moralistic therapeutic deism

Meaning

Noun

• A diffuse notion of theism and morality, which need not be tied to any particular religious creed, found to be common among early 21st-century US American teenagers.

Origin

• 2005 neologism (coined by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in Soul searching: the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers, Oxford University Press, 2005).