The following two articles are best read in tandem, since the second is a response to the first. So, rather than submit them individually, I'm recommending them here in a text post.

On October 12, 2022, Samuel James published “When the Therapeutic Replaces Sin” over at Mere Orthodoxy. His piece is a review of Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissicism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.

While James’s critique is not entirely negative, he is pointed in his analysis of DeGroat’s significant flaws from trying to supplant traditional understandings of sin and morality and spirituality with modern, secular psychological concepts and terminology:

By abandoning the theological language of sin, idolatry, and failure to love others, and by porting in their place the language of therapy culture, DeGroat has left the reader with the near impossible task of resisting spiritual abuse with nothing more than impressions. The only way to follow DeGroat’s framework to its consistent conclusions would be to only and ever center the felt experiences of some people, and to rebuke and correct everyone else. Banished are any thoughts of helping even the suffering to view their experiences from the lens of Scripture. Gone is the possibility of seeing both those in authority and those under authority as fallible people. Instead, the spiritual world of When Narcissism Comes to Church is divided into black and white, good and bad people: the good people who are in touch with their inner selves, and the bad people who are not.

And in conclusion, James writes:

This book makes a monumental decision: a decision to put the Bible’s moral language to the side, to call a disorder what the Bible calls sin, to call self-actualization what the Bible calls repentance. This book’s aversion to biblical categories does not empower readers to confront spiritually abusive systems. It instead makes those systems harder to disrupt. I said above this book could split churches. Yes it could. But splitting a church and defeating spiritual abuse are not the same thing. Only in the light of God’s judgment against our self-love, against the curvature of our affections inward, can we see other people for divine image bearers that they really are. Only in the light of God’s Word can we discern sin from mistake, selfishness from reasonableness. It won’t do to respond to spiritually toxic environments by centering experiences and feelings at the cost of biblical categories and the discovery of truth. This approach merely exchanges one set of heresies for another.

Within the church, especially within the theological circles that may folks on this sub run, there has been a rapid increase in recent years to condemn things like spiritual abuse, and narcissism, and gaslighting and so forth. And when those terms are used, you can bet that therapy is often the recommended course of action. James argues here how an avoidance of biblical categories and a reliance on purely secular categories is not the answer.

Not surprisingly, James ruffled a few feathers with his review, and Mere O’s editor-in-chief, Jake Meador, took notice.

On November 2, 2022, Meador published a follow-up article, reflecting on the reaction to the original review: “HR Goes to Church”. As Meador begins:

The longer that I listen to folks who didn’t like Samuel’s review talk about Samuel’s review the more I think Samuel has it exactly right

And he continues, in his introduction:

My fear, in short, is that we have a growing contingent of more centrist, urbanite evangelicals (the sort who tend to read and like outlets like Mere O, frankly) who get their doctrine of sin and doctrine of salvation not from Scripture and the teachings of the church passed down to us over millennia, but from therapeutic categories and ways of imagining the human person.

To Meador, the rapid growth of therapy as a go-to source for Christians undermines the church:

This has the effect of rendering therapists the new priests and of making pastoral leadership and discipleship virtually impossible because any attempt to actually encourage people in Christian discipline can be dismissed as potentially abusive or indicative of narcissism in the pastor. It also implicitly re-situates the church and the individual Christian disciple into a different sort of world. In this world, the church is a community that stands beneath the judgment of the mental health professional and the Christian disciple is simply someone who has found Christianity to be a helpful part of emotional health and self-actualization. But the engine driving the train isn’t Christianity; it’s emotional health, harm prevention, and self-actualization.

The difficulty with this is that some of the goods that we are directed to pursue by concepts like “emotional health,” “self-actualization,” and so on are not actually good, but are instead idols that will lead us away from the life of Christian love

But Meador doesn’t stop there. As he digs deeper, he hits on the following:

We need to press this a bit more, I think. One of the most useful questions we can ask ourselves as we try to get our bearings in a very confusing time is something like this: “What kind of world does this thought system presuppose?” The problem with the Christian Nationalist schema, for example, is that it imagines a world where Christians are never called to suffer defeat or to die, which is actually a pretty horrifying error when one considers the biblical witness. But the therapeutic imagination imagines its own sort of false world, one defined by impersonal institutions, isolated individuals, and the professionalization of care, such that goods and services once rendered to one another organically through human relationships are now transformed into market goods that are bought and sold by licensed professionals.

Finally, Meador concludes with the following observation:

I suspect that the pivot amongst some centrist evangelicals toward a focus on emotional health, identity talk, and self-care is a movement of evangelicals who (rightly) fear being lumped in with Christian nationalists, but who also lack a positive Christian program for society, and therefore default to baptizing the categories that their audience has already deemed acceptable. The problem with this is that it situates the church’s witness within the frame of therapeutic culture, which makes it answerable to therapeutic culture and insulates the therapeutic from any sort of critique.

What I want to see, instead, is a centering of the Cross and the Eucharist in the life of Christian communities, which in turn equips them for lives of heroic sacrifice in the world.

I highly recommend both articles.