On “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as U.S.

Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith 1

• Christian Smith

My book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American

Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton, follows over hun-
dreds of pages a variety of topical trains of thought and sometimes pursued
diversions and digressions. But what does the bigger picture of the religious
and spiritual lives of U.S. teenagers look like when we stand back and try to
put it all together? When we get past what we discovered about adolescent
inarticulacy regarding religion, systematically sort through the myriad stories
and statements about religious faith and practice, and pull apart and piece
back together what seem to be the key ideas and relevant issues, what did we
conclude?
Here we resummarize our observations in venturing a general thesis about
teenage religion and spirituality in the United States. We advance this thesis
somewhat tentatively, as less than a conclusive fact but more than mere con-
jecture. Namely, we suggest that the de facto dominant religion among con-
temporary teenagers in the United States is what we might call “Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism.” The creed of this religion, as codified from what
emerged from our interviews with U.S. teenagers, sounds something like this:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over
human life on earth.

Christian Smith is the Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor and associate chair in the
Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent
publication is Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coau-
thored with Melissa Lundquist Denton. Smith is the director of the National Study of Youth
and Religion, a research project funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.

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 Christian Smith

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 one-
self.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except
when he is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Such a de facto creed is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and

Catholic youth but is also more than a little visible among black and conser-
vative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers, and even
many “nonreligious” teenagers in the United States.
Note that no teenagers would actually use the terminology “Moralistic
Therapeutic Deist” to describe themselves. That is our summarizing term.
And very few teenagers would lay out the five points of its creed as clearly and
concisely as we have just done. But when one sifts through and digests hun-
dreds of discussions with U.S teenagers about religion, God, faith, prayer, and
other spiritual practices, what seems to emerge as the dominant, de facto reli-
gious viewpoint turns out to be some version of this faith. We could literally
fill another chapter of this book with more quotes from teen interviews illus-
trating Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and exploring its nuances and variants.
Given space limitations, however, suffice it here to examine merely a few more
representative quotes depicting this religion’s core components.
First, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about inculcating a moralistic
approach to life. It believes that central to living a good and happy life is being
a good, moral person. That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, and
responsible; working on self-improvement; taking care of one’s health; and
doing one’s best to be successful. One seventeen-year-old white Mormon boy
from Utah said this very clearly: “I believe in, well, my whole religion is where
you try to be good and, ah, if you’re not good then you should just try to get
better, that’s all.” Being moral in this faith means being the kind of person who
other people will like, fulfilling one’s personal potential, and not being socially
disruptive or interpersonally obnoxious. As more than one teenager summa-
rized morality for us: “Just don’t be an asshole, that’s all.” Such a moral vision
is inclusive of most religions, which are presumed ultimately to stand for equiv-
alent moral views. Thus, a nonreligious white girl from Maryland said,

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Morals play a large part in religion; morals are good if they’re healthy
for society. Like Christianity, which is all I know, the values you get
from like the Ten Commandments. I think every religion is impor-
tant in its own respect. You know, if you’re Muslim, then Islam is the
way for you. If you’re Jewish, well, that’s great too. If you’re
Christian, well, good for you. It’s just whatever makes you feel good
about you.

Feeling good about oneself is thus also an essential aspect of living a moral
life, according to this dominant de facto teenage religious faith.2 Which leads
to our next point.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is also about providing therapeutic benefits
to its adherents.3 This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the
Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s
prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through
suffering, of basking in God’s love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude
and love for the cause of social justice, etc. Rather, what appears to be the
actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling
good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being
able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people. One
fifteen-year-old Hispanic conservative Protestant girl from Florida expressed
the therapeutic benefits of her faith in these terms: “God is like someone who
is always there for you; I don’t know, it’s like God is God. He’s just like some-
body that’ll always help you go through whatever you’re going through. When
I became a Christian I was just praying, and it always made me feel better.”
Making a similar point, though drawing it out from a different religious tra-
dition, this fourteen-year-old white Jewish girl from Washington describes
what her faith is all about in this way: “I guess for me Judaism is more about
how you live your life. Part of the guidelines are like how to live and I guess
be happy with who you are, cause if you’re out there helping someone, you’re
gonna feel good about yourself, you know?” Thus, service to others can be one
means to feeling good about oneself. Other personal religious practices can
also serve that therapeutic end, as this fifteen-year-old Asian Buddhist girl
from Alabama observed, “When I pray, it makes me feel good afterward.”
Similarly, one fifteen-year-old white conservative Protestant girl from Illinois
explained: “Religion is very important, because when you have no one else to
talk to about stuff, you can just get it off your chest, you just talk [to God].

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It’s good.” And this fourteen-year-old East Indian Hindu girl from California
said of her religious practices, “I don’t know, they just really help me feel
good.” It is thus no wonder that so many religious and nonreligious teenagers
are so positive about religion. For the faith many of them have in mind effec-
tively helps to achieve a primary life goal: to feel good and happy about one-
self and one’s life. It is also no wonder that most teens are so religiously
inarticulate. As long as one is happy, why bother with being able to talk about
the belief content of one’s faith?
Finally, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about belief in a particular kind
of God, one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral
order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in our affairs—espe-
cially affairs in which we would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the
time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance. He is often described by teens
as “watching over everything from above” and “the creator of everything and
is just up there now controlling everything.” As one fifteen-year-old Arabic
Muslim boy from California put it:

God is like an entity that decides when, if, he wants to intervene

with a lot of things. To me God is pretty much like intervention, like
extreme luck. Say you’re $50 away from something and you find $50
on the floor, then that’s probably God’s intervention or something
like that. But other than that it just seems like he’s monitoring. He
just kind of stays back and watches, like he’s watching a play, like he’s
a producer. He makes the play all possible and then he watches it,
and if there’s something he doesn’t like, he changes it.

For many teens—as with adults—God sometimes does get involved in

people’s lives, but usually only when they call upon him, which is usually
when they have some trouble or problem or bad feeling that they want
resolved. In this sense, the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-
century version by the Therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selec-
tively available for taking care of needs. As this fourteen-year-old white
mainline Protestant boy from Colorado said, “I believe there’s a God, so some-
times when I’m in trouble or in danger, then I’ll start thinking about that.”
Like the Deistic God of the eighteenth-century philosophers, the God of con-
temporary teenage Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is primarily a divine Creator
and Law-Giver. He designed the universe and establishes moral law and order.

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But this God is not Trinitarian, he did not speak through the Torah or the
prophets of Israel, was never resurrected from the dead, and does not fill and
transform people through his Spirit. This God is not demanding. He actually
can’t be, since 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, profes-
sionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become
too personally involved in the process. As one fourteen-year-old white
Catholic boy from Pennsylvania responded to our inquiry about why religion
matters, “Cause God made us and if you ask him for something I believe he
gives it to you. Yeah, he hasn’t let me down yet. [So what is God like?] God is
a spirit that grants you anything you want, but not anything bad.” Similarly,
this seventeen-year-old conservative Protestant girl from Florida told us,
“God’s all around you, all the time. He believes in forgiving people and what-
not, and he’s there to guide us, for somebody to talk to and help us through
our problems. Of course, he doesn’t talk back.” This last statement is perhaps
doubly telling: God, being distant, does not directly verbally answer prayers,
according to this girl, but he also does not offer any challenging comebacks to
or arguments about our requests. Perhaps the worst the God of Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism can do is to simply fail to provide his promised therapeu-
tic blessings, in which case those who believe in him are entitled to be grumpy.
Thus, one sixteen-year-old white mainline Protestant boy from Texas com-
plained with some sarcasm in his interview that, “Well, God is almighty, I
guess [yawns]. But I think he’s on vacation right now because of all the crap
that’s happening in the world, cause it wasn’t like this back when he was
famous.” Likewise, this fourteen-year-old white conservative Protestant boy
from Ohio told us that, “God is an overall ruler who controls everything, so
like, if I’m depressed or something and things aren’t going my way, I blame it
on him. I don’t know why.” But few teens we talked to end up blaming God
for failing them, since Moralistic Therapeutic Deism usually seems to be effec-
tive in delivering its promised benefits to its many teenage believers in the
United States.
We want to be very clear about our thesis here. We are not saying that all
U.S. teens are adherents of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Some teens are
simply disengaged from anything religious or spiritual, and other teens
embrace substantive religious beliefs and practices that effectively repudiate
those of this revisionist faith. Some teens do appear to be truly very serious

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about their religious faith in ways that seem faithful to the authoritative or
orthodox claims of the faith traditions they profess. We are also not saying
than anyone has founded an official religion by the name of Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism, nor that most U.S. teenagers have abandoned their reli-
gious denominations and congregations to practice it elsewhere or under
another name. Rather, it seems that the latter is simply colonizing many estab-
lished religious traditions and congregations in the United States, that it is
merely becoming the new spirit living within the old body. Its typical embrace
and practice is de facto, functional, practical, and tacit—not formal or
acknowledged as a distinctive religion. Furthermore, we are not suggesting
that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a religious faith limited to teenage
adherents in the United States. To the contrary, it seems that it is also a wide-
spread, popular faith among very many U.S. adults. Our religiously conven-
tional adolescents seem to be merely absorbing and reflecting religiously what
the adult world is routinely modeling for and inculcating in its youth.
Moreover, we are not suggesting that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a
religion that teenagers (and adults) adopt and practice wholesale or not at all.
Instead, the elements of its creed are normally assimilated by degrees, in parts,
admixed with elements of more traditional religious faiths. Indeed, this reli-
gious creed appears in this way to operate as a parasitic faith. It cannot sustain
its own integral, independent life. Rather it must attach itself like an incubus
to established historical religious traditions, feeding on their doctrines and
sensibilities, and expanding by mutating their theological substance to resem-
ble its own distinctive image. This helps to explain why millions of U.S.
teenagers and adults are not self-declared, card-carrying, organizationally
gathered Moralistic Therapeutic Deists. This religion generally does not and
cannot stand on its own. So its adherents must be Christian Moralistic
Therapeutic Deists, Jewish Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Mormon
Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, and even Nonreligious Moralistic Therapeutic
Deists. These may be either devout followers or mere nominal believers of
their respective traditional faiths. But they often have some connection to an
established historical faith tradition that this alternative faith feeds upon and
gradually co-opts if not devours. Believers in each larger tradition practice
their own versions of this otherwise common parasitic religion. The Jewish
version, for instance, may emphasize the ethical living aspect of the creed,
while the Methodist version stresses the getting-to-heaven part. Each then can
think of themselves as belonging to the specific religious tradition they name

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as their own—Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, Mormon, whatever—while simulta-

neously sharing the cross-cutting, core beliefs of their de facto common
Moralistic Therapeutic Deist faith. In effect, these believers get to enjoy what-
ever particulars of their own faith heritages appeal to them, while also reaping
the benefits of this shared, harmonizing, interfaith religion. This helps to
explain the noticeable lack of religious conflict between teenagers of appar-
ently different faiths. For, in fact, we suggest that many of them actually share
the same deeper religious faith: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. What is there
to have conflict about?
One way to gauge people’s interest in different matters is to track their lan-
guage use. What do people talk about? How often do they use different kinds
of key words and phrases? The idea behind this approach is that people’s dis-
course roughly reflects their concerns and interests. We used this method as
one means of assessing U.S. teenagers’ relative orientations to religious and
therapeutic concerns. We systematically counted in our interview transcripts
the number of teenagers who made reference to specific subjects or phrases of
interest. We found, first, that relatively few U.S. teenagers made reference in
their interviews to a variety of historically central religious and theological
ideas. The following list shows the number of teenagers who explicitly men-
tioned these concepts in their interviews:

47—personally sinning or being a sinner

13—obeying God or the church
12—religious repentance or repenting from wrongdoing
9—expressing love for God
8—righteousness, divine or human
7—resurrection or rising again of Jesus
6—giving glory to or glorifying God
6—salvation
5—resurrection of the dead on the Last Day
5—the kingdom of God (2 Christian, 3 Mormon)
5—keeping Sabbath (of 18 Jewish interviews)4
4—discipleship or being a religious disciple
4—God as Trinity
4—keeping Kosher (of 18 Jewish interviews)5
3—the grace of God
3—the Bible as holy

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3—honoring God in life

3—loving one’s neighbor
3—observing high holy days (of 18 Jewish interviews)
2—God as holy or reflecting holiness
2—the justice of God
0—self-discipline
0—working for social justice
0—justification or being justified
0—sanctification or being sanctified

When teenagers talked in their interviews about “grace,” they were usual-
ly talking about the television show Will and Grace, not about God’s grace.
When teenagers discussed “honor,” they were almost always talking about tak-
ing honors courses or making the honor role at school, very rarely about hon-
oring God with their lives. When teens mentioned being “justified,” they
almost always meant having a reason for doing something behaviorally ques-
tionable, not having their relationship with God made right.
For comparison with these tallies on religious terms, we also counted the
number of teens who made reference to the key therapeutic ideas of feeling
happy, good, better, and fulfilled. What we found—as shown in the following
list—is that U.S. teenagers were much more likely to talk in terms broadly
related to therapeutic concerns than in the religious terms examined above:

112—personally feeling, being, getting, or being made happy

99—feeling good about oneself or life
92—feeling better about oneself or life
26—being or feeling personally satisfied or enjoying life satisfaction
21—being or feeling personally fulfilled

Note that these are not total number of times that teenagers used a word
or phrase, but simply the number of teens who used them. In fact, our inter-
viewed teenagers used the single, specific phrase to “feel happy,” for instance,
more than two thousand times. In short, our teen interview transcripts reveal
clearly that the language that dominates U.S. adolescent interests and think-
ing about life—including religious and spiritual life—is primarily about per-
sonally feeling good and being happy. That is what defines the dominant
epistemological framework and evaluative standard for most contemporary

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U.S. teenagers—and probably for most of their baby-boomer parents. This,

we think, has major implications for religious faiths seriously attempting to
pass on the established beliefs and practices of their historical traditions.
What we are theorizing here, in other words, is the very real existence of a
shared American religion that is analogous to the American civil religion that
Robert Bellah astutely described in 1967,6 yet which operates at an entirely
different level than civil religion. It is not uncommon for people to think of
the United States as comprising a variety of diverse religions that coexist more
or less harmoniously: Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Freewill Baptist, Irish
Catholic, Conservative Judaism, Reformed Presbyterian, Latter-day Saint, and
so on. But the reality is actually more complicated than that. “Religion” in the
United States separates itself out and operates at multiple levels in different
ways. American religion is most obvious at the level of formal organizations,
the plane on which denominations, seminaries, religious congregations, pub-
lishing houses, and other religious organizations operate. But religion also
often operates distinctively at a level “below” the organizational plane, at the
level of individual belief and practice. Here religious faith is often eclectic,
idiosyncratic, and syncretistic, inconsistently—from the perspective of most
organized religious traditions, at least—mixing together elements as diverse as
belief in infant baptism, interest in horoscope predictions, and the collection
of religious kitsch. This is the dimension that some scholars have called “lived
religion” or “popular religion.”7 Beyond these two levels, Bellah’s major con-
tribution in 1967 was to reveal civil religion operating in the United States at
yet another level—“above” the plane of formal religious organizations. Bellah
very insightfully showed how religious symbols and discourse—appropriated
and abstracted from the Judeo-Christian tradition—are mobilized at a nation-
al civic level for purposes of national order, unity, and purpose.
What we are suggesting here in our observations about Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism is that, to understand the fullness of “religion” in the
United States, we need to come to see yet another level or plane of religious
life or practice operating in this social order (as shown in figure 2 on page 169
of Soul Searching). At the “bottom” exists the eclectic, idiosyncratic, and dis-
cretely syncretistic faiths operating at the level of individual religion. “Higher
up” abides the more coherent, systematized faiths operating on the plane of
organizational religion. Even “higher” exists the nationally unifying political
faith of American civil religion. But situated between the individual level at
the “bottom” level and the organized religions and civil religion on planes
above that, there operates yet another distinct level of religion in the United
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States—the widely shared, interfaith religion of Moralistic Therapeutic

Deism. Like American civil religion, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism appropri-
ates, abstracts, and revises doctrinal elements from mostly Christianity and
Judaism for its own purpose. But it does so in a “downward,” apolitical direc-
tion. Its social function is not to unify and give purpose to the nation at the
level of civic affairs. Rather, it functions to foster subjective well-being in its
believers and to lubricate interpersonal relationships in the local public sphere.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism exists, with God’s aid, to help people succeed
in life, to make them feel good, and to help them get along with others—who
otherwise are different—in school, at work, on the team, and in other routine
areas of life.
Finally, to suggest that “religion” in the United States operates complexly
and distinctly on different levels, however, does not mean that those levels
never interact or influence each other. They do. Purely individual beliefs, for
instance, are shaped in part by the teachings of organized religion—as well as
by horoscopes, advice columns, talk show hosts, and so on. American civil
religion is affected both by liberal religious activism and by the Religious
Right operating at the level of formal religious organization. The same obser-
vation about interlevel interaction and influence is also true of Moralistic
Therapeutic Deism. It helps to organize and harmonize individual religious
beliefs “below” it. It also both feeds upon and shapes—one might say
infects—the religious doctrines and practices at the organizational and insti-
tutional level “above” it. In addition it mirrors and may very well interface
with American civil religion at the highest level by providing the nation’s
inhabitants a parallel and complementary common, unifying, functional faith
that operates at a more apolitical, private, and interpersonal level of human
life. The cultural influence of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may also be
nudging American civil religion in a “softer,” more inclusive, ecumenical, and
multireligious direction. What is conservative becomes more “compassion-
ate,” what is liberal becomes more “bleeding heart” and “inclusive,” and what
is remotely particularistic is increasingly universalized. All can then together
hold hands and declare in unison, “Each person decides for himself/herself!”
And those who believe that only the born again who are justified by the spilled
blood of Jesus Christ go to heaven, or that the Angel Moroni really did appear
to Joseph Smith with a new and commanding revelation, or that God’s cho-
sen people really must faithfully observe his laws are suspect. The flock of

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sheep is diversified and expanded, but certain goats remain part of the picture
nonetheless.8
Adults in the United States over the last many decades have recurrently
emphasized that which separates teenagers from grown-ups, highlighting
things that make each of them different and seemingly unable to relate to each
other. But, as reported in our book, Soul Searching, our conversations with
ordinary teenagers around the country made the contrary clear to us, that in
most cases teenage religion and spirituality in the United States are much bet-
ter understood as largely reflecting the world of adult religion, especially
parental religion, and are in strong continuity with it. Few teenagers today are
rejecting or reacting against the adult religion into which they are being social-
ized. Rather, most are living out their religious lives in very conventional and
accommodating ways. The religion and spirituality of most teenagers actually
strike us as very powerfully reflecting the contours, priorities, expectations,
and structures of the larger adult world into which adolescents are being
socialized. In many ways, religion is simply happily absorbed by youth, large-
ly, one might say, “by osmosis”—as one sixteen-year-old white Catholic boy
from Pennsylvania stated so well: “Yeah, religion affects my life a lot, but you
just really don’t think about it as much. It just comes natural I guess after a
while.”
However, it appears that only a minority of U.S. teenagers are naturally
absorbing by osmosis the traditional substantive content and character of the
religious traditions to which they claim to belong. For, it appears to us, anoth-
er popular religious faith—Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—is colonizing
many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, con-
verting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely
underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness. Exactly how this
process is affecting American Judaism and Mormonism we refrain from fur-
ther commenting on, since these faiths and cultures are not our primary fields
of expertise. Other more accomplished scholars in those areas will have to
examine and evaluate these possibilities in greater depth. But we can say that
we have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of
“Christianity” in the United States is actually only tenuously connected to the
actual historical Christian tradition,9 but has rather substantially morphed
into Christianity’s misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism. This has happened in the minds and hearts of many individual believ-
ers and, it also appears, within the structures of at least some Christian organ-

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izations and institutions. The language—and therefore experience—of

Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist,
and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United
States at the very least, to be being supplanted by the language of happiness,
niceness, and an earned heavenly reward. It is not so much that Christianity
in the United States is being secularized. Rather more subtly, either
Christianity is at least degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more
significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite
different religious faith.

Notes

1. This paper is a version of “Summary Interpretation: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” from Soul
Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith with Melinda
Lundquist Denton, copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford
University Press.
2. There is a strong connect between this vision of morality and the “emotivism” described by
Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
3. For more on the therapeutic in culture, see James Nolan, The Therapeutic State: Justifying
Government at Century’s End (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Philip Rieff, The Triumph
of the Therapeutic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of
Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979); James Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education
in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Joel Shuman and Keith Meador, Heal
Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Andrew Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); John S.
Rice, A Disease of One’s Own: Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Ronald Dworkin, The Rise of the Imperial Self (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985); Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
1976); Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down
(New York: Bantam Books, 1981); James Nolan, Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court
Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
4. Four other Jewish teenagers mentioned Sabbath specifically to say that they do not keep or observe
the Sabbath.
5. Three Jewish teens mentioned keeping Kosher to say that they do not.
6. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (Winter 1967): 1–21.
7. See, for example, David Hall, Lived Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997); Erling Jorstad, Popular Religion in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993).
8. For an explanation about how such status differentiations and cultural constructions of difference
are essential to the making of human identities, see Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism:
Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
9. As specified by numerous, defining historical creeds and confessions, including the Apostles’
Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, the Athanasian Creed, Canons of the Council of
Orange, the Belgic Confession, the Westminster Confessions, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Augsburg
Confession, the Canons of Dort, the Scots Confession, the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of

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