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.
What happens when the language of therapy becomes the language through which Christians understand sin, suffering, and human flourishing? In this piece, Matthew Loftus examines how modern psychology has shaped Christian thinking about the self, and argues that the Church’s task… pic.twitter.com/4xD2u3QFF0
— First Things (@firstthingsmag) September 28, 2026
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