The story
First use appears c. 2005. Coined by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
moralistic therapeutic deism
Today it means: A diffuse and nonspecific conception of theism and morality, not necessarily anchored in any established religious doctrine, identified as prevalent among American adolescents in the early twenty-first century. Full definition →