Therapeutic Christianity
Any student of U.S. culture today must recognize the pervasiveness of therapeutic systems and language in daily life. At my gym the television that entertains the stationary bikers and elliptical trainees always shows the same channel, so every morning it makes the transition from “Good Morning America” to Regis and Kelly to Dr. Phil McGraw. Dr. Phil, although the latest and currently the most popular TV therapist, joins Dr. Laura and Dr. Ruth and a long line of radio talk therapy shows. We talk about our feelings these days, something my parents never did as far as I can remember. And when we talk about them we use words like “depressed” rather than sad, lonely, blue, sick, nostalgic, or even melancholy. A child might feel happy but describe herself (and, unfortunately be described by her teacher/parents/counselor) as “hyper.” Therapeutic language, and therapy of one kind or another, has taken the place of an older religious way of appropriating experience and understanding the world, a vision that pitted cosmic forces in the struggle between sin and salvation, heaven and hell.
That having been said, however, another feature of the therapeutic culture in the early 21st century is the seemingly seamless convergence of Christianity and therapy. Katja, in a blog entitled “Magazine Digest,” gave a thumbnail review of an article that she had read in a popular Canadian men’s magazine, Toro. The author noted the use of therapeutic terms in business, but he also included the observation of a friend of his that many of the terms had made been taken over from religious education. These include terms like “closure” and “community” (not as in “the Shaker Community in Canterbury, NH”; rather, this refers to individuals who have something in common but as a group lack all other characteristics of community, as in “the business community,” “the gay community,” “the political community,” “the cyber community,” and so forth). This observation does not contradict my previous judgment that therapy seems more important than sin and salvation. Some of the largest and least compatible of the subdivisions of American Christianity, like the Roman Catholic Church and American evangelicals have turned into a Christian therapeutic community. And while their theology remains unchanged, the therapeutic practice has changed the meaning of Christian dogma. God offers therapy, and therapy offers us God.
On the surface the affinity of Christianity and therapy seems less than unlikely. While I might draw from a wider range of Christian confessions, what follows will deal almost entirely with evangelical Christianity. As a recovering evangelical, I know it inside and out. Therapy developed from asylum psychiatry and, later, from the treatment of nervous disorders. It was a medical specialty, and had roots in the Enlightenment and medicine, and, later, psychology. Practitioners might be believers, but that was not a prerequisite. Tension and sometimes open conflict existed between the Enlightenment “faith” in human goodness and perfectibility and the Christian dogma of original and humanly irremediable sin. Growing up in an evangelical household, I never received any positive impression of any kind of psychotherapy. I believed that the people drawn into therapy must be weak, weird, and crazy. Certainly they had to be at least middle-class if not wealthy, because I never had the impression that therapy was something any of us could afford. And the best known symbol of therapy was Sigmund Freud, a cigar smoking atheist completely preoccupied with sex. How repulsive!
But even without my realizing it, therapeutic and evangelical practices had already merged and probably continued to merge all around me. I was just a kid. I didn’t know a lot of things. I was still Republican I didn’t even know about the therapeutic culture. But I did know about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that helped otherwise unsalvageable drinkers. A.A. had begun during the Great Depression and has continued to grow and spread across the U.S. and around the world. It has provided the impetus and model for the 12-step programs, a widely practiced approach to domestic violence, drug abuse, and many other social problems. I don’t know any of these organizations first hand, but I have attended an A.A. meeting and have some sense of how they operate. At the meeting one or two individuals shared their experience of alcoholic decline and their eventual recovery through the help of A.A. There were some other rituals, including holding hands and non-sectarian prayer. All very simple. All very evangelical. This exactly matched the experience of my Christian youth camp and of revival meetings when brothers and sisters would witness about finding Jesus. A.A., and for all I know the entire 12-step community, is evangelicalism minus Christianity.
If the recovery movement has carried evangelicalism into the mainstream of American culture, therapeutic language has become a fundamental part of the evangelical subculture. For decades Guideposts for Living has relayed a quasi-Christian message completely mixed with the positive-thinking views of Norman Vincent Peale. There now exists specialists in Christian therapy [see Comment for my explanation of “Christian”]. A vast literature links the teachings of Christianity and the needs of individuals for mental health. Verses of scripture serve as guidelines for better living and healthier relationships. So, for instance, in an attempt to impress readers with the importance of “input and feedback” in relationships, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend note that “the Bible has harsh words for those who can’t handle input: ‘Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult; whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.’ (Proverbs 9:7)” (p. 63, and no, it is not clear to me how they drew that meaning from that verse). I don’t know if Jews, Moslems, and Hindus have mined their scriptures and rituals to shore up a therapeutic system (Yaacov? Saif? Neha? I need some help here.) But Christians have, and evangelicals seem to have taken on the task with all the fervor they are known for.
As I reflected on this it made more sense. One of the first steps in a 12 step program is to turn over the problem (alcohol, drugs, anger) to a “higher power.” Talk about lowest common denominator religion! Any concept of transcendent power, deity, god-head, or benign universal consciousness qualifies for the higher power position. All of us, even agnostics and atheists have times when they come face to face (or face to porcelain plumbing fixture) with problems that we cannot handle alone, when we want to turn the mess over to a cosmic parent no matter how unlikely. Ellie, at This is My Body, This is My Blood ends her poem “Dancing in the Dark,”
Remembering that you lost your religion a long time ago
Praying anyway” .
But it’s not just Ellie and I who’ve been there. A BBC
poll on religion in ten countries found that nearly 30% of self-identified atheists admitted to praying, sometimes.
Emergency prayer only reveals part of the connection between religion and therapy. After all, in a desperate situation, you will try anything, especially if it’s free. For someone who practices religion, though, belief can have far more important effects. In fact, the therapeutic Christianity of today promises that God or religion or redemption will penetrate every part of life. God will make us better, both in the sense of helping us to do good deeds but also in the sense of helping us overcome negative emotions and bad habits. And at the same time, a therapeutic Christian has ample evidence that God does all of this because, after all, the bad emotions loosen their grip and the bad habits come under control. I’m sure we have all come into contact with religious people who seemed always bright and cheerful, people who are so annoying that they are hard to forget. They seemingly live to convince us of the reality of false consciousness—religion, God’s drug.
Yet from their vantage, from the p. o. v. of therapeutic Christians, they really feel happy or in control or at least okay. And they’re sure that this feeling comes from their special, one on one relationship with the Creator of the Universe. Therapeutic Christianity, in fact, offers yet another variety of religious experience. William James, in Will to Believe and other writings offered as a means of grounding faith in philosophy the value of experience. Does belief in God make a difference for the believers? Does it strengthen the individual in the struggle for justice? Does it offer courage, patience, hope, and perseverance? Does it help us face the cold reality of death? If so, then belief has a value that we cannot ignore. For the pragmatist, or radical empiricist, experience always wins out over theory. Pragmatism should not be reduced to relativism. Purely idiosyncratic experience may have no value. To have “cash value,” a philosophic idea has to work “in the total push and pressure of the cosmos.” (Pragmatism, ch. 1)
We might expect to see the old “God is my Co-Pilot” bumper sticker replaced by “God is my Therapist” stickers—but don’t count on it. There’s still plenty of hellfire being handed around in evangelical churches. The therapeutic view of God and belief undermines orthodoxy which, after all, still relies on original sin with a capital “O” and on the cosmic struggle. There probably are not many Christians today who would accept eternal damnation for the glory of God, but there are still plenty who willingly condemn to hell non-Christians and even the Christian heterodox. No happiness in this life for unbelievers, and no eternal life. It sucks, but it’s God’s commandment.
But evangelical Christianity probably relies more on its therapeutic uses than most evangelicals recognize. Even the most ordinary descriptions of religious life contain some elements of it. You go to church because it makes you feel good; you enjoy the fellowship of other people in your congregation; prayer allows you to find relief from pressing personal problems. Although all of these have been used by churches and individual Christians through the ages, today churches emphasize these functions of religious life, and many churches have added elaborate new strategies for providing help for individual problems. And, the Christian groups that are most successful make the most use of therapeutic strategies.
The paradoxes here should be obvious. Evangelical Christianity, witness to a transcendent God and to a cosmic struggle carried out on planet earth, has all its claims now underwritten by the private experience of its adherents. And a movement that has consistently placed itself at odds with the secular culture that surrounds it has completely assimilated the language and rituals of secular therapy. That shouldn’t surprise those of you who believe in cultural hegemony. But it might also help expand our understanding of the pervasive power and influence of evangelical ideas and institutions in American society today. This reflection might also give us another reason—if we needed more--to reexamine all the claims of therapy and all the claims that the therapeutic culture has on us.
Comments
You write:"You go to church because it makes you feel good; you enjoy the fellowship of other people in your congregation; prayer allows you to find relief from pressing personal problems." I couldn't have put it any better myself.
There are plenty of retired people in India, and in my old neighbourhood in Delhi, who spend absured amounts of time in temples, doing nothing but catching up with last nights cricket game. I doubt very much that scriptures have anything to do with providing therapy to these people. It's the company that they're that does all the work, yet they're blissfully unaware of it.
Otherwise, there's a lot to be said for the Indian middle class approach to therapy, but this isn't the place for it.
Posted by: Neha | March 7, 2004 5:36 PM