It is important for people of faith to keep in mind that there can be no real compromise between Christianity and the psychological society. Rieff in a 1991 essay insists that the therapeutic culture is at war with traditional culture and aims to destroy it. This seems overblown at first. If the therapeutic culture is our enemy, it appears rather a tame one. After all, it speaks the language of compassion, sensitivity, and tolerance. But any culture that has no use for truth is ultimately a dangerous culture. If there is no meaning outside the self, there is no meaning. And if there is no meaning, there is no morality. As Dostoevsky famously warned, without God everything is permissible—and the therapeutic culture has no God. It is well on the way to dismantling the moral structure of society through semi–sincere appeals to tolerance, compassion, and diversity. There is no reason to think it will put limits on what is morally permissible. There is, in the end, not a dime’s worth of difference between the nihilism of the therapeutic culture and the nihilism of a Nietzsche—except that the therapeutic culture lacks Nietzsche’s sense of the tragic nature of life.
The twentieth century has seen many attacks on Christianity, but the frontal attacks of militant atheists, Marxists, and Nazis have not resulted in as much lost ground for Christians as the more insidious attacks of the therapeutic culture. The sense of guilt, the sense of sin, the sense of the sacred, the sense that there is another order of authority by which we are judged—these have not disappeared entirely from Christian culture, but they have been eroded. If this is difficult to see, it is because of the fog that the culture of therapy emits—an empathic fog which surrounds us and confuses us and prevents us from seeing life clearly. We wander around in this fog thinking our enemy is our friend because he is so exquisitely concerned with our health.
The only thing powerful enough to cut through this fog is the light of revelation. Revelation reminds us that physical and emotional health is not the Alpha and Omega of existence. The Gospels tell us that if our hand offends us we should cut it off, it being better to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell. Likewise, it may be better to enter the kingdom of Heaven with a repressed psyche than to enter the other place brimming with self–assertiveness. There is no ultimate consolation to be found in the theories propounded by psychologists. Psychology has very little to say to the majority of suffering people in this world, and absolutely nothing to say to the fact that all of us must one day die. The therapeutic culture’s well–adjusted person, for all his serene sense of self, has one overwhelming problem: he is blinded to the beatific vision.