The Golden Calf of the Therapeutic

In our day, mental health dominates discussion and the term has bloated to an exceedingly broad umbrella, encompassing everything from psychological disorders to anything that makes me anxious or leads to mental discomfort. A google search defines mental health as “a person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being” and it is to this expansive definition that I refer to in this post. I am not writing about disorders, mental illness, or many of the viable medication offered for mental health; only the preeminence this broader category has taken in the modern mind over every other category, and particularly that of religion.

In The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors recognize a concept creep in the category of “safety,” and one example is in the term “trauma.” Trauma up until 1980 was used only to describe a “physical agent causing physical damage.” After 1980 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder became the first type of traumatic injury that is not physical, but still the parameters were strict: it must “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone and be outside the range of usual human experience.” But the definitions have since softened and widened to include almost any kind of negative or perceived negative experience: “by the early 2000s, the concept of trauma within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything ‘experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” The term had undergone a transformation from an objective measurement to something subjective and largely judged by the individual self. 

The Triumph of the Therapeutic Self

Today the broader categories of mental health and self-care rule our everyday conversations and content intake. Books and social media feeds fill our minds with this supreme priority of emotional wellness, elevating it to a standard which everything else must subordinate to, a rubric by which we score all else. Something is judged good as long as it is perceived as conducive to mental health, and if it is not, cut it out. Take care of yourself at all costs for everything in the end must submit to your well-being.

This is exactly how Carl Trueman describes the modern “psychological man” in his illuminating book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Where prior eras found their “purpose and well-being by being committed to something outside themselves,” now “in the world of the psychological man . . . the commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed. Thus, the order is reversed. Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being.”

With one's “sense of inner well-being” as the final arbiter for what the self will accept or reject, Christianity must also conform to this inner sense. We see it happen all the time. The Bible says forsake not the assembling of yourselves together—a clear command if ever there was one. But say I have had a negative experience in a church before. Say the church I attend has people who make me uncomfortable. “Well then,” the psychological man says, “now that you put it that way, in the name of your almighty mental health you are relinquished from the command.” The Bible says, put to death what is earthly to you—to make no less than total war against your flesh, giving it no quarter. Sexual desires beyond the marriage union, sloth, self-centeredness, envy—it all has to die. But what of the harm this brutality does to one’s mental health? This is exactly what Sigmund Freud called repression, his contention being that since he judged repressing such fundamental desires harmful to one’s psychological state, it is wrong and must be avoided. This is now mainstream public sentiment.  

But Jesus never said following him would be therapeutically healthy, He said “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He said “fear Him who has power to cast both body and soul in hell” (Matt 10:28). He even went as far as to say “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matt 5:29). What hard words! If taken seriously and subjected to they cannot but negatively affect one’s psychological well-being. And these verses are not rare, cherry-picked ones: all throughout the Bible we find similar examples of disruptive, self-killing, utterly crushing commands. 

Do you see the problem? Modern “psychological man” (also known as “we”) will struggle to submit to such constricting terms. Many will reject it out right, while others who would like to have it both ways will take scissors to the Word and include only the parts judged conducive to their current emotional state. The mentally troubling parts--the sexual restraint, the gender distinctions, the ethics of “consider others better than yourself,” the command to “forgive one another,” the call to “endure hardship as a good soldier”--can all be skirted, for they obviously are not favorable to our emotional well-being. 

God is Not Safe

We play a dangerous game however when we come to God with our checklist for what we will submit to and what we will not. We do not know who we are dealing with when we make our emotions the barometer and say I will go this far and no further. God demands all. Some call God a gentleman, a Being who politely complies with our terms and pushes us no farther than we would like to go. But there is nothing polite about the Holy One. God is no tame lion. He is not safe. He is described as a Consuming Fire: invasive, threatening, even traumatizing—which is exactly why theologians have called mortal contact with the divine in Scripture as “traumatic.” He is the God who makes Isaiah shout “woe is me” and induces Job to repent in dust and ashes. The merest glimpse of the Son’s power causes Peter to say “leave me for I am a sinful man!” God alone is the one who makes demands and works to transform. As He is God He is entirely free to do so as He sees fit. If He calls us to suffer through something that is truly traumatizing and painful, who will stay his hand? If His commands feel emotionally burdensome, like a war within the inward man, who will say He has no right to command thus?

C.S. Lewis has written about this many places, but I love his quote from Mere Christianity about God’s renovation of the redeemed man. How He so often goes where we wish He wouldn’t, demanding we lose those parts we love most:

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

Such renovation is intrusive, it is the furthest thing from comfortable, and it is hard on one’s emotional well-being. But the outcome is what counts. He is building something far beyond the shallow end game of the psychological man, beyond the comfort of the immediate. He is building a palace.

Death to Life

In Christianity the pattern of death to life is repeated over and over again. It is not life that is the starting line but death, which requires turmoil and emotional hardship. The Bible says whoever exalts himself will be humbled, whoever humbles himself will be exalted. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). Even the cross itself, the focal point of our religion, speaks directly to this: it is only through the death of the Son of God that eternal life and glory imparted to those formerly dead in their trespasses and sins. Take away the death and there is no life. 

While this path seems foreboding and the call of our Savior no better than death itself, there is life and light if you stay long enough to find out. “Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Those who swallow the bitter pill will find there is truly wondrous rest to be found in Christ; and as we walk on the path which to our flesh seems so hard and torturous, even the journey becomes a delight as our feet are made suited for the path we tread.

The moral of the story is we must submit to God’s demands no matter the cost. The journey will hurt and there will be challenges that will undoubtedly bring great trial and pain. But this is the path to life. The path of insulation and emotional comfort at all costs, cloaked in the language of modern psychology, does not lead to life. It is only in dying every day and slowly, often painfully being conformed into the image of Jesus that we are awaken in new life. Accept His terms and be made new.

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Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind How Good Intentions and    Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. Kindle ed., Penguin Books, New York City, 2019, Loc 613-Loc 663.

Trueman, Carl R., and Rod Dreher. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Kindle ed., Crossway, 2020, Loc 686.

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. HarperCollins, 1998. Pg 205.