Is Theology the New Therapy?

It is my impression that, during the past half century, American mainline churches have been changing before our eyes. Denominations that once anchored civic life, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, appear to have lost members, perhaps authority, and most significantly, theological clarity. Sociologists usually choose the terms secularization, cultural liberalization, or demographic changes to explain this phenomenon. My take is that the pattern of change may fit another lens: the neurodiversification of moral life. To even a non-theologian like me, it appears that what has changed may not simply be belief but cognition, i.e., the way Christian morality and the practice of faith is processed internally, communicated publicly, and felt communally. The old Protestant mind, having issued from the scission with the Catholic Church, was doctrinal, hierarchical, and rational. In the modern Christian church, the new religious sensibility is therapeutic, diverse, egalitarian, and emotive. The former was neurotypical in its structure; the latter is possibly neurodiverse. It is not unusual to hear a sermon that could be given as a lecture to a group of psychology students.

The mainline tradition emerged from a world of systemizing faith. As it was subsumed into the Roman Empire, the church became officialized. Its core assumption was that religion describes objective reality and that doctrine can be logically organized like a political constitution. Theology was the architecture of salvation; liturgy was its public grammar; the clergy mediated the journey. Ministers functioned as moral engineers, trained in exegesis, history, and homiletics. Their congregations operated in a cognitive ecology that rewarded abstraction, self-discipline, and consistency. The Protestant virtue of sincerity was intellectual, not emotional: to believe was to assent truthfully to propositions about God.

Feelings replaced doctrine as the measure of authenticity.

Beginning in the 1960s, a decade full of more or less well thought “cultural” revolutions, the internal scaffolding of the Protestant church, and to a lesser extent the Catholic (primarily its Second Vatican Council), began to undergo noticeable change. The causes were many. I can only discern a few: cultural revolution, the rise of psychology, the decline of authority. The churches cognitive through-line was a shift toward emotional immediacy. Comforting and reassuring became key words, to be expressed in a thousand ways. Feelings replaced doctrine as the measure of authenticity. Sermons became therapeutic conversations; hymns became pop anthems. The hymnals went out of style, briefly replaced by cheaply printed “hymnalets” and then by the big-screen projectors. From my vantage point, I see the so-called “7/11 songs,” seven words sung eleven times, not as trivialities but as neurocognitive data: they reflect a strong preference for rhythmic emotional regulation over semantic content. Gregorian chant functioned in the same way, to a great extent. Worship, in many congregations big and small, appears to have moved from propositional affirmation to sensory modulation, from catechesis to collective self-soothing. The unstated goal may no longer be orthodoxy but affective harmony. Arms raised, misty eyes, knowing glances to the neighbors are hallmarks of a successful sermon or a moving song.

In neurodiversification terms, this could represent the triumph of low-context, emotionally explicit, and rule-sensitive cognition over the high-context, interpretive, and symbolic mode that had characterized traditional expressions of faith. The old Protestant mind, and indeed the old Bible school, could tolerate paradoxes such as divine sovereignty and human freedom, faith and works, justice and mercy, because it operated through metaphor, story-telling and rigorously vetted narrative. The new mind, seeking cognitive safety, cannot bear contradiction; it demands clarity of intention and purity of emotion. Salvation is no longer what to strive for, it is offered as a guarantee. Spirituality, from what I hear in my office, is procedural: sincerity is defined by transparency, mystery is painfully and thoroughly dissected, the semi-casual has replaced the awe-inspiring. While this is not universally the case, in many worship services the act of faith becomes a group exercise in emotional regulation rather than a communal encounter with metaphysical tension.

In some quarters, doctrines of sin and judgment have given way to “inclusion” and “self-acceptance.”

The theological consequences of this shift were immediate in the 60’s and 70’s and are ongoing. Church dogma is a word to be avoided, its tenets softened, discipline relaxed, and moral teaching is often replaced by therapeutic empathy. In some quarters, doctrines of sin and judgment have given way to “inclusion” and “self-acceptance.” Many pastors, especially in megachurches or in so-called churches for the unchurched, often become facilitators of emotional wellness. Quite effectively, I would say.

I have heard some explanations that have given me food for thought. A well-known pastor told me recently that the church’s language of transcendence, grace, holiness, repentance, “works better” if it is translated into psychological idioms: acceptance, authenticity, growth. Is the Word of God now the Emotion of God? For many congregants, this is a relief. For others, it means the evaporation of the sacred.

The goal is to ensure that no one feels uncomfortable, and in the process, the divine itself becomes harmless and thus less motivating.

In my view, this evolution cannot be understood apart from the broader neurodiversification of American institutions. The same cognitive norms that transformed universities and corporations, i.e., the introduction of emotional safety, explicit communication, and procedural fairness, have penetrated the sanctuary. Clergy training has adapted accordingly: seminaries emphasize counseling skills over doctrinal rigor, inclusive language over metaphysical precision. Some of it is actually quite good, in theory; its application is often approximate. The emotional climate of worship is managed like so many a classroom. Risk of perdition, intellectual, moral, or spiritual, is minimized. The goal is to ensure that no one feels uncomfortable, and in the process, the divine itself becomes harmless and thus less motivating. Is all this ultimately good or terribly bad?

The sociological consequences are plain to see. As the mainline churches neurodiversify, they become far more empathetic but, sadly, much more likely to go out of business. Membership falls at the same rate as the rise in tolerance. Congregations that restructured their liturgies around therapeutic inclusion rather than theological conviction seem to dissolve fastest. The Catholic and many Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, by contrast, have retained neurotypical features: hierarchical authority, doctrinal clarity, emotive but rule-bound worship. Their growth among working-class and non-elite populations reflects an intuitive appeal to minds still organized around relational authority and concrete belief. They offer certainty and catharsis in a culture of ambiguity, high emotionality and theological restraint.

Even within the evangelical world, however, neurodiversification has made inroads. The megachurch movement and its praise-band aesthetic represent an accommodation between the two cognitive types: emotionally explicit yet doctrinally minimal, sensory yet risk-free. The “seeker-sensitive” service operates like a therapeutic group session, modulating affect while often avoiding theological complexity. The sermon becomes motivational speech; sin becomes “brokenness”; worship becomes managed catharsis. It is not religion as revelation but religion as mood regulation. Worship is a communal therapy session. The Holy Spirit is treated less as person than as atmosphere.

The embrace of wokeness within many mainline institutions fits perfectly into this schema. Social justice, reframed as liturgy, provides the procedural structure that therapeutic spirituality lacks. Antiracist catechesis, pronoun rituals, and “stolen land” acknowledgments supply the moral precision once offered by creeds and commandments. They reintroduce rules into a rule-less faith, but in the language of emotional safety rather than divine order. Is the Christian church reinventing itself as a moral bureaucracy of compassion? Is it becoming an institution whose chief sacrament is affirmation? Are its ministers and priests sensitivity trainers? Are its heretics those guilt of the sin of insensitivity? I may be proven wrong, but I think I see a shift from metaphysics to management.

What are the empirical indicators that reinforce my interpretation? Surveys by the Pew Research Center show steep declines in denominational loyalty, belief in absolute truth, and participation in liturgical forms among mainline Protestants since 1980. Simultaneously, self-reported measures of empathy and inclusivity within those same populations have risen. The correlation suggests not a loss of morality but a cognitive reconfiguration of it, from externally anchored truth (the old, “for the Bible tells me so”) to internally regulated feeling. The decline in church attendance coincides with the rise of mindfulness, yoga, and online “spiritual coaching.” While per se laudable, these activities claim to provide the same emotional functions without the discomfort of doctrine. The Christian religion has not vanished; it has been neurodiversified.

In contrast, the Orthodox, Catholic, and conservative evangelical communities that have resisted this shift remain cognitively “bimodal.” They strive to preserve high-context rituals and doctrinal systems that require tolerance for paradox. Their members often describe faith not as comfort but as discipline, a language foreign to the theological-therapeutic lexicon. These traditions remain intelligible to neurotypical minds, which experience mystery and hierarchy as stabilizing rather than oppressive. But they appear alien, even dangerous to the uberdiversified, which interpret exclusivity as harm and transcendence as emotional coldness. The same sermon that comforts the traditional believer may shock and traumatize the progressive one.

In the long view, the neurodiversification of American religion reflects a deeper transformation of the sacred itself. I’m watching this happen, and I haven’t decided yet if this is going to turn out good, or not so good. The old God was external, commanding, incomprehensible—a being who demanded submission and offered meaning. The new God is internal, supportive, and safe—a feeling that demands validation and offers comfort. One could say that the West has moved from worshipping a deity to managing a mood. The cathedral has become a counseling center, the altar, a stage for self-expression. What began as compassion has culminated in cognitive self-containment.

This transformation may help explain not only the decline of mainline churches but also the rise of their moral successors: the secular movements that carry forward the same neurodiverse ethic. The campus diversity office, the corporate HR seminar, and the therapeutic influencer all occupy the spiritual territory once held by the pastor or the psychotherapist. They promise inclusion, healing, and belonging through the same means: emotional ubertransparency and rule-based empathy. The difference is that they make no reference to transcendence at all. The neurodiversified West has thus achieved the long-imagined Protestant goal of the “priesthood of all believers,” but stripped of belief itself. Every individual now curates their own orthodoxy of feelings, moderated by algorithmically and spectacularly scripted liturgy, and for the most part free of divinely mandated obligations.

The paradox, and what concerns me, is that this system could devolve into moral inflation and spiritual exhaustion. A religion of constant empathy demands endless emotional labor; a church of inclusion must forever expand its circle. Without a metaphysical anchor, faith becomes ritualistic bureaucracy. The neurotypical mind, when it encounters such environments, often retreats into fundamentalism, liturgical traditionalism, or even irreligion. It seeks structure, not sensitivity—something that can once again make sense of the world’s rough edges, of human failures, and our sinful nature. The polarization of American religion, caught between hyper-sensitive progressivism and hard-edged literalism, thus mirrors the broader cognitive divide of our age.

Seen through a psychoanalytical lens, the decline of the mainline church is not a failure of faith but the logical outcome of a civilization whose emotional metabolism has changed. The church that once formed consciences now manages feelings; the parish that once preached repentance now enforces empathy. A “come to Jesus” meeting is more likely to happen in the corporation than in the sanctuary. The ultramodern believer does not want to be saved but understood. Yet salvation, at least in the classical sense, is not understanding but transformation—a process that presupposes, I daresay welcomes, discomfort. A religion that abolishes discomfort abolishes itself.

The empty pews that have persisted after the Covid era are not symbols of secularization but of saturation. Is it possible that the church has succeeded too well in mirroring the culture that replaced it? It has become another therapeutic institution in an ubertherapeutic civilization, staffed by well-meaning professionals fluent in the language of emotional safety. In many sad cases, it has ceased to demand what religion uniquely can: surrender to something beyond one’s emotional horizon. Until the faith that can speak again to the neurotypical—the intuitive, the contradictory, the broken yet still obedient—reasserts itself, the West will have temples of empathy but no altars of reverent worship.