Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond
Ebook
Overview
Let Churches Be Churches and Therapists Be Therapists
We live in an age where “therapy culture” dominates our cultural milieu. Everywhere we look, therapeutic language and psychological concepts are popularized, misapplied, and lose their medical significance. Therapy and psychiatry are good practices, but when people begin to filter everything in life through a therapeutic lens, it becomes harmful rather than helpful.
The church is not immune to this phenomenon. Increasingly, people’s expectations of the church and its leaders are viewed through the lens of psychological health and wellness.
In this book, Matthew Loftus unpacks how this kind of “therapy culture” can distort the Christian life. He argues that the church cannot do for people what therapy and psychiatry are designed to do. While church should be a place of healing and love for people who are suffering from mental illness, churches and their leaders should focus on what they are called to do: bringing people together to worship God.
What you’ll get with Resisting Therapy Culture:
- An understanding of the role of the church in supporting people through mental health struggles
- A deeper appreciation for the expertise and value of mental health professionals
- Insight into how both therapy and the church can be good for Christians’ spiritual and mental health in their own intended ways
- Encouragement for church leaders to renew their focus on leading people in worship
This book is an invitation for church leaders to focus on what the church does best. As Loftus explains, "People will live healthier lives when churches and therapists are working well, but the two do not have the same mission, methods, mandates, or measures of success. . . . Both should do the very best that they can in the sphere of work that God has assigned."
Introduction: What Is Therapy Culture?
1. What’s Gone Wrong? Church and Therapy Culture
2. Medicalization and Iatrogenesis: The Means and Ends of Therapy Culture
3. Mental Health and Moral Choices: Defining the Indistinguishable
4. Diagnoses and Treatments: Lines in the Sand and Hammers for Pointy Objects
5. Christianity and Psychology: History and Rivalry
6. Suffering and Mental Illness: Finding a Purpose in, Through, or Despite Pain
7. Stress and Self-Care: Cycles of Rest and Choosing to Suffer Well
8. Attachment and Parenting: What We Inherit and What We Learn
9. Trauma: Wounded and Healing
10. Addiction: Desire and Disease
Conclusion: The Good Enough Church
"This is the book I’ve been waiting for. Matthew Loftus has finally written what the church so desperately needs: a sharp rejection of therapy culture that doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. His recommendation of the ‘good enough church’ is spot on: neither pop-therapeutic nor anti-therapeutic but focused, in his words, on ‘being faithful at the little things that God has called us to do.’ This book is full of hard-won knowledge, Christian mercy, and wise counsel; I can’t wait to recommend it to every pastor, elder, and parent I know."
"If someone you love or a pastor you listen to has embraced therapy culture, this is the book to read or recommend. Matthew Loftus, who knows suffering, critiques trendy self-care and wellness importunings, along with over-medicalization and underappreciation for normal cycles of stress and rest. Freud, Fromm, Maslow, Rogers, and others rise and fall, but Christ is still the best doctor, compassion the best embrace, and resilience rather than reliance on drugs the best goal."
- Title: Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond
- Authors: Matthew Loftus, Alan Noble
- Publisher: IVP
- Print Publication Date: 2026
- Logos Release Date: 2025
- Pages: 224
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781514012697, 9781514012680, 1514012685, 1514012693
- Resource ID: LLS:9781514012697
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-12-03T02:23:46Z