FAITH IS NOT THERAPY

the feel-good "revival" has a belief issue. secular critics of religious movements do, too.

“People just want to find something outside of their day-to-day life,” explains Cyriaque. “They’re looking for transcendence.”

Hence the Latin Mass: It’s the “most beautiful,” he says.

Rod Dreher is here quoting a young, traditionally inclined Catholic who’s participating in a massive pilgrimage from Paris to a cathedral 60-odd miles away. Dreher’s interviewee reflects a burgeoning sense among disaffected youth that religion is a good vibe. That quote could stand in for any number of explanations I’ve read regarding this alleged religious revival among the zoomers. For the most part, these new faithful aren’t into belief or faith. Dreher aptly describes their motives: “The reasons for the quiet revival of Catholicism among the young vary, but they all come down to the search for meaning, purpose, stability, and identity.”

In accounts of this feel-good revival, one seldom encounters a Moses at the burning bush moment, or a moment like Abraham realising the truth and smashing the inert idols in his father’s shop.¹ Rarely does one find—to cite a Christian story for greater relevance—an attempted parallel to Paul’s revelation on the road or to the mass conversions during Jesus’s apostles’ ministries in the book of their Acts.

Of course, few religious people have experiences like these. I’m not claiming every conversion story has to be up to literally biblical standards to be real. Those who think they had such an experience might later lose their faith anyway. Perhaps a more down to earth comparison would be to St. Augustine’s conversion; still, one finds few parallels in the many testaments of this new wave. My only point in bringing up classic conversion narratives is that most accounts of the nu spirituality are missing a consideration of belief. They’re about a desire for a special kind of high, not about a realisation that G-d exists.

Opinion writers and religious thinkers have spilled much ink in the last few years over this alleged resurgence of traditional religiosity among the younger generations. At The Free Press, a useful hub for this genre of writing, Madeleine Kearns wrote a bit ago about the experiences of new converts to Catholicism; per her earlier reporting, some young Catholics are becoming more traditional than their older coreligionists.

Peter Savodnik recently described the paths taken by numerous public intellectuals in their (re)discovery of religion. Reading his article, I began to feel uneasy about some of these intellectuals’ conception of faith. Mortal, worldly concerns seem to play a central role. But who knows whether they’re sincere, their few words in an article aren’t reflective of their whole selves. But they are reflective of the vibe around this “revival.”

Savodnik wonders, concerning the intellectuals he profiles, whether they truly came to believe in the dogmata of Christianity regarding Jesus’s godhood and resurrection, or rather, “did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark?” In any individual case, it could go either way. As a whole, though, I get the sense that the “revival” is mostly a wave of new social media aesthetics that can be dropped with a few clicks. Although to be fair, the situation Dreher describes, a massive crowd on a long haul to a certain cathedral, is more compelling than most such stories.

In a 2022 piece for the New York Times, Julia Yost discussed the movement of Dimes Square-adjacent New Right figures toward “traditional” Catholicism. Looking back, this trend was a forerunner to the broader shift we see all over the press now. During her exploration of the Dimes Square Catholic revival, Yost mulls over a central question: how sincere are these converts? What, in her words, “will sort the converts from the LARPers?” I suppose a good thing about being a religious devotee is that we’re confident that such things will become clear in the end. But for now, even as a non-Christian, I’m side-eyeing the whole fad.

In our alleged religious revival, I see a wave of people who have come to aesthetically appreciate Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa but have no belief in the angel piercing Teresa’s heart. If masses of disillusioned young people are finding faith, I’m not seeing them anywhere. Everywhere I see people embracing new “identities,” almost nowhere do I see throngs moved to spiritual conviction. And the half-fervour I see will not last long, because I doubt that the good vibes the new pilgrims want from faith will manifest without belief.

From Wikimedia

I’m going to outline a few issues I see with the new notion of “faith as therapy,” and I want to be abundantly clear—again—I am not challenging any individual’s faith. I have their words to go on, and it’s not my place to play psychic. If my wording implies otherwise at times, know that that’s a wording issue, not an issue of intent. A lot of the conversation is about Christianity, and I have less than no skin in that game, as a Jew. Even were I a Christian I’d not pretend to have a view into anyone’s soul. This is why I’m responding, as much as possible, to a wave, not an individual drop of water or two in it. Well, except one anonymised dating profile.

I want to criticise two parties on this issue, not just the people who want faith as therapy for themselves. I’m going to look at how the feel-good revival is spiritually malnourished first, but then I’ll turn to how secular critics can mistakenly think of faith as functioning well or badly based on whether it makes people feel good or bad. Wouldn’t it be so nice if religious people would ditch their beliefs for the secular values of our decade? say concerned atheists from their lecterns. Cue applause from other atheists. If religion is just therapy, surely the faithful can compromise with secularism when their beliefs become unpleasant for themselves or others. Surely.

As someone in a religious minority, I get the desire for this, but again: religious people believe in their religion. Be realistic.

“Ani maamin [I believe]…”

Here are a few of my own beliefs that bring me comfort.

• I believe in gilgul, the cycle of reincarnation that allows souls the chance to fulfil all the commandments before resting.

• I believe that the world will be redeemed. Evil, pain, and death will cease at the time of redemption, and I will bask in the the Presence of G-d forever.

• I believe that evil will be transformed into good, in the end. Darkness will become light, not merely be driven off by it.

• I believe that G-d loves me and I feel this love during prayer.

I won’t belabour this point, but to be abundantly clear: I find comfort in these ideas because I believe they are true. In fact, it makes me cringe to say “I believe” instead of “I know.” But thus goes the recitation: ani maamin…

I’m not sure how I would derive comfort from these ideas if I found them merely pleasant to read about. Well, I suppose I could derive aesthetic pleasure from them. I could derive pleasure from reading about the Holy Maiden just as I find pleasure in reading anything that is in some vague—albeit real—sense meaningful. Like Anne Sexton is for me, or Shakespeare.

Therapy is not faith

Reflecting back on Dreher’s article, the one I quoted above, and the many pieces like it, it’s hard to avoid noticing a trend: the nu-faithful are unhappy and choose religion as their cure. But a cure should not be confused with faith.

I’ll cite Stephen Bradford Long’s work on a foundational idea that I often encounter in discussions of the feel-good revival. Since I want no dead horses beaten, I’ll only cover this briefly myself; check out the links for more. Long pinpoints something that has bothered me for a while but that I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to explain, dubbing it “therapeutic theism,” a belief in the “Therapist’s God”:

You know you are in the realm of the Therapist’s God when someone primarily argues for theistic belief and practice from personal fulfillment and happiness. Life without God is meaningless and frightening. Therefore, belief in God is justified.

As he summarises later, in a rebuttal to therapeutic theism: “Bad news can still be true.” Maybe life just sucks and there’s nothing else to it. The fact that this idea is unpleasant does not make it false. That we want a god to give us good vibes does not mean a god exists. Nor does a person who desires fulfilment from a god necessarily believe in one.

Repugnant comfort

Utilitarian ethicists have their “repugnant conclusion,” but to the secular world, many comforts of faith are equally repugnant, even taken as rude to bring up. “Everything happens for a reason!” is hardly a thing to say at a funeral. However, to me it’s at least partially true, and to someone who believes in a truly fixed fate for all things, it seems entirely true.

Even to many religious people, being told that a tragedy—whether individual or massive in scale—happened for a reason or works out for the good seems cruel. It’s thus socially unacceptable to bring up at most times. Nevertheless, belief that even tragedy works out for the good is a necessary component of many religions. That’s not to say it’s empathetic to mention it to a bereaved person who won’t appreciate it, just because it’s true. Even so, it is an idea that’s ultimately comforting to the faithful in many situations, but to most people seems repugnant. When I think about the comforts provided by faith—mine or others’—those comforts rely on belief. Even to many believers, though, these comforts can be unpleasant. Bad therapy, huh.

Martyrdom

I’ve argued before that martyrdom runs against the idea that faith is a reliable therapeutic. Martyrdom is an extreme situation, of course, but it can still happen. It’s also baked into a lot of faith traditions’ own sacred works and their worldly histories. Stories about martyrs (and near-martyrs whose faith allows them to escape through miracles) abound in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. I need not go into examples of people who’ve died for their faith in the non-scriptural historical record. As a side note, remember when people pretended to care about the Yazidis?

Setting aside murder, there are other minor—but real!—religious pains to consider. Religious people can suffer indignities in myriad everyday ways. Many don’t, many do. Many pretend to when they don’t; many pretend not to when they do, out of shame. Where’s the good vibe, here? It’s as if belief is belief that something is true no matter what anyone does to you, as if faith is something other than a way to find “meaning,” as if it’s an aspect of life far grander than some vague “identity” with no greater consequence to a life than being an Indiana Fever fan.²

Regarding the secular faithful

Is there any comfort in religion without believing in the aspects that would be comforting? Rituals and guaranteed community are nice, of course. I don’t want to downplay that. But doing things isn’t faith. One also could get those experiences from other sources, if one has no attachment to their religious variants: try activism, sports, yoga, the military, a nursing home. Maybe a posh Scandinavian jail.

To be clear, since I know my ALL-CAPS-STYLE FIRE AND BRIMSTONE religious posts (read by about two people) might make me seem otherwise: I am a liberal, heterodox Jew. We tend to not emphasise faith so much, valuing a very loose sense of orthopraxy over any orthodoxy. I care a lot about ideas, though, and I have extremely firm spiritual beliefs of my own. An eternal hell is not one of those beliefs.

I know and love many people who get a lot out of Jewish ritual and community but don’t have any clear belief system to do with G-d or gilgul or whatever else, and they’re sincere and amazing. Judaism is also, to put it academically if not fully accurately, an ethnoreligion. So that gets complicated but ultimately means “faith” doesn’t define a Jew, but might define Judaism, and so on, I don’t want to hash that out here and it’s not my place to try. Regardless, the ritual-first Jews I know aren’t pretending to be based tradcaths (or Haredim). They are not pretending to be part of a community that has any rigour around orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

I also know non-Jews who have begun attending liberal churches despite not believing in the literal truth of Christianity. Again, that’s great. That’s a story in itself, a much more interesting one than constant repetition of the idea that mostly fake tradcaths might indicate a revival of faith. As many people began to attend religious services less often, they lost a crucial third space, which guaranteed weekly social time and so on, everyone knows what I’m on about. That’s valuable to rediscover, in itself, full stop. But fake trad Christians notoriously do not attend Sunday services.

Fake tradcaths’ ortho- lacks -doxy as well as -praxy. They’re the most visible vibe-seekers and the easiest to make an example of, so I’ll press the point for another paragraph or two. Cartoons Hate Her recently discussed the dating profile of one such tradcath.

Look, I know only God can judge us, so I’ll try not to judge this guy, but it feels kind of striking that despite attending traditional Latin Mass (albeit rarely) and considering his faith “very important,” he decided to nope out of the whole sex before marriage rule. This is even more baffling in light of the fact that he doesn’t believe in contraception, which in the Catholic faith would typically also include condoms. So you’re having unprotected sex with girlfriends and….what then?

Many of us have seen these guys around. Online, at least. Pretty much only online. A based aesthetic without anything behind the mask. I guess he might have the movie Kingdom of Heaven memorised, to be fair. Where is the trad revival in this? Twitter crusaders are nothing more than inheritors of mall ninja cringe. I don’t know what they would feel about their “traditional Catholic” identities if they skimmed the Catechism.

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Secular critics rarely understand belief: Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes as a case study

A wave of criticism directed at the right-wing politics of American Christianity has flooded bookshelves and news feeds, focussed primarily on Protestant communities. It’s tempting for me to jump on board with this criticism—perhaps it would be all too easy, because my religious beliefs necessitate my support for liberalism.³ However, I want secular critics to understand this small fact before they pick up their pens to write about religious people: eternity is longer than history. If someone believes that what we do in this world has ramifications for souls in eternity, a mortal fad like democracy seems like a trifle. When democracy or monarchy or whatever’s next goes against what a religious person views as an urgent and eternal concern, that political movement is worth less than one soul to her. And that’s a logical conclusion for her, because it proceeds from firmly held belief.

I confess to being frustrated by Jonathan Rauch’s book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, in a way that not many other recent books have irritated and disappointed me. Since I have half the book highlighted, half its pages bookmarked, and half its margins filled with notes, I’ll home in on it as my chief example of how secular critiques of religious groups can fail to account for belief and thus fail to make convincing arguments.

Rauch’s ostensible argument in Cross Purposes is that religion and liberalism need each other to keep society afloat, but that religion is failing to hold up its end of the bargain. His actual argument is that any time religion rubs up against liberalism (secular liberalism), it should submit. Ultimately, that renders religion useless in Rauch’s framework. Before I get to his fatal “Four Ms,” in which this confusion becomes obvious, I want to point out how blatantly Rauch buys into the idea that faith is therapy. He writes of religion and liberalism: “Although they are always in tension and sometimes in outright conflict, neither by itself will ever be able to satisfy human needs to cope with the world.”⁴ This passage is part of a constant theme in Cross Purposes: Rauch holds that people adopt faith to fill an emotional need. Sometimes it almost seems as if he holds this to be a temporal sequence. First a person feels upset, then they decide to invent a god. I’ll show another instance of this, shortly—a more jarring one.

Rauch introduces four human anxieties that he thinks liberalism and religion have to work together to assuage: the four Ms. He initially claims that religion is necessary to address two of these Ms, and liberalism needs to address the other two. The four Ms are:

• Mortality

• Morality

• Murder (by which he means the problem of evil)

• Miracles (by which he means the question of how we can explain the world without miracles—yeah, this doesn’t make much sense, bear with me/him)⁵

Mortality and morality are the purview of religion. Liberalism, by which he primarily means secularism in this context, addresses the problems of evil and how we can reach shared conclusions about how the world works (without miracles).

However, Rauch does not believe everyone needs religion to relieve the anxiety of mortality, only people who fear death. That crowd does not include him. The afterlife just an opiate for cowards. It’s not a belief, just therapy, and not everyone needs that therapy. As he admits of himself, and alleges of theists:

But I am weird! Purely secular thinking about death will never satisfy the large majority of people. Most rely on some version of faith to rescue them from the bleak nihilism of mortality.⁶

Whether religion is necessary to answer that M is questionable, then, since it’s only a bother for people who can’t tolerate being rational atheists. Rauch and other atheists get along fine without religion’s morality, too. So, both religious Ms are pretty much just for suckers, and aren’t strictly needed. If everyone were simply rational and enlightened, they’d be fine to deal with death and moral quandaries without a delusional painkiller.

When discussing the problem of evil, Rauch does not address any religious arguments, nor does he address religious traditions in which there is no problem of evil because they bluntly state that their god(s) created evil. He simply asserts that secularism is the only way to address the problem of evil since it eliminates the belief in an omnipotent, good deity. To be fair, he does give a few examples of bad things that happen and how silly religious strawmen might attempt to justify them. A question should arise, though: how in Gehenna does Rauch expect anyone to believe in a religious afterlife or law without believing in, uh, their god? The matter becomes more confusing when he addresses the fourth M.

Rauch comes off as ballistic when discussing Murder, but when he gets to Miracles, he comes off less as ballistic and more as a type of atheist I often encountered online a decade and a half or so ago. I suppose he discloses the context in which he developed his stances on the Ms when he mentions having once been “an atheist of the militant, angry variety.”⁷ The issue with Miracles, as with Murder, is that religion does not serve the social purpose Rauch wants it to. He worries that belief in miracles leads to a mad world in which there “is no path to a coherent, broadly shared, reliable, and progressively improving account of reality—no path, that is, to what we call objective knowledge.”⁸ Again, he does not grapple with religious writings on miracles, as if nobody has thought to address his basic criticisms. Basic criticisms I read online many years ago. Need I point out that his argument precludes belief in the resurrection of the dead? When faith—virtually any kind of religious faith—has an element misaligned with secular liberalism, Rauch thinks it’s stepping out of its lane.

I could go a lot further into my issues with Rauch’s book, but I’ll restrain myself, despite having only cracked open the first chapter here. I can make my point, now. Both secular critics of religious conservatives and conservative promoters of the feel-good “revival” view religion as nothing more than an opiate, a form of therapy devoid of belief. They differ only in how flaccid they prefer pseudo-faith to be. Rauch, for one, argues that Christians should compromise between their beliefs about Jesus and a renewed adherence to James Madison’s political values, when the two clash (as he thinks they always will). Whether most Christians will find that convincing, I can’t say for sure, but I can guess.

Ultimata

I don’t agree with Christians on matters of doctrine because I’m not a Christian. I have no confessional stake in defending their scriptures against James Madison or in defending Catholic congregations from the occasional furtive intrusion by a knight-themed mall ninja. But I have a refined sense of cringe and it’s reached some kind of threshold after reading article after article on this “revival.” Christianity happens to be the main target, positively or negatively, of “faith as therapy” drivel at the moment, but it comes up in a negative sense toward Orthodox Jews occasionally, too.

When it comes to politics, I will vote in ways far more similar to Rauch than to MAGA. Unless he doesn’t vote or something. My radical notion that religious people believe things doesn’t mean that I’m going to bow to whatever other religions want. I believe things, too, and strive to act according to my beliefs, even if I stumble like a toddler more often than I wish.

All I want to argue here is that people should stop thinking that faith is therapy. Faith as therapy is a bad way to advocate for religion, and it’s a bad framework within which to criticise religious groups. People who join a religious sect for therapeutic benefits but don’t believe a word of its doctrines will leave when the therapy loses its charm. Religious people will never heed criticisms that barely-covertly require that they ditch their faith to fulfil mortal concerns.

I guess I’m finishing this on a Friday. In that case, a warm shabbat shalom to the atheists and religious people who are hypothetically reading this.

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For more screeds on religion, check out:

Louis Brandeis's mother wrote a religious memoir for our time

Judaism's forgotten warrior queen

1. I refrained from making the pun idle idols but have to mention how fun it would be.

2. To those who know me and may have become worried: no, I do not think Sophie Cunningham is Mashiach!

3. For background, albeit written kind of densely and free-associatively, see this parsha commentary, in which I clarify (?) why “I believe that progress toward gender equality is part of geulah and geulah cannot happen without it.”

4. Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2025), 22.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. 67.

8. 31.