Can the youth in your church – or your home – tell you more about the rules of Ultimate Frisbee than they can the core truths of the Christian faith? If the youth in your life are like most, the troubling answer is likely to be a resounding “yes.”

A major new study about what our teenagers believe should be cause for both great concern and hope for our youth – and it should be required reading for every parent and youth minister in our churches.

The National Study of Youth and Religion led by University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith interviewed nearly 3,600 teens (ages 13-17) during 2001-2005 and found that teenagers in America – including those of conservative, evangelical churches – are effectively practicing their own, new religion, which Smith has labeled, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” This new religion bears little resemblance to the “faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3, HCSB), has profoundly influenced what our teens believe and has dramatic implications for the future well-being of our churches.

On the other hand, while conventional wisdom suggests that teens are not interested in church, don’t respect their parents and are not interested in doctrinal matters, the study reveals that teens like church, admire their parents, want to understand the Bible and are eager for the adults in their lives to engage them on deeper issues than the games they played this week at church.

In a Christianity Today article (April 2005) about Smith’s book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Andy Crouch notes, “It should rock the world of every church in the country: In spite of their generally positive attitude toward religion, almost no teenagers, from any religious background, can articulate the most basic beliefs of their faith.”

Crouch notes that the shocking inability of youth to express their beliefs is not because they are generally inarticulate. “When researchers asked them about pop culture or sexually transmitted diseases, they could give sophisticated answers. They could talk about Will & Grace, but not grace,” Crouch writes.

“Of the 267 teens interviewed [in person], only 12 mentioned ‘repentance’ in connection with their faith; 7 mentioned the resurrection; and 4 mentioned ‘discipleship.’ On the other hand, 112 mentioned ‘personally feeling, being, getting or being made happy,’” according to Crouch.

In an interview in Books & Culture (January/February 2005), Christian Smith describes the “de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens,” what he calls, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

Teens believe “God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant, wants me to get along with people. That’s teen morality,” Smith said. “The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone’s good.”

Smith continues, “You don’t have to get too personally involved with this God. But when there is a problem – when you need Him – He will solve it as soon as you snap your fingers or ring the bell. Many teens explain their faith in these terms: ‘you know, there is a god out there, and when I get in trouble I think about that.’ The rest of the time God’s irrelevant. So the deism is qualified by the therapeutic.”

Smith notes that this distorted belief system has found its way even into the youth in evangelical churches: “It’s unbelievable the proportion of conservative Protestant teens who do not seem to grasp elementary concepts of the Gospel concerning grace and justification. Their view is: be a good person.”

For Smith, who is an evangelical, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism “is not just an inadequate version of Christianity. It’s a different religion.”

Where are youth getting their beliefs? Smith argues the culture youth are submerged in – and their own parents – are influencing what teens believe more than churches – a fact about which few would be surprised.

“Consider teenagers’ lives as finite bundles of time and energy, of resources, and we see that there are a lot of institutions that are trying to get the attention and resources of teenagers. School, media, girl friends, the mall, sports, parents, volunteering, homework. And some of those institutions are quite powerful in the way they are situated in our social order. They can demand a lot from teenagers,” Smith said.

Given the extraordinary time demands today on most youth, Smith said, “It’s amazing to me that religion has any effect in teenagers’ lives.”

A key factor in the possible influence of church on youth is whether teens have “socially significant relationships” at church and with families of other believers. “But many teenagers have their socially significant relationships almost exclusively through school; even if they have friends at church, the youth group is a satellite out there on the fringe of their life, rather than at the center,” Smith told Books & Culture.

“Most young people are not being formed primarily by their religious faith traditions; rather, they are being formed by other notions and ideologies,” Smith said.

But the absence of influence of churches is not because the faith worldview has been rejected by teens. Instead, most teens are never challenged to even consider the biblical worldview in the array of ideologies pressing for their consideration.

Amazingly, part of the reason teens’ beliefs are not more influenced by church is “adults are afraid to teach,” said Smith. “They are afraid of young people. They are afraid of not looking cool when they teach real substance.”

And yet, Smith argues that teens “actually want to be taught something, even if they eventually reject it. They at least want to have something to reject, rather than an attitude of anything goes.”

Counter to the prevailing wisdom which suggests teens will flee from churches that make greater demands on their life, Smith says youth want more substance in their faith.

“Teens need an opportunity to articulate, to think and to make arguments in environments that will be challenging to their faith. And I don’t think they are getting that. In general, religious traditions that expect more and demand more of their youth get more. And those that are more compromising, more accommodating, more anything goes, end up not getting much.”

Parents and youth pastors – we need to get in the game. Our teens want to be challenged with the solid truths of the Christian faith – and they desperately need that biblical worldview to answer the false ideologies our culture bombards them with every day.

Long gone are the days when youth ministry could just be fun and games or mere baby-sitting. While such should have never been the posture of our churches, it must clearly not be the sum and substance of youth ministry today.