Therapeutic Religion and the Nova Effect

© 2016 Chad Lakies, MDiv, PhD | Concordia University, Portland, OR, USA

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In this paper I argue that one of the prominent features of religion that emerges in the explosion of

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ways of believing that Charles Taylor calls “the nova effect” is that these new ways of believing have a

strongly therapeutic character. To begin, I’ll explain each of these two main ideas—the “nova effect” in

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the context of Taylor’s understanding of a secular age. Next, I will address the therapeutic as a

characteristic feature of religion in our secular age, engaging with various scholars whose work is fruitful

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for understanding therapeutic ideology and the culture it has produced. Then I will highlight the work of

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various sociologists of religion to demonstrate the plausibility of my thesis. Finally, I will conclude with

an evaluation of the therapeutic as a characteristic feature of religion in our secular age, noting its

weaknesses but also recognizing its present persistence on account of the social imaginary of our time.
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The Nova Effect
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In his massive and critically-acclaimed A Secular Age, Charles Taylor posits a new way to understand
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what we ought to mean when we use the term secular. Eschewing the secularization thesis from the

mid-20th Century, which many of its own promoters have repudiated, Taylor offers a rather bold and
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counter-intuitive thesis that focuses on the empirical reality of pluralism in the West. 1 Taylor suggests

that “secular” ought to refer to the fact that all views are contestable, and thus, contested. This, he
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suggests, is a novel but nevertheless accurate way of understanding our current cultural moment in the

West as “secular.” Taylor goes on to suggest, following Peter Berger, that the world is no less religious
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than it ever was and is perhaps even more so. 2 Thus he proposes what he calls the “nova effect.” 3 He
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1
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University / Belknap, 2007).
2
Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World:
Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
3
Taylor, A Secular Age, 299.
 uses this short hand to refer to the phenomenon that ways of being religious continue to be imagined

and adopted.

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Taylor adds to the description of this phenomenon by discussing the experience of cross-pressure

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exerted upon individuals living in the North Atlantic world. 4 The plurality of worldviews and religious

positions, he argues, inevitably exerts stress on those who hold to particular convictions. Thus, while

one might hold a particular set of convictions, she cannot avoid the empirical fact that others do not

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hold the same position, and in fact, a great many other possible convictions exist. Such awareness

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produces a sense of cross-pressure in which she contends and works to secure her own position while at

the same time being forced to admit that the existence of other positions raises doubts about her own.

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What arises in this context is a realization of the fragility of one’s own convictions (and those of others).

This sense of fragility contributes to a more comprehensive sense of uncertainty and anxiety about what
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one can know, epistemically speaking, as well as concerning one’s own sense of identity. This is what
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makes plurality in our secular age so unique.

The sense of uncertainty about knowledge one’s identity emerges from the fact that it was once
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communities of conviction from which personal identities were derived and which we trusted as

authorities concerning knowledge. This is no longer the case. Rather, Taylor describes our present era in
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which, after “Christendom” and the often religiously oriented nationalisms that followed, ours is a time

when people no longer look outward to the state or other institutions for identity, but now have turned
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inward. So we have what Taylor calls the Age of Authenticity. Definitive of this Age is “the social
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imaginary of expressive individualism” 5 in which the conditions of belief have shifted radically from what
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4
Taylor, A Secular Age, 299–304.
5
Taylor, A Secular Age, 486. The term “social imaginary” is Taylor’s own. He coined it first in Modern Social
Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University, 2004). He defines it as any given society’s or group’s “sense of the normal
expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective
practices that make up our social life” (24).
 they were. The social imaginary of this Age he explains, is the “understanding…that each one of us has

his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as

against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside.” 6 Taylor places the

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beginning of the Age of Authenticity in the 1960s. It is in this present era that we begin to witness the

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rapid expansion and entrenchment of the therapeutic.

Therapeutic Ideology and its Culture

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A basic understanding of the therapeutic is as a social ethos in which there is an effort to secure and

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sustain full autonomy of the self along with the elimination of anything that might restrict or restrain the

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self in its efforts at reaching self-fulfillment or self-realization. It should go without saying that, following

this definition, self-fulfillment or self-realization are also self-defined. In other words, as the self

constructs itself, it may or may not draw on any resource it deems necessary to help decide its own self-
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determined telos. Philip Rieff, the first great prophet of therapeutic culture, has called this a
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“manipulatable sense of well-being.” 7 There is great fluidity in the therapeutic, but its spirit is entirely

liberationist, aiming at maximal freedom and maximal choice for human beings.
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Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn succinctly describes the major traits of the therapeutic ethos. 8 The first has

already been noted in the above reference to autonomy, guaranteeing freedom from all external
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authority. This leads to a second trait that is produced by the centrality and quasi-worship of the self: an

ethic of emotivism. Alasdair MacIntyre described emotivism as the complete lack of ability to ground
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moral choices and self-understanding in a transcendent ethic or tradition, thus forcing the self to be
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6
Taylor, A Secular Age, 486.
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7
Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, 40th Anniversary ed. (Wilmington, DE: ISI,
2006), 10.
8
Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, “Liberation Therapeutics: From Moral Renewal to Consciousness Raising,” in Jonathan
Imber, ed., Therapeutic Culture: Triumph and Defeat (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004), 3–18. Lasch-Quinn
draws on work from James L. Nolan, The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (New York:
New York University, 1988).
 reflexive, making moral determinations by means of one’s emotional state as directed at various choices

and/or circumstances. 9 The third trait is the institutionalization of the therapeutic in a new “priestly

class.” That is, experts in the form of psychologists, counselors, life-coaches, self-help gurus, and even

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religious leaders. These new experts become what Rieff refers to as the new cultural elite. In this light,

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one might think of such well known figures as M. Scott Peck, Oprah Winfrey or Elizabeth Gilbert, and a

handful of others.

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Another way of describing the nature of the therapeutic is that it is constituted by the necessity of

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choice. 10 On the one hand, the imperative to choose emphasizes and upholds the anthropology that is

concomitant with the therapeutic: humans are construed as fully autonomous creatures. On the other

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hand, the making of choices aims at a particular goal: perhaps personal fulfillment, happiness, self-

actualization. Philip Rieff argues self-fulfillment is the highest good of therapeutic culture, saying, “That

a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior
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communal end, announces a fundamental change of focus in the entire cast of our culture.” 11 All choices
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are made to reach the ultimate goal of pleasing oneself, feeling good and being happy. Christopher
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Lasch echoes Rieff when he says, “The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today

hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the
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feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.” 12
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It is in the space of uncertainty and anxiety produced by the cross-pressure of our pluralistic age that the

therapeutic becomes ever more influential upon religion. James Tucker has demonstrated this in his
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9
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), 11–12.
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10
See Smith on the AA, which has the ultimate value of bare choice (How Not to be Secular, 85); Taylor, SA 478
11
Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 223. See also
his My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations on the Aesthetics of Authority (Charlotteville, VA: University of
Virginia).
12
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York:
Norton, 1979), 7.
 studies of the American religious environment. In his analysis, he finds widespread infiltration of a

therapeutic ideology.

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[M]uch of Western religion, which has hardly disappeared, now incorporates a therapeutic

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ideology. American Protestants, for example, now define God more like a counselor who

responds to individual needs and feelings than a judge who condemns sinners and blesses the

faithful. The synthesis of therapy and religion is most clearly evident, however, among the many

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so-called New Age spiritual activities that have become popular during the past few decades. 13

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Tucker’s work focuses predominantly on the New Age movement, making it only one facet of how we

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can see the influence of therapeutic ideology in American religious life. We can go further to see how it

is playing out generationally as observed in other sociological and ethnographic research. Analyzing the

spiritual lives of the American baby-boomer generation, the renowned sociologist Robert Wuthnow
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observes the generally inward turn of American spirituality, saying, “Those who attribute the inward
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turn to American’s’ growing desire for a sense of the sacred are right in one respect: the collapse of the

sacred canopy under which to live in spiritual security has awakened a compulsion for a new kind of
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faith, a faith that requires inner knowledge and that must be renewed and renegotiated with life

experience.” 14 The sacred is now to be found on the inside, rather than in some kind of external
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community or institution. As one of Wuthnow’s interviewees reported on her process of turning inward

and discovering herself: “There is something so big inside of you and it is so powerful that you have to
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find it. That was it for me.” 15 Wade Clark Roof’s examination of the spiritual marketplace that emerged
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after the collapse of the sacred canopy helps us to see the shift in what was sought by individuals who
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13
James Tucker, "New Age Religion and the Cult of the Self." Society 39, no. 2 (2002): 46-51. See also Tucker’s
additional analysis of the New Age movement in “New Age Healers and the Therapeutic Culture,” in Imber,
Therapeutic Culture, 153–169.
14
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California, 1998),
167.
15
Wuthnow, After Heaven, 149.
 were pursuing this new sense of the sacred within therapeutic culture. “[W]hat was once accepted

simply as latent benefits of religion, for example, personal happiness and spiritual well-being we now

look upon more as manifest and, therefore, to be sought after and judged on the basis of what they do

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for us.” 16

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The work of sociologist Christian Smith focuses on the children of the baby-boomers, many of whom

were teenagers in America in the 2000s. Based on his ongoing longitudinal research with this

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demographic, Smith described what seemed to be a new form of religion emerging from the data.

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Dubbing this new religion Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Smith’s work offered another look at the way

therapeutic ideology has infected American religion. This led Smith to conclude that teenagers imagine

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religion to have a particular role in human life:

Most U.S. youth tend to assume an instrumental view of religion. Most instinctively suppose
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that religion exists to help individuals be and do what they want, and not as an external
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tradition or authority or divinity that makes compelling claims and demands on their lives,

especially to change or grow in ways they may not immediately want to. For most U.S.
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teenagers, religion is something to personally believe in that makes one feel good and resolves

one’s problems. For most, it is not an entire way of life or a disciplined practice that makes hard
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demands of or changes people. Stated differently, for many U.S. teenagers, God is treated as

something like a cosmic therapist or counselor, a ready and competent helper who responds in
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times of trouble but who does not particularly ask for devotion or obedience. 17
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One final area of sociological research has to do with those who identity as “none” on social surveys,

who are often also called “spiritual but not religious,” or SBNR. Drawing upon Rieff’s ideal character-
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16
Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Markeplace: Baby-Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton:
Princeton University, 2001), 78.
17
Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 148.
 type that he called “Psychological Man,” theologian Linda Mercadante writes that an SBNR takes “his or

her own inner state as determinative rather than looking outward toward certain agreed-upon

authoritative or society-wide standards. In this milieu, ‘self-fulfillment’ becomes one’s main organizing

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principle.” 18 What Mercandante finds in examining the religious or spiritual content of the beliefs and

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convictions of SBNRs is a significant amount of both hybridity and fluidity. Not only are those who

identify as SBNRs drawing on the teachings and beliefs of various traditions to create their own unique

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hybridized spiritualties. They also tend not to stay connected for long in any one particular community,

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but move fluidly in and out of them, sometimes spending significant amounts of time practicing their

spirituality alone. 19 In the end, Mercandante concludes that the primary reasons SBNRs “value religion

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or spiritually” is “only for its therapeutic, behavior-modifying, or functional aspects.” 20

Joining the accounts of various other scholars in psychology, sociology and cultural studies, the

therapeutic is widely described, especially in its religious form, as serving to shore up the self’s anxieties
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and uncertainties concerning knowledge and identity. Therapeutic religion ostensibly returns control to
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the individual through instrumental rationality to anticipate and eliminate all the contingencies in life.
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Evaluating Therapeutic Religion in the Age of Authenticity

What are we to make of this phenomenon of how the therapeutic is featuring significantly as a
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characteristic of religion in the nova of new ways of believing in our secular age? There are a handful of

possible responses, each with its own constructive contribution. For the sake of time however, I will
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highlight that of Charles Taylor.

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18
Mercadante, Belief without Borders, 129.
19
Mercadante, Belief without Borders. Various examples of hybridity are discussed in chap. 5 on “Transcendence.”
Concerning SBNR views about engaging in spirituality with others, see chap. 7 on “Community.”
20
Mercadante, Belief without Borders, 244.
 Taylor suggests there are two likely responses to the therapeutic character believing in our Age of

Authenticity. One can either decry it as a devolution toward individualist relativism. Or one might cheer,

believing it to be just the sort of liberative progress that is needed in a culture stultified by its inherited

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religious interdictions. Taylor thinks that each of these options have inherent weaknesses and puts them

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aside for a more nuanced response. In brief, Taylor sees the “new normal” of the expressive

individualism that is definitive of the therapeutic ethos as an age in which the contestability of beliefs

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and their concomitant optionality tend to flourish. In other words, Taylor’s final evaluation of the Age of

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Authenticity is fairly positive. He does not see in it the threat that many religious conservatives tend to

see. Nor does he see it necessarily as an advance on an antiquated past. Rather, he views it as a time of

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possibility for various views to flourish and work themselves out by various means of negotiation

between individuals, communities, institutions, and societies at large. What will come of this Age he

does not predict, except to highlight the possibilities of conversions toward the end of A Secular Age.
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Another response comes from Linda Mercandante. She recognizes that the religious teachings and
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practices that are being adopted by SBNRs in various hybridized forms have each emerged from some
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particular tradition, within that tradition’s particular narrative of existence, and for a particular purpose.

She is concerned that by detaching them from their original contexts these practices and teachings lose
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their meanings. Thus, SBNRs are attempting to make meaning out of now meaningless or

decontextualized rituals and doctrines. Furthermore, to treat religions as manipultable and malleable in
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this manner, SBNRs end up construing the religions as if they were all ultimately about the same thing.
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All of these reductions trivialize religion. How can we really understand the profound context of

any particular religion, if we leave out its metaphysical, conceptual, and intangible aspects? If
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you rip a religious practice out from the tradition’s roots, you may well impede the prophetic
 and culture-challenging features of that religion. And what is the point of working to preserve

and hand on tradition if they are ultimately the same? 21

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A final response comes from Christian Smith. His critique of therapeutic religion builds on Mercadante’s.

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A therapeutic reduction of religion, Smith argues, is something like an “internal secularization” of a

particular tradition. Concerning Christianity and various other prominent faiths in America, Smith

observes, “it does indeed appear to me that mainstream American religion—which now also includes

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evangelical Protestantism—reflects a process of internal secularization, whereby ‘the secular ideas of

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the America Dream’—namely individually defined, subjective, therapeutic happiness—“pervade church

religion” in the United States.” 22

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Smith goes on however to offer a tentatively hopeful conclusion. He argues that therapeutic religion is

parasitic. That is, therapeutic religion leans upon the older, established traditions and relies on them to
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exist. Without the pre-existing content of those faiths, there would be nothing to pervert. Smith
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suggests that such parasitism cannot continue on forever. Following the traditional secularization

theorists, this may mean that the parasitism of therapeutic religion will continue extracting the life out
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of its host until it is fully dead. Or it may mean that, given the growing awareness of the “internal

secularization” of American religion, religious leaders and congregations may appropriate strategies
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meant to renew the socialization of young people into a more authentic version of the faith. 23

Conclusion
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I have worked to make the case here that one of the major characteristics of religion that has emerged
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in our secular age is that it is therapeutic. Within the nova of religious forms of believing that have
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21
Mercadante, Belief without Borders, 244–45.
22
Smith, “Is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism the New Religion of American Youth?” Smith quotes Thomas Luckmann,
The Invisible Religion (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 36.
23
Smith, “Is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism the New Religion of American Youth?”
 exploded into Western culture life, we have seen that within a wide swath of those who claim some sort

of religious or spiritual disposition, the aim is to use whatever faith they identify with to their own

personal ends, shaping a life with the ultimate goal of well-being. Religion is just playing a part here. This

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is not to say the therapeutic is ultimately a feature of all religious persons or of all the new emerging

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religions and spiritualties we are observing in the nova. Furthermore, there has been no discussion of

those who would consider themselves atheists or agnostics (who might reject or doubt

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religion/spirituality for therapeutic reasons, such as on account of particular dissatisfactions 24), nor has

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there been much focus on non-Western religions to the extent they have a presence in the West. 25 This

is for lack of space, not for lack of data. Perhaps this would mean that Taylor’s idea of a nova should

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apply to other ways of believing that are not so narrowly understood as “religious” or “spiritual,” which

seems to be the intended reference when he discusses belief. 26 At any rate, as preliminary examination

suggests such further exploration would likely only support the thesis presented here and offers itself as
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an opportunity for future work.
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24
See for example Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, Church Refugees (Loveland, CO: Group, 2015); Phil Zuckerman,
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Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (Oxford: Oxford University, 2012).
25
Buddhism would be the first area to examine in this regard. See for example, Franz Metcalf, “The Encounter of
Buddhism and Psychology,” in Prebish and Baumann, eds. Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia (Berkley:
University of California, 2002), 348–64.
26
Taylor acknowledges that his book focuses on the world of Latin Christendom, thus invoking the sense of belief
and “unbelief” from a uniquely religious perspective. A Secular Age, 21.