternal future, it radically changes how we think of earthly joys and sufferings. We don’t accept sufferings because we’re masochists or because we think God wants us to be unhappy. We accept sufferings because we know that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, as St. Paul says. And we believe this in part because we can look at the cross and see that God can draw the greatest good in history from the greatest suffering in history. So what about the third part of MTD, the deism part? It’s the idea that God exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but he isn’t particularly personally involved in our affairs, especially affairs in which we’d prefer not to have God involved.
In Smith and Denton’s words, this God is not demanding. He actually can’t be because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good. In short, God is something like a combination divine butler and cosmic therapist. He is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves and does not become too personally involved in the process. Here again, there’s a sliver of truth involved here because it’s true. Jesus really does wash the feet of his disciples at the last supper and he says to them, For which is the greater, one who sits a table or one who serves. Is it not the one who sets a table? But I am among you as one who serves. So it’s tempting to take that sliver of truth and then use it to reduce Jesus to being our butler and our therapist.
And this is not a new temptation. Sies Lewis called out a very similar view of God in his 1940 book, The Problem of Pain. He said,” We want in fact not so much a Father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven, a senile benevolence who as they say, like to seng people enjoying themselves and whose plan for the universe was simply that might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all. So what does this view get wrong? I suspect this is going to be the most obviously anti-Christian dimension of MDD because it’s an attack on the Lordship of Christ. A Lord, if you remember, is a ruler. It’s somebody who’s in charge. I’ve been plenty critical of John MacArthur in the past, but I really like the way he said it. Jesus is Lord. Those who refuse him as Lord cannot use him as savior, and Jesus himself similarly says that merely proclaiming his Lordship isn’t enough.
In Matthew seven, he says, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Remember, many of the people who believe in MTD think of themselves as good Catholics and good Protestants, but I think taken together the implications of his theology are positively cancerous. If you think of Christianity as being about becoming a good person, a lot of theology becomes irrelevant. Why care if Jesus has one nature or two? When you combine that with big dealistic dimensions, then even morality becomes largely irrelevant. Does God really care what I do with my girlfriend? Doesn’t even have better things to do like answering my prayers? And so MTD has served for decades now as a kind of stealth assault on theology and on morality, on the Lordship of Christ and the sovereignty of God and on the Christiological and sacramental nature of Christian love.
Finally, speaking of both Christian love and John MacArthur, I think the question of getting God’s love right is critical in understanding an important distinction between the Calvinism MacArthur believed in and the Catholicism I believe in. And that distinction is namely this. Does God love everyone including sinners with a deep and salvific love? If you want the answer on that biblically, I urge you to check out this episode right here. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.