Five years ago there was an interesting survey made in America of the religious attitudes of teenagers who defined themselves as believers. The academic conducting the survey, a sociologist called Christian Smith, reached two broad conclusions.
One was that religion, for these young people, was primarily a matter of being a good person - being good and nice and fair, in their terms - and second, that they saw the main purpose of religious faith as therapeutic: something that's meant to make people feel happy, fulfilled, contented.
Negatively speaking, what was noticeable in the survey was that the content of belief, or doctrine, played a very small role in these young people's faith. And in fact even their ideas of "being a good person" tended to be rather nebulous - and rather selective.Smith put it very well himself, in my opinion, when he wrote that the version of religion they believed in was "not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the sabbath, of living as a servant of a divine sovereign," - an interesting image in the light of what Christ says in today's gospel reading - "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".
He found that all these aspects of classical or traditional Christian faith were unfamiliar to these young people, who nevertheless defined themselves as Christian.
And the language of Smith's conclusion I found quite striking and prophetic. "It is not so much that Christianity in the United States is being secularised," he said. "Rather more subtly, either Christianity is...degenerating into a pathetic version of itself, or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonised and replaced by a quite different religion".
My first thoughts about the attitudes described in the survey were that it's not just teenagers who construe religion like this, and it's not just teenagers in the United States.
It's instructive to read Christian Smith's reflections about his research and then turn to something like the pastoral programme sponsored by the English and Welsh bishops called Everybody's Welcome, which seems to share all the same assumptions, to show the same reluctance to advance definite beliefs and definite moral principles as constituting the substance of Christian faith, and concentrates instead on the therapeutic strategies that parish communities might use to induce a sense of well-being among their members.
The point is, it's a far cry, isn't it?, from the teaching we've just listened to in today's readings.
"When you have done all that you have been told to do," Christ says, "say, 'We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty'". And St. Paul: "Keep as your pattern the sound teaching you have heard from me...You have been given something precious; guard it".
For us, today, there are two important messages in these readings. One is that God is not some distant, vaguely benign force, looking over us but making no demands. He's a person with very definite characteristics: our master, as Jesus says, our father, our shepherd - to use all the well-known images from Scripture.
And the second message is that the relationship he invites us into has a definite character as well. It's not something that we can modify and endlessly negotiate according to our own tastes or according to passing cultural fashions. It's something with a specific content: specific beliefs, specific principles, specific forms of worship. These are all things that have been given to us, or revealed to us, by God.
Jesus' own mission, after all, wasn't an exercise in religious market research. It was the revelation of the truth about God, and a summons to accept that truth in its fulness.
So I would suggest that we read these passages of Scripture as a challenge to us, as the present-day Christian community: the challenge not to allow the faith to degenerate into "a pathetic version of itself", not to allow it to be gradually "colonised and displaced by a quite different religion".
It's the challenge to immerse ourselves in the truth about God instead, which, as Paul says, has been entrusted to us as something precious to be guarded, with the help of God's Spirit living in us.
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