The Church in the Age of Therapy

See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.
—Deuteronomy 32:39

In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” At some point we crossed a threshold, and the broader values of Western culture became more concerned with self-actualization and freedom from restraint than with salvation from our sin and communion with God. We are now at a point where the language of therapy pervades every level of discourse.

How did we get here? Some blame Sigmund Freud and other early psychologists for building a persuasive intellectual case for doing whatever we want, on the grounds that repressing our desires is harmful and that we must be true to ourselves. In this telling, Christians (mostly liberal ones) took the bait and swapped out Christian doctrines for psychological fads, leaving only a remnant of faithful believers who have done their best to stand their ground against a rising tide of psychobabble.

This is certainly part of the story, and there’s no happy ending for any church that abandons the truths we have cherished for two millennia in the hope of unearthing deeper truths that conveniently align with the modern zeitgeist. Yet this story neglects the fact that we live in the world that Freud helped create, and it is impossible to talk meaningfully about human psychology without drawing on his insights. We take for granted many ideas that came to us through modern psychological theory and research; any critique of therapy culture must take this reality seriously.

What’s more, Christianity’s entanglement with therapy culture can’t be separated from Christian enthusiasm for healing and the Church’s insistence on holistic care for people who are suffering. Jesus himself tells his disciples to heal (therapeuete) the sick, and early Christian writers (including Augustine) used secular healing methods as analogies for the powerful work that God does in a believer’s soul. Pre-scientific Christians seem to have mostly accepted whatever theories governed mental health at the time, including things like the four humors. Christians have always been interested in what it means for us to flourish in heart, soul, mind, and strength—just ask Aquinas.

Modern psychology simply took that quest for flourishing and narrowed it, supposing that our thoughts, emotions, and desires could tell us all that we needed to know about living well. The insights of Freud (and many others) revealed truths about our inner lives that, while not as ironclad as thermodynamics or as practically useful as germ theory, were arrived at with enough rigor for psychology to consider itself a science alongside others. Psychology told compelling stories, such as the idea that moral obligations are at best useful social tools and at worst hindrances to becoming who we’re meant to be. We retold those stories over and over until they became our culture’s central myths.

Carl Trueman describes the consequences of these cultural myths in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: “Satisfaction and meaning—authenticity—are now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end. Indeed, it must now serve the purpose of meeting my psychological needs; I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic.”

Since the rise of psychology as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has been no lack of Christian discourse about psychological studies and theories. Christians have vigorously opposed, assiduously incorporated, or fought for compromises with the fast-growing cultural juggernaut that therapy represents, but even the most strident anti-therapy messages have been and are still the other half of a Rorschach blot: defined in opposition to the dominant message. Resistance to therapy culture is not futile, but some assimilation is inevitable.

The greatest danger that therapy culture poses to churches today is not that we will trade out our doctrines wholesale, but that we will define those doctrines only in terms that therapy culture finds acceptable. The best way forward, then, is to tell a story truer than the one on offer from our cultural mythmakers.

In this story, sin is not merely our “brokenness” or “messiness,” but it is the inescapable inclination to hurt ourselves and others by violating the laws that a holy God taught us so that we might live in peace. Our deliverance does not come through conspicuous consumption, rejecting moral strictures, or unvarnished asceticism, but through trusting in the power of Jesus’s death and resurrection. We are not helpless victims understanding ourselves through diagnoses, but we are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit to live free of sin and imitate Christ. A therapeutic culture full of people living to be pleased will falter when compared to a body of believers who live as if sin truly is a deadly illness they have been healed from and hell is a real place they’ve been saved from.

Image by Fabebk via Creative Commons. Image cropped.