Recently Dr. Al Mohler responded to an article by Peggy Drexler in the Wall Street Journal which called millennials the therapy generation. Both Drexler and Mohler’s pieces help identify a change in our society that we must consider. Fundamentally, for many people in their twenties and thirties, their therapist helps them keep life balanced and functional.
As Christians, we must ask a few questions: “What happened in society that the therapist became so important? What does this tell us? Over what should we be concerned?” I think the answers are fascinating to these questions and Dr. Mohler helps us understand it. I have copied Dr. Mohler’s article in totality under my comments.
Here’s the bottom line. Therapists in many ways have replaced parents, older and wiser friends, and the authentic relationships in the church for many in our society. Some time back, the church lost the parents. This had a long-term effect on those families. The parents lost the “one-anothering” that only vibrant relationships in the church can provide. The parents missed out on cross-generational discipleship, friendship, and conversation. The parents raised children who both observed them going to therapists whenever they needed help and taking their children as well.
The roll and function of authentic, vibrant, real, and imperfect relationships fostered in and around a vibrant faith with God and in His Church was lost to this generation – and now to another. As a church and community, we must pay attention to this. A generation of parents who did not keep their families plugged into church have lost one of the major benefits to a vibrant local church. Instead of receiving the life-giving, life-sustaining, and life-benefiting gospel truths and wisdom through a relationship with Jesus Christ and His people, the world in greater part has turned to a secular faith to fill in the gaps. The church and individual Christians must ask ourselves hard questions as to the functionality, practicality, authenticity, and vibrancy of our relationships with Jesus Christ, each other, and the community.
The therapy generation: What the trend of millennials seeking out therapeutic help communicates about a generation starving for meaningful community by Albert Mohler
But next, I want to turn to yet another article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago. It’s by Peggy Drexler. The headline: “Millennials are the Therapy Generation.” The subhead: “People in their 20s and 30s seek medical health help more often, as new habits and technologies change the nature of treatment.”
Drexler tells us about Christina, a 27-year-old publicist living in Manhattan, who has been in and out of therapy since she was nine, when her parents got divorced. Back then, she says, “I had a pretty pragmatic view of what was happening. And so did my parents. Going to therapy was just something you make kids of divorce do.” But then as the article continues, the young woman tells us that she had thought back then that the therapy was something that she would get through, it would be done, she would deal with her trauma, and it would be over.
But she says, “I eventually learned that’s not really how it works.” And then we are told, she’s had four or five different therapists since then. So have most of her friends. Then here’s the big statement, “The stigma traditionally attached to psychotherapy has largely dissolved in the new generation of patients seeking treatment, raised by parents who openly went to therapy themselves and who sent their children as well, today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings, turn to therapy sooner and with fewer reservations than young people did in previous eras.”
Again, the headline of the article is, “Millennials are the Therapy Generation.” Drexler gives us a great deal of detail about this, telling us that there has been a huge shift in the culture, and millennials are the leading edge. For millennials, we are told, going to therapy is just a part of the adult experience. And furthermore, the article’s pretty sad because we are told, “Many younger people pursue therapy as another form of self-improvement and personal growth, not unlike yoga, meditation, or preventative Botox.”
We are also told that mental health problems are becoming increasingly pervasive, or at least more pervasively diagnosed amongst millennials, but far beyond the diagnoses, there is very clearly in this article, and in the culture around us, affirmation of the fact that therapy is replacing something in the lives of millennials. We need to ask the question, what would be therapy be replacing? One argument would be, replacing what otherwise would be a function served by parents.
It’s no accident that this article begins with a child who first experienced therapy in the context of the breakup of her parent’s marriage. A huge cultural shift is also indicated in a paragraph like this, “Many of my clients joked that they and their coworkers often start conversations with, ‘My therapist thinks.'” That according to Elizabeth Cohen, a clinical psychologist in Manhattan. She said further, “The shame of needing help has been transformed into a pride in getting outside advice.”
But this is a particular kind of outside advice. It is therapeutic advice. The article by Drexler also tells us that another reason for the shift among millennials is the fact that so many celebrities very publicly depend upon therapy. Many of them speak openly of their own struggles. The huge shift here might be the fact that for many people, having a therapist is something of a badge of authenticity.
Looking further at the article, we come to discover that many of these millennials are seeking therapy for what really doesn’t amount to any kind of deep depression or psychological problem at all. One young woman quoted in the article said, “My life coaching and my therapy work really well together. It’s about forming habits and behaviors that lead to a fuller life.” Drexler tells us beyond, “Young people are struggling to find such balance.”
A 2018 study of 40,000 American, Canadian, and British college students, we’re told, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, found that millennials are suffering from what was described as multidimensional perfectionism in many areas of their lives. “Setting unrealistically high expectations, and feeling hurt when they fall short.” This propensity, says Drexler, “Can motivate them to seek assistance when something goes wrong, but it also sometimes drives them to turn that assistance into dependence.”
Even later in the article, we are told that young couples are sometimes going to therapy together before, they not only get married, but even decide to cohabitate. But the Wall Street Journal article ends with this, “For many, such self-care doesn’t feel like a chore.” One young woman said, “I just enjoy therapy. I don’t enjoy getting blood drawn. I’d be looking for ways to stop having to do something like that, but I like my therapist. I have a good relationship with him. It’s not like I’m trying to figure out at what point can I stop doing this?”
Well, again, you don’t have to read between the lines there to understand that therapy is really replacing something else. What’s it replacing? I mentioned parents. It is also, in many ways, replacing friends. It is, from a Christian perspective, also reflecting the fact that many young millennials don’t have any older adult friends. They just don’t relationships so they have to go out and pay someone to be involved in this kind of conversation about their lives and meaning, organization and habits.
They also, we have to note, are often actually not very good conversationalists even with their own friends. A generation so dependent upon technology and addicted to social media is sometimes finding it very difficult to engage in conversation. Conversation appears to be awkward, but ultimately Christians must understand that the therapeutic worldview is more than anything else, explicitly a replacement, a stand in for a theological worldview.
That’s not an accident. Many of the first efforts in therapy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the very beginnings of psychotherapy and other therapeutic professions began in an explicit effort to try to ground human happiness and to fix human problems, to diagnose the most basic human issues in terms other than the theological terms that had been explicitly embraced by the Christian Church as taught in scripture.
It would be an exaggeration to say all of the founding fathers and mothers of psychotherapy were not Christian, but it’s not much of an exaggeration because as you look at the history of this entire worldview and the profession, the reality is that many of those who began the movement were explicitly identified as those who are unbelievers. To one degree or another, many of them had openly, if not energetically rejected the religion of their beginnings and they had embraced a fully secular worldview.
Therapy is the extension of that secular worldview into the attempted explanation of the self, of the human psyche, of the human problem and of some way of dealing with that problem. Back in the 1960s just as a therapeutic revolution was hitting warp speed, Philip Rieff, an interpreter of Sigmund Freud and a very skillful cultural observer, wrote a book entitled: The Triumph of the Therapeutic. The subhead of the article was: The uses of faith after Freud.
Now just notice the title: The Triumph of the Therapeutic and then the: uses of faith after Freud. Freud was such a revolution. Speaking of Sigmund Freud, he is also symbolic of a revolution that was larger than Freud. Rieff understood it. He understood the 20th century as the triumph of the therapeutic. In many modern western countries, the theological left behind the therapeutic put in its place.
The theological worldview begins with the existence and the authority of God. The therapeutic worldview begins with the existence and authority of the self. Again, by the 1960s, the psychotherapeutic worldview was so extensive that it became something of a motto that all persons honestly are either in therapy or in denial. Everyone was diagnosed as being sick and therapy was prescribed as the answer.
All issues were understood necessarily to revolve around the sovereign self as the ultimate unit of meaning, everyone therefore needs analysis and therapy. Rieff also understood that many people who think themselves not needing therapy they’re hardly immune from the therapeutic virus. Rieff, we should note, who was not a Christian in 2005 raised the question as to how many people who think that they are Christians are really holding to a therapeutic mentality and simply substituting some Christian categories.
Many bestselling Christian books amounted to nothing more than that, just the prevailing therapeutic worldview with some edited Bible verses put in, but the fundamental worldview was still that of humanistic psychology, not of biblical Christianity. Now, let’s be clear, there is an authentic discipline, medical profession known as psychiatry. There are legitimate psychiatric and psychological diagnoses.
I am not speaking as a medical doctor here, but as a theologian and cultural observer, it is really clear that in the larger culture therapy becomes the reflex. Humanistic forms of therapy become the norm, and once again we are back where we were in the 1960s, only in a worst situation than before. Now, we are either in therapy or in denial, but we’re also looking at a generation that has skipped denial and gone straight to therapy, but in so many cases therapy is now something of a badge of honor.
It’s not just a response to some kind of perceived brokenness, it’s now something of a rite of passage, only again, it’s a rite of passage that no one really intends even to outgrow. Fundamentally, we have to understand that Christianity, the Christian Gospel, is not a form of therapy. The millennials described in Peggy Drexler’s article are well understandable when we think about the culture that produced them, the culture that they have experienced.
A culture that overwhelmingly wants to communicate that if there is a problem in us, and everyone does really recognize there were some kind of problem in us, it is something that happened to us, it is something that can be alleviated by therapy, but you’ll also notice one of the most interesting aspects of Drexler’s article is how many millennials don’t expect for this really to resolve anything.
They intend to remain in therapy even if they don’t have any kind of deep distress, they want someone to talk to. That’s very sad. It’s actually a heartbreaking article when you consider how many of these millennials might not even seek this kind of therapy if they had a good relationship with their parents, especially when it comes to talking about basic fundamental issues, if they had deep friendships.
But this article also reminds me as a Christian of something that is one of the most important dimensions of the reality of being a part of a local church, a local gospel-believing, Bible-preaching Church. It’s a church. If it really is representing an authentic congregation, vibrant and Christian faith, it’s going to be made up of a multi-generational membership where you should find younger Christians, younger adult Christians, millennial Christians in very healthy relationships with older Christians, and I would simply ask the question, is that what you see in your church?
I’m afraid that in too many of our churches, churches that believed themselves to be very biblical and Gospel minded, the age groups simply hang around with one another. The millennials with millennials, older adults with older adults, children with children, teenagers with teenagers. There’s something fundamentally unhealthy about that. At least one thing intelligent Christians should consider is whether or not an article like this is a reminder to all of us in the Church of what we should be doing but might not be doing. That’s at the very least a question we know we ought to ask.
About the Author:
Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is a prolific writer and produces a daily show “The Briefing.” In addition to these responsibilities, he also serves on the faculty of Southern and is a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention. He is married to Mary, and they have two children, Katie and Christopher, as well as one grandchild.
