The Triumph of the Therapeutic and the Subversion of the American Church

“Verily there is that which is more contrary to Christianity, and to the very nature of Christianity, than any heresy, any schism, more contrary than all heresies and all schisms combined, and that is, to play Christianity.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Over 50 years ago, sociologist Philip Rief’s insightful work The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud described a monumental cultural shift taking place in modern Western culture, a shift from traditional communal values grounded in transcendent religious and moral truth to individualistic values grounded in therapeutic psychological self-fulfillment.^[1]Philip Rief, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Due to the increasing secularization of Western culture, the influence of Freudian thought, and the rising culture of affluence, the “religious man” was being replaced by the “psychological man,” the difference between which Rief pithily described thusly: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man was born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when “I believe,” the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to “one feels,” the caveat of the therapeutic.”^[2]Rief, 24-25. The psychological man, increasingly typical in modern Western culture, is not concerned with conformity to an objective moral order, in spite of the self-sacrifice this may require; rather, he is concerned with achieving a subjective sense of personal well-being. 

This monumental cultural shift has produced a mindset among most modern Westerners that is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ, which calls people to deny themselves, find their identity and purpose in participating in the story of Scripture, and be willing to share in the sufferings of Christ. What Rief insightfully recognized, though, was that, rather than remaining an external alternative to Christianity, the therapeutic ethos had in fact already to a large extent permeated Western churches. Rather than radically resisting the therapeutic ethos, Western churches had sought to adapt to it, “engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope that by embracing doctrinal expressions of therapeutic aims they will be embraced by the therapeutics; a false hope–the therapeutics need no doctrines, only opportunities. But the spiritualizers persist in trying to maintain cultural contact with constituencies already deconverted in all but name.”^[3]Rief, 18. The psychological man may continue to participate in the institutions and rituals of the Christian religion, but rather than doing so as a means to facilitate denying himself, taking up his cross, and following Jesus, he does so as a means to achieve a state of psychological well-being. Rief predicted that, “Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.”^[4]Rief, 27.

Rief’s predictions have proven to be deeply prophetic. A study of the spiritual and religious lives of American teenagers conducted in the early 2000s found that the responses of those interviewed contained very few references to basic Christian beliefs, but thousands of references to feeling happy.^[5]Christian Smith and Melissa Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 167-168. Analyzing hundreds of in-depth interviews, the researchers commented, “What very few U.S. teens seem to believe, to put it one way, is that religion is about orienting people to the authoritative will and purposes of God or about serious, life-changing participation in the practices of the community of people who inherit the religiocultural and ethical tradition. As far as we could discern, what most teens appear to believe instead is that religion is about God responding to the authoritative desires and feelings of people. In simple terms, religion is essentially a tool for people to use to get what they want, as determined not by their religion but by their individual feelings and desires.”^[6]Smith and Lundquist, 149. The researchers concluded that, regardless of religious tradition, the de facto majority religion among American teenagers was a vague “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”; while this de facto religion was especially present among mainline Protestants and Catholics, it was present among supposedly theologically conservative Protestants as well.^[7]Smith and Lundquist, 162-163. The therapeutic had triumphed indeed, and its triumph has only continued to advance since that time.

A decade before these disturbing findings, evangelical theologian David F. Wells had already noted with alarm how deeply the therapeutic ethos permeated evangelical churches, to the point of supplanting theology as the de facto center of evangelical Christianity. In his insightful work, No Place for Truth; or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?,^[8]David F. Wells, No Place for Truth; or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids, MI: 1993). he bemoaned the extent to which evangelical Christianity had abandoned a focus on objective theological truth in favor of a focus on subjective personal religious experience. This has caused the church to abandon holy conformity to God’s will in favor of what people like and what evangelistic techniques “succeed” in attracting people. Meanwhile the role of the pastor has shifted from a focus on being a teacher of the objective truth of God’s word to a focus on being a professional manager and therapist. 

As Wells notes, all this leads to a religion that is quite different than orthodox Christian faith: “good and evil are reduced to a sense of well-being or its absence, God’s place in the world is reduced to the domain of private consciousness, his external acts of redemption are trimmed to fit the experience of personal salvation, his providence in the world diminishes to whatever is necessary to ensure one’s having a good day, his Word becomes intuition, and conviction fades into evanescent opinion. Theology becomes therapy, and all the telltale symptoms of the therapeutic model of faith begin to surface. The biblical interest in righteousness is replaced by a search for happiness, holiness by wholeness, truth by feeling, ethics by feeling good about oneself. . . The psychologizing of faith is destroying the Christian mind. It is destroying Christian habits of thought because it is destroying the capacity to think about life in a Christian fashion. . . It can no longer sustain the bountiful harvest of being able to discern between good and evil, to think about all life in terms of God and his purposes, to construct a way of being that accords with his Word, and to contest the norms of cultural plausibility. And when people are no longer compelled by God’s truth, they can be compelled by anything, the more so if it has the sheen of excitement or the lure of the novel or the illicit about it.”^[9]Wells, 182-183. Wells ended his book by calling for a reformation that will return theology to the center of church life and enable Christians to live genuinely Christian lives.

Three decades later, such a reformation has not occurred. Rather, the developments noted by Rief and Wells have continued to advance in the American church. So-called “progressive” churches blatantly embrace the therapeutic model of faith, explicitly rejecting the Authority of God’s Word and believing in whatever idea of god will make them feel good. But even in evangelical churches theoretically committed to historic Christian orthodoxy, it is evident that the therapeutic model of faith is widespread.

This is the fundamental problem which underlies most other problems in the American church. The church is in desperate need of moral revival, greater theological orthodoxy, more disciplined church life and more faithful Christian political witness. But none of this is possible unless church members are truly committed to Christian discipleship in the first place. As Rief noted, “Nowadays the world is full of tame Christians; in consequence, the churches are empty of life, if not of people.”^[10]Rief, 99. Those who are “already deconverted in all but name,” who regard Christianity as a “religion” which can help them attain a sense of personal well-being, have been tamed by the world, and are not Christians in any meaningful sense. Tame “Christians” are incapable of viewing all of reality from the standpoint of the gospel of Jesus Christ and of costly, obedient discipleship. This is why, rather than providing a unified, embodied witness to the Kingdom of God that provides a challenge to the state, American Christians are overwhelmingly themselves controlled by secular political ideologies (whether of the left or the right) in their political and moral thinking. 

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot” (Matt 5:13). This is the judgment that must come upon the American church, which, in spite of its massive size and influence, has for the most part failed to show forth God’s Kingdom. As the American church continues to decline in both size and political and cultural power, we must pray that a faithful remnant can, by God’s grace, bring about a genuine reformation.