This makes perfect sense.
...What do Catholic youth believe in? The preeminent social researcher on the religious knowledge and attitudes of American youths is Christian Smith, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.
Smith has been tracking and personally interviewing various huge cohorts of U.S. youth for over two decades, thanks to a grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation. Smith himself is a convert and in his first book, Soul Searching, he devoted a chapter to the fact that of all Christian youth he interviewed it was the Catholics who were least likely to articulate what their Faith was. Smith has asserted that the dominant faith American youngsters hold is what he calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). MTD is "colonizing" Catholicism itself, as this new “pop culture” religion seduces converts who never have to leave their Christian identification as they embrace this new faith and all of its undemanding dimensions. People can even remain affiliated with their parents’ religion while believing nothing of it....
Let's not kid ourselves. Parents are responsible for seeing to their children's faith formation. Of course, sending them to a Catholic school, or to CCD if the kids are in publick screwels, used to be a good alternative. Apparently things have gone way out of whack somewhere along the way, and my money's on the fat-and-happy '50's complacency. You know what followed the '50's, right?
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