Therapy Without Truth: The Incoherence of Christian Counseling in the Age of the Therapeutic

In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff warned that modern psychology had not merely replaced theology but inverted it. “Religious man was born to be saved,” he wrote. “Psychological man is born to be pleased.” The shift was not trivial. It marked a civilizational pivot from a culture ordered by sacred authority to one dominated by emotional management.

This pivot has not spared the church. In fact, much of what passes for Christian counseling today is built atop the ruins Rieff described, Freud’s anthropology draped in Christian language. It offers a fundamentally therapeutic goal: to help the individual adapt to their circumstances, reduce symptoms, and feel more empowered in a universe stripped of meaning. But instead of Freud’s candor about the meaningless void, we get Christianized platitudes about “flourishing” or “wholeness.” It is, as Rieff put it, “the curious pairing of psychological technique with religious rhetoric.”

The result is incoherence. To claim Christ’s ends while using Freud’s means is to harness a vehicle built for exile and hope it will lead home. The assumptions underneath the practice are often entirely secular, that human suffering is best understood as pathology, that emotional stability is the highest good, and that the self is both the problem and the solution. The symbol of the sacred is present, but the authority is absent.

This isn’t harmless compromise. It’s defection.

Rieff saw it coming. In modern culture, he argued, “there are no sacred orders, only therapeutic ones.” The therapist becomes a priest of adaptation, not of transformation. The goal is not confession but catharsis, not obedience but self-expression. The sacred is repressed, both in theory and in practice, not because it was disproven, but because it makes a claim too binding for the modern self to bear.

Christian counseling, in its dominant form, has made peace with this arrangement. It offers Bible verses instead of psychoanalytic theory, but the underlying structure remains intact: the client’s internal world is sovereign, and the task is to rearrange it for peace. This is Freud baptized, not Christ followed. It is, in Rieff’s terms, “charisma without commandment.”

But Christian faith begins not with the self but with God. The aim of Christian counsel is not the easing of distress but alignment with Truth. The pain may be real, but the goal is not simply to relieve it. It is to discern what the pain reveals about disordered loves, broken covenants, and forgotten vows. In this light, suffering is not meaningless. It is diagnostic. It points us back toward the sacred order we have violated or ignored.

This is what Rieff meant when he insisted that the therapeutic worldview could not sustain a culture. It has no vertical axis. “The west,” he warned, “no longer dreams of anything stronger than itself.” Without a sacred source of authority, all healing becomes management. All counsel becomes technique. All meaning becomes optional.

But Christian counsel must not flatter this logic. It must rebel against it. The counselor is not a technician for emotional maintenance. He is a witness to the reality of the sacred. His aim is not to help the client cope with a fallen world, but to call the client into alignment with God’s reality—through confession, repentance, forgiveness, and obedience.

These are not coping mechanisms. They are sacred acts. They demand a different anthropology, one in which man is not a bundle of drives, but a soul made for communion. They require a different telos, not peace of mind, but conformity to Christ.

A therapeutic frame cannot bear this weight. It can’t explain why a man should deny himself, take up a cross, or endure suffering for the sake of righteousness. It can’t explain why some wounds must be carried rather than cured. And it certainly cannot speak truthfully about sin, except as a maladaptive behavior to be managed.

Christian counseling, if it is to remain Christian, must return to the reality of sacred order and the human impulse to violate it. What ails us is not merely psychological imbalance but the transgression of limits, the breaking of covenants, the disordering of love. Healing cannot occur unless the breach is acknowledged. As Rieff warned, “Where there is no longer a sense of sin, therapeutic man appears.” And once he appears, the sacred is eclipsed, and the church begins to speak in a foreign tongue, soothing the self, but no longer summoning it to bow.

There is a better way.

It begins by rejecting the premise that healing can be achieved without repentance. It requires courage to name disorder not merely as dysfunction, but as defiance. It requires hope, not in technique, but in the Person of Christ. And it requires humility, for both counselor and counselee, to acknowledge that true healing means surrender to something higher than the self.

Christian counseling must not aim to help people live well in a disenchanted world. It must aim to re-enchant the world, to restore the sacred as real, binding, and beautiful. This, and only this, is coherent with the Christian gospel.

We do not need more tools for managing our pain. We need more courage to face what our pain is trying to tell us. And we need counselors willing to tell the truth: that healing comes not through insight alone, but through obedience to the God who speaks.

As Rieff foresaw, “The next culture will be a religious one—or it will not be at all.” The same is true for Christian counseling. It will be sacred—or it will be swallowed whole by the therapeutic.