Saving Therapy: Exploring The Religious Self-Help Literature

Abstract

“Religious writers justify their reliance on psychology by praising it for ‘catching up’ to some eternal truths, but they've also found a way to make the temporal truths of psychology palatable. Religious leaders once condemned psychoanalysis for its moral neutrality…. Now popular religious literature equates illness with sin …, which makes psychology a penitential technique, if not a form of exorcism. While religious writers stress repeatedly that psychology is only a spiritual tool, some therapists might consider religion only a therapeutic one. But whether psychology has caught up to religion, infiltrated it, or been adopted by it, the most popular versions of both psychology and religion are becoming less and less distinguishable. Like Macy's and Gimbel's, therapists and religious leaders are happily staking out a common market.”