Brian Labosier © May 12, 2021

The common denominator for all false gospels is a rejection of God and His ways combined with an attempt to build life around ourselves, our self-centered desires, and our own human understanding of things.  One way of summarizing false gospels is to think in terms of idolatry.  Idolatry was a longstanding problem in Old Testament times, even as it continues to be a significant problem in at least a few cultures around the world today.  By New Testament times, things had changed, at least among the Jews.  Although the worship of physical idols was a significant issue in the broader Greek and Roman worlds in New Testament times, this specific sin was no longer the primary issue within Judaism.  Yet Jesus regularly experienced great spiritual opposition from the Jewish leaders of His day.  They were often as offtrack spiritually as ever, but manmade idols weren’t the focus of their problem.  They had found other ways to resist and reject God’s claims on their lives.  J. I. Packer is helpful at this point in his classic Knowing God (InterVarsity, 1973, page 42) where he reminds us that physical idols are not the only problem: we can just as easily “dream up mental images of Him.”  For us today, our problem lies in the mental idolatry of faulty views of God we entertain in our minds.

Our present condition as broken human beings living in a broken world order virtually guarantees it is easier for us to go astray spiritually than to remain on course.  Our challenge is to apply Proverbs 3:5 to our lives every day: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (italics added).  The moment we rely on our own understanding we become like Adam and Eve listening to Satan in Genesis 3 or like Peter walking on the water in Matthew 14:30 when he got his eyes off the Lord and began to sink.

We shouldn’t be surprised that there are many false gospels in the church today.  The Apostle Paul warns us numerous times about the danger of following “a different gospel from the one you received” (2 Corinthians 11:4; see also Galatians 1:6). 

One specific example of a counterfeit gospel that has shown itself in recent decades is what is sometimes described as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). This terminology was originally introduced by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their 2005 book Soul Searching, as they tried to describe common religious beliefs they observed among American youths.  But this terminology stuck because it is so descriptive of where we are today.  The tragedy is that MTD is not limited to a small segment of American youth a decade or two ago, but it seems to describe the vast bulk of American Christianity.

Wikipedia in their article on “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (accessed March 3, 2021) provides the following summary (that in turn is based on material quoted directly from Soul Searching, pp. 162–163):

“It is this combination of beliefs that they label moralistic therapeutic deism:

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 new religious spinoff of traditional Christianity, popularly called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is deistic in the sense that there is belief in the existence of a Creator who is virtually uninvolved in the ongoing affairs of human life, like in traditional Deism of several centuries ago.  Unlike the sovereign God of this universe revealed in the Bible, this deistic god simply wants people to be “good” and to be “happy.”  Preaching and teaching growing out of this movement tends to be therapeutic in the sense that it focuses primarily on helping people feel good about themselves and moralistic in the sense that it focuses on encouraging people to be “good, nice, and fair to each other.”  In other words, it is a feel good about yourself approach built on a system of outward morality based on human energy, combined with a thin veneer of God and the Bible to give it a measure of plausibility and acceptance.

We can simplify this approach in terms of three basic convictions.  It is:

1. Moralistic in its appeal to live morally upright lives through our own human energy,
2. Therapeutic with a focus on ourselves and our feeling good about ourselves,
3. Deistic in its offering of a vague and unbiblical concept of God.

Some important observations about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are that there is no place for Christ or any prospect of forgiveness or need for new life.  Biblical values like faith, grace, and God’s glory are simply missing.  Like many false religions, it has the outward form or “appearance of godliness, but [lacks] its power” (2 Timothy 3:5).

We should also recognize that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism describes a reality that shows up in different ways in different contexts.  Sometimes it clearly takes the form of a counterfeit gospel that is far beyond the range of any form of orthodox Christianity.  Here the true gospel is so significantly compromised that its message of hope and new life is completely lost in the process.  God is reduced to someone who does little more than cater to the felt needs and desires of human beings like a combination “Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist,” to use some of Smith and Denton’s terminology in describing this movement.

Other times the influence of this man-centered or self-centered approach to Christianity is less pronounced and simply shows up when people are trying to communicate the gospel in gracious and superficially friendly ways, such as is common in some seeker-sensitive churches.  There is always the temptation not to offend the lost, but to go out of one’s way help them feel comfortable through a watered-down view of God and the gospel.  Hopefully the true gospel is still being presented in these contexts, but still there is often a lack of clarity as key truths are frequently toned down.  So, what is described here as MTD is perhaps best seen as a tendency or a potential danger of our day, that is more extreme in some situations and less so in others.

The widespread prevalence of MTD is also definitely not limited to those who are familiar with this terminology or people who self-describe themselves in this way.  Rather, this terminology provides a reasonable summary of the beliefs held by many people as our Evangelical sub-culture increasingly moves away from a God-centered perspective and toward a man-centered or self-centered one.  Sadly, this lightweight version of self-centered spirituality seems to characterize increasing numbers of evangelical churches, especially those who describe themselves as being more “progressive” in their understanding of the faith.