A few weeks ago the columnist Freya India, who writes often about problems facing Gen Z women, released a piece about the cultural tendency to explain away personality and humanity with therapeutic language.
Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.
This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.
India goes on to give examples from social media and popular online publishing that reduce personality “quirks”— that used to be accepted as what makes individuals unique and interesting— as “diagnoses” to be understood and treated. This is a feature, not a bug, of therapeutic culture.
But it’s not new under the sun. The therapeutic desire to explain everything is only one example of many. In response to the emotional and psychological pressures that many young people feel, those of us who counsel them may be tempted towards the opposite swing of the pendulum: easy “Christian” answers. Oftentimes these answers are given in the form of Biblical platitudes (“because the Bible said so”) or under the pressure of strict moral codes. Sometimes answers are given through the form of vague spirituality (“just pray”).
This is not to say that there are not real Biblical and theological answers for the meaning of life, only to say that they may not be as easily learned as we have been led to believe. My concern is that in making the easy critique of the therapeutic, we miss the ways that quick appeals to Biblical and theological categories of meaning may also provide young people “answers” that skip over the necessity of holiness and the trembling of mystery. The speed of spiritual formation in the church should be shockingly longer than the time it takes to diagnose yourself on TikTok.
In order to receive the truth of God, we must first tremble before the mystery of God. In order to help bring young men and women back to the mystery of humanness, we have to ground all our knowledge and explanations in faith, which grounds us as we seek understanding. We have to help the next generation embrace the mystery of faith. Understanding is a worthy aim, but not an ultimate one: it bows to faith.
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes gives us a timeless warning against the vanity of seeking to explain away mystery.
All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, “I will be wise,” but it was far from me. That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?
The absurdity of seeking ultimate answers is that the more questions we ask, the more questions we find. India rightly points this out in her exploration of the rabbit hole of the therapeutic. But the same is true of the theological and philosophical rabbit hole as well.
In Ecclesiastes 7:25, the preacher reminds us that he has done the deep dive.
I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness.
The connotation of the word for “scheme” is the same as “plan,” “reason,” or “explanation.” In short, the preacher wants to know the meaning of life. He wants to understand God’s reasoning. But what he finds is foolishness.
And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.
The woman he finds at the end of his searching is none other than Lady Folly, the Scriptural epitome of over promising and under delivering. Instead of the freedom of enlightenment, a quest of wisdom for wisdom’s sake only leads to the chains of vanity.
Recently I was asked by a family member if I had heard of Alex O’Conner, a popular Youtuber whose channel, CosmicSkeptic, focuses on asking life’s difficult questions. His channel is an example of many Generation Z wisdom seekers. This same family member gifted me a copy of Marcus Arelius’ Meditations for Christmas. A thoughtful gift, knowing I am a reader. But both of these interactions alerted me to something I sensed was in the water: an attempt to explain mystery through popular, digestible philosophy. The desire for answers is there: but what answers will the church give?
Jerome, the 5th century Bible translator, describes the absurdity of seeking after life’s biggest questions:
What Ecclesiastes is saying is this: Before I turned my thoughts to ponder over God’s work, I was not aware of God’s magnificence. I said, I must have wisdom: that is, I must inquire into the nature of every cause; and wisdom withdrew farther away from me than it was before. By that I mean, formerly I was not in quest of wisdom because I was unaware of it, and afterwards, when I began to seek it, I could not find it.
Even if we turn our attention away from the therapeutic and towards bigger questions, we still won’t find the answers we seek. If we stop asking about our problems or personalities: “what does this say about my psyche?” and instead only ask: “what does this say about the meaning of life?”, we still won’t arrive at the right kind of answers.
In other words, the solution of the church to the questions of identity plaguing the younger generation is not primarily tighter theological systems or stronger reasoning skills. We must warn new believers and seekers of the enjoyable but often counterintuitive reality that the more we seek God, the more we should expect to wonder at his vast unknowability.
We must also resist the cultural urge to identify with our lack of answers. One reason the “over explanation” of therapeutic culture is appealing is because it offers an identity alongside a diagnosis. If we all have ADHD, then we belong to a communal identity that offers some safety from the shame of being strange or defective. India also points this out, linking to a website in which licensed doctors and therapists diagnose dead authors and cultural figures with autism and ADHD. If Jane Austen was autistic, I suppose it’s not so bad to admit I might be. We can all be crazy together.
But the preacher tried this approach as well, to no avail. Not only has he searched out wisdom, he has sought out insanity. He goes to the asylum. He tries living with no purpose, no point. He tries out madness. I like to imagine the preacher intentionally living in a deranged fiction for a while, kind of like Don Quixote, where he play-acts and loses touch with reality, just to see what happens.
But the thing about delusions is that eventually, they trick us into thinking that everyone else are the crazy ones.
The way of insanity leads to the ultimate sin of trying to explain everything: hubris. When we begin to take pride in our foolishness as well as our knowledge, it is a sure sign that our vanity is out of control. Consider Cervantes's speech in the 1975 theatrical version of Cervantes work, Man of La Mancha:
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
What is madness? Maybe it’s all the undiagnosed, normal, people who are unimpressed with themselves. Maybe those without social media are the crazy ones.
The Church’s answer to therapeutic culture cannot be an overreliance on reason, since therapeutic culture is totally fine accepting the label of unreasonable. Neither is the church’s response one of no diagnosis. There are real problems in the world, and some of them are therapeutic. Some of these problems can and should be answered with Biblical and theological answers—but in the right order.
As Hartmut Rosa has observed, it’s only in embracing the mystery of what is outside of our control that we can receive what has been given us to control as a gift:
The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world. . . . Our lives unfold as the interplay between what we can control and that which remains outside our control.
Ultimately, our struggle to embrace the mystery of the faith is not a deficit of explanations (even true ones) but a deficit of holiness. Only holiness allows us to readily embrace the uncontrollability of the world, and only holiness solves the problem of our first diagnosis, the problem of sin. What the church needs, in the words of theologian John Webster, is a return to the centrality of “holy reason.” According to Webster, “holy reason” has four parts:
The primary act of holy reason is prayer for the assistance of the Holy Spirit; the setting of holy reason is the fellowship of the saints; the manner of holy reason is fear of the holy God; and the end of holy reason is the sanctifying of God’s holy name.
Churches and church-folk who hope to effectively reach the therapeutic generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot appeal to truth claims alone. Clinicalism cannot be replaced by Biblicism. Instead, the path forward must be to help young people embrace the mystery of the gospel by faith, and dare to live a life of holiness.
Imagine a young person coming to a pastor or church leader for counsel. They’ve been to a therapist already. Maybe it really helped them. But they are not satisfied. Something about the world they live in feels off. In his work Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy correctly diagnoses the real problem: “You live in a deranged age–more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
So how do they answer their questions about life’s disappointments? How do they know who they are or what they are doing? According to Webster’s formula, here are the simple instructions you should give them:
These instructions are not always self-explanatory. There is plenty of room for mystery here. But the beauty of them is that they are neither over-complicated or over-ambitious. They are the basics of the faith.
In the introduction to Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton tells an underdeveloped tale of “an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.” The point of this tale, according to Chesterton, is to show the joy of being “at once astonished in the world and yet at home in it.”
Those who belong to Christ uniquely possess this joy. We adventure into the mystery of the world and all its questions, knowing that we will never find all the answers. But we have no need to over-explain anything. Why? Because we know the power of the basics. We have tasted and seen the power of the simple gospel, the continual unraveling of the mystery of God in the face of Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit. We see in the mirror dimly, but know one day we will see face to face. We long for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord, and know the mystery of life is not found in the explanation of our confusion, but in the holiness of orthodoxy.