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Teens picture God as a celestial butler
What teens believed
Whatever their supposed faith, few of the teens could say anything specific about the divine. Most believed God is a cool dude who floats in the sky and wants everybody to be happy and get along. If you ask him nicely he might help you achieve your goals, but otherwise he's mostly busy floating.
This celestial butler is not specific about what you should and shouldn't do, and he doesn't really speak unless spoken to.
A name for it
Smith and Denton named this thin soup of theology moralistic therapeutic deism. They only studied teenagers, but they suspect many people remain moralistic therapeutic deists for their whole lives, since the teens probably picked up this loose handful of beliefs from their parents. People claim on surveys that they belong to a certain religion, or they get riled up about specific bits of dogma, but digging into their beliefs soon hits a gooey core of underbaked religious mishmash.
How did Smith and Denton study teenagers' beliefs?
Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton led the National Study of Youth and Religion, which began in 2001. They ran a telephone survey of 3,290 American teenagers aged 13 to 17 and then held 267 in-depth interviews with a subset of them. They published their findings in the 2005 book Soul Searching. The researchers re-interviewed many of the same young people in later waves, following them into adulthood.
Why do teens inherit their parents' religion?
Children absorb religious habits the way they absorb a household's language, through daily routines such as meals, holidays, and conversation. In the National Study of Youth and Religion, Smith and Denton found that the strongest predictor of a teenager's religious practice was the religious practice of the parents. Sociologists call this process religious socialization. Teens whose parents rarely discussed faith at home tended to describe their own beliefs in the vaguest terms.
Why did Enlightenment thinkers imagine a hands-off God?
Deism spread in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe and America, when advances in physics made the universe look like a machine running on natural laws. Deists pictured God as a clockmaker who built the machine and then stepped back, and they doubted miracles and private revelation. Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are all associated with deist ideas. Jefferson cut the miracle passages out of the New Testament to make his own edition around 1820.
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