In Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (2024), Keith Hayward says that we live in a “therapy culture.” This is “a way of thinking” about upbringing and education “when the values and language of counseling and psychotherapy break out from the clinical setting and take hold within the cultural imagination more generally.” This perspective or approach leads to a reversal of goals in education and childrearing, which Hayward describes as “psychology first, education second.” Instead of challenging students to master new knowledge, the primary goal is to soothe their unpleasant emotional reactions to existential and educational challenges.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt address the same problem in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). They claim that overprotective parents and teachers constitute the main obstacle in bringing kids to maturity, as their main objective is to guard the children against hurting. Another obstacle is the will to keep children at home forever, which leads to their cannibalization. To use Edwin H. Friedman’s term from The Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (2017), we could speak here about the unwillingness to let children differentiate themselves, or develop their own particular identity. Overprotective parenting focuses on the parents’ feelings instead of the kids’ well-being. Protecting children is all good as long as it stays within a reasonable range and does not sabotage the other side of childrearing, namely growth and maturation. Exposure to challenges and risks that can lead to physical or emotional pain is inevitable in coming to maturity. But if the goal is shielding from negative emotions and jumping from one bliss to another, and if safety really and always must come first, then no wisdom can be gleaned through exposure and experience. In the end, what the therapy culture has to offer is to produce emotionally crippled future generations with no grit, no endurance, and no taste for greatness.
In The Failure of Nerve, Friedman claims that the overprotective mindset is the opposite of the ethos that leads to any positive development, whether personal or communal. Those who sought safety first never became great and advanced communities. His favorite example is Columbus, who dared to cross the Atlantic and thus gave momentum to the Renaissance with his discovery of America or, at least, became one of the midwives of the new era. Had he stayed at home and been satisfied with, at most, the further exploration of the known realms, the stagnation of the late Middle Ages would have been prolonged. Without people who want to go “where no man has gone before” and take the risk of failure—but also the risk of true discovery that might change their lives and perhaps even start a new epoch—our fate would be stagnation and recession.
The therapeutic culture has many sources for Hayward, but one is special: misunderstanding love. Mercy and compassion are undoubtedly Christian virtues, especially when applied to our neighbors, including our enemies. This was not the attitude of ancient pagans but arrived with the embrace of the Gospel, as Tom Holland shows in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019). Yet, mercy can quickly degenerate if divorced from justice. If an act of charity is not aimed at the right objective, if it does not aim at helping others to mature and grow in glory, then we should question whether it is mercy at all.
The Christian compassion divorced from the Biblical sense of righteousness evolves into what could be called empathy, which is quite a recently invented idea. In The Failure of Nerve, Friedman defines it as “that feeling for others [that] helps them mature or become more responsible.” So far, so good. However, it never delivers what it promises. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Cambridge Dictionary adds that empathy is “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.” Even this definition proves that empathy is not very helpful, even useless. First, just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, pain is in the thalamus of the sufferer. It is hard to imagine that we can honestly imagine and even co-experience someone else’s bad feelings. But even if we could, how would that help the suffering person? We are indeed called to weep with the weeping but also to rejoice with those who rejoice, and the context of these words shows that Paul does not mean to be content with co-weeping. True, this is all we can do at certain times, but it cannot be all the good we want for those who weep. We cannot limit Christian compassion to co-weeping and thus turn it into empathy. Besides, even weeping is an action rather than “imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”
Furthermore, people’s existential pain may be genuine, but taking it away for whatever price and as soon as possible does not produce endurance, so it does not help on the way to maturity. Soothing pain is not enough to get someone to walk straight again. The obvious example is those who abuse different kinds of substances, which help them forget their misery. The substances soothe the pain for sure, but at what price? The usual result is addiction, which is a kind of slavery. To put it differently, when soothing pain is the ultimate goal, pain always returns without us being able to bear it without artificial help. Yet, many parents, teachers, and pastors keep believing that this is what their job is all about. Eliminating pain makes life easier and more bearable, but only for a while. Still, on its own, it leads to even more existential suffering not only because it does not train our emotional framework to take the beating from reality but also because it robs us of real achievements and development. Thus, we turn in circles, attracting pain and getting rid of it, but the turning never leads out of the bleak and subpar existence. Yet, this is all that the therapeutic culture has to offer. It is bad for the patients but suitable for those who prey on them.
The culture of charity, deprived of the proper sense of righteousness, leads to the culture of empathy and, thus, to the therapeutic culture and its distorted version of Christianity and the Gospel. Maybe for too many years in preaching the Gospel, we have focused on the forgiveness of sins and pushed away the coming-to-maturity part of it (see Ephesians 4:11–15). Justification (as traditionally presented in books on dogmatics) reconciles us with God so that we can embrace the joy of salvation, which can be (mis)understood as the lack of misery and the feeling of contentment. Sometimes, an easy life of immediate gratification is added as a bonus. Created to be glory seekers, we have become pleasure enjoyers instead. This kind of Gospel cannot save us. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, if we are after soothing existential pain and the feeling of pleasure, a bottle of cognac will work better than the Gospel (see: “Answers to Questions on Christianity” in God in the Dock). This is because “we are not merely creatures of pleasure” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity). Some might add that our good deeds prove our regeneration and election. Still, even this does not do justice to the story of the Bible, which we should read rather like the story of glorification than mere salvation.
As James B. Jordan emphasizes, “We are said to be created in the image of the God who made the world in verses 2–25 of Genesis 1. God had made the world, and now He commissions man to take it over. But the man He designs for this task is nothing less than His own very image and likeness” (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints: Studies in the Patriarchs of Genesis). God did not create us to stay in the Garden forever, enjoying an easy and painless life in kindergarten equipped with all kinds of safety features and a free ice cream dispenser. God created us to imitate Him in His epic work of glorification so that we also become more and more glorious. From the beginning, God told us to go where no man has gone before, study, explore, guard, cultivate, transform, and fill the Earth with the knowledge and glory of God. Thus, we are teleological beings, and only sitting and enjoying ourselves is not an option. It would make us not only bored to death but also genuinely miserable. True, once a week and on a few other occasions, we rest, yet this is not so much leisurely rest but a celebration of the fruit of labor.
Of course, entering the great unknown is a challenge. It stirs up fear, can be dangerous, and requires sacrifice. We are tempted to choose safety, especially when it is the safety of a comforting environment with no risk, danger, or challenge. Nevertheless, “safety can never be allowed to become more important than adventure” because if it does, then we become “a nation of ‘skimmers,’ living off the risks of previous generations and constantly taking from the top without adding significantly to its essence” (Friedman, The Failure of Nerve). Of course, an individual or two can be a skimmer, but he would never want too many members of his society to follow in his footsteps. However, the real problem with becoming a skimmer is that it deprives us of the opportunity to grow, to become strong and wise, and to earn the wreath of glory—to become what God created us to be.
Yes, because of the Fall, we need Christ’s blood to wash away our sins and reconcile us with God. But this is only the beginning of the Christian life. To stop here would be to miss the point of the Cross because the Cross is the way to glory and not just redemption. Even to a lesser degree, it is a way to freedom from the pains of life and cheap pleasures. Yes, in the resurrection, God will wipe away all our tears and turn the sorrowful sowing into a joyful harvest, but there can be no joy of the harvest without the toil, pains, and sometimes even tears of sowing.
In the end, the therapeutic culture is not only a distortion of the Gospel, a misunderstanding of charity, but also a tool in the hands of Satan to prevent us from growing into the glorious likeness of Christ. Satan wants to keep us soft, spooked, and silly because then it is so much easier to keep us under his power. But first of all, he wants to prevent us from filling the earth with the glory of God and thus from becoming glorious according to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).
Bogumil Jarmulak is pastor of Evangelical Reformed Church (CREC) in Poznan, Poland. His PhD is from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.