Our world is filled with self-help. This is entirely to be expected.
Creatures who for uncounted millennia lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers, and then for a few thousand years lived in medium-sized agricultural communities, in the last 200 years have moved into massive urban and suburban complexes in which we are compelled to navigate countless rules and systems.
Life in an electrified world means too much stimulation and not enough rest.
And it is not just that the world has changed; it is also that the pace of change accelerates constantly. The world gets better (in technological terms) so quickly that it becomes unsettling.
People need help.
We turn to writers who tell us how to win friends, influence people, manage our time, manage our depression, speak to our spouse in the proper love language, and every other thing.
We didn’t end up in what is sometimes derisively referred to as “therapeutic” culture just because we are narcissists (though there is that). The truth is, we need therapy to deal with what we have made of our world.
Catholics are not exempt from the madness of modern life, nor from the need for help in coping. As a consequence, the self-help movement has moved inside the Church. We see speakers, teachers, and writers drawing on the treasures of the Church to create Catholic self-help materials and programs.
Some of this is clearly good and practical, because it draws on the deposit of faith to help the confused and worried citizen of modernity. But some of it seems to have a dark side, using the Church’s language to offer ideas and practices not consistent with the Church’s life.
A few years ago, writing in The Week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry reminded his readers that Catholicism is not some ‘’therapeutic religion along the lines of Oprah, self-help writers, and spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra.” Christianity, Gobry said, is about “pushing you to confront your sins and thereby repent and receive friendship with God.”
This is right. But how do we tell when Catholic self-help has crossed from drawing on the Faith to re-drawing the Faith, remaking it in Oprah’s image?
To help us find the dividing line, we might distinguish between practical self-help and philosophical self-help.
That is to say, some self-help is no more than an effort to learn and develop skills. This we can call practical. One thinks of the person who wants to learn a breathing technique for managing anxiety or another who needs a system for time management.
Neither learning a technique nor trying a system (whether for time management, or addiction treatment, or for any other practical need) raises many alarms for the person of faith. A life of faith is not threatened by the seeking and sharing of this kind of help.
Practical self-help is everywhere, from YouTube videos on how to be better at dating to Weight Watchers meetings offering information and support. So long as the help they offer is actually helpful—no snake oil, please—and does not make philosophical or religious claims, we are probably safe in treating it as benign.
Practical help can extend even into the inner life of the person without raising religious concerns. For example, there is the growing school of cognitive behavioral therapy, in which people learn to speak to themselves inwardly in new ways so that they can improve their state of mind.
Such an inward form of self-help (learning to hold a different kind of inner monologue) might seem scary to the person of faith who places a high value on the inner dialogue with God and the saints. Should I really let a psychologist or therapist into this inner space?
But the inner life of the person, just like the outer, has practical needs. The person who suffers mental anguish can benefit from techniques that build new habits of internal conversation.
What makes self-help “practical” rather than “philosophical” is not that the practical happens on the exterior of the person, and the philosophical happens on the interior. Rather, what distinguishes them is what they have to say about the meaning of life.
Neither dating videos, nor Weight Watchers meetings, nor psychological techniques such as cognitive/behavioral therapy make any general claims about the meaning of life. This makes them practical.
But philosophical self-help goes beyond mere learning and skills development. It seeks to speak to us about the meaning of things. This is an obvious incursion into areas of life that are directly connected to faith.
To give a popular example, think of Deepak Chopra, who makes specific claims about “enlightenment” as the highest religious value rather than salvation in the Christian sense. He specifically rejects Jesus as a savior and refers to him as an enlightened one, like the Buddha.
It might well be that mixed in with Chopra’s religious claims, he also provides practical help. But he is not an acceptable teacher for a Christian because his teaching is in direct opposition to the Christian faith. It must be rejected as false and avoided as a spiritual danger.
Just as in the secular world, both kinds of self-help are now on offer within the Church.
Many Catholic self-help books and programs offer practical help infused with the wisdom of the Faith. One thinks of Gary Zimak’s book, Give Up Worry for Lent, which helps the anxious by providing daily Lenten Bible readings accompanied by reflections aimed at deepening trust in God.
The book is one of a million you can find, meant to help you deal with anxiety, but it is made better by providing a grounding in the love of God as revealed in his word. It is pretty hard to see how such a book could be spiritually dangerous.
The Catholic in Recovery addiction program, founded by a man we frequently have on our radio program, Scott Weeman, and Courage, a Catholic outreach to those who face same-sex attractions, are two movements that likewise seem to offer practical self-help infused with the wisdom and values of the Faith.
They offer programs of self-improvement for those who have found they can’t do it on their own. They offer teachings and techniques to master through reading and listening. And they offer communities that meet for sharing and support.
But both also use the language of the Church to describe themselves, placing themselves within the familiar moral and spiritual bounds of Church teaching.
The website for Catholic in Recovery, for example, states that “the goal of every encounter and interaction that one has with our organization is connection—connections with others who have struggled or still struggle from a similar state of hopelessness as well as connection to Jesus Christ, the Lord that delivers new life.”
The language we associate with recovery programs is here, but it is placed at the feet of Christ, so to speak, recognizing him as the font of healing.
Likewise, in its mission statement, Courage takes the teaching of the Church as given, using the language of the Church to describe itself: “Courage members are men and women who experience same-sex attractions and who have made a commitment to strive for chastity. They are inspired by the gospel call to holiness and the Catholic Church’s beautiful teachings about the goodness and inherent purpose of human sexuality.”
These apostolates recognize that Christian life is more than just therapy; it is a call to imitate Christ in love. What they are providing, when they are at their best, is help to do just that.
This brings us, finally, to that problematic area of Catholic self-help that goes beyond drawing on the Faith and moves toward re-drawing the Faith.
The controversial work of Richard Rohr, for example, has faced significant criticism for its use of Christian terminology to teach understandings of God, of Christ, and of the meaning of salvation that are at odds with the Church’s.
Rohr, who came to prominence by writing about and encouraging a form of spirituality for men, has developed a body of teaching in which he asks us to be more comfortable with the goodness of creation and with the goodness in non-Christian religions, which is laudable.
But as Trent Horn recently pointed out on his podcast (see The Counsel of Trent, “The False Christ of Fr. Richard Rohr,” on Catholic.com), the spiritual help that Rohr offers comes wrapped in a distorted view of Christ.
Rohr’s spiritual teaching, while it uses Catholic language, tends to use that language in ways that mutilate Church teaching. Like Chopra, his teaching might well include practical helps, but the meanings it proposes are at odds with those held by the Church.
Most disturbing is Rohr’s Christology, which openly divides the person of Jesus from the divine Christ.
“The full Christian leap of faith,” Rohr writes in his book The Universal Christ, “is trusting that Jesus together with Christ gave us one human but fully accurate window into the eternal now that we call God. This is a leap of faith that many believe they have made when they say Jesus is God. But strictly speaking, those words are not theologically correct. Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ’s historical manifestation in time.”
Needless to say, this is problematic. To divide Jesus and the Christ, however eruditely one does the cutting, is to do violence to the Incarnation as the Church has always understood it.
Matthew Kelly, who functions in both the secular and Catholic self-help worlds, though far more orthodox than Rohr, seems to dance on the edge of redrawing the meaning of Christianity when he bids his readers to “be the best version of yourself.”
Much of Kelly’s advice comes in the form of helpful slogans. Some are merely practical: “Diets don’t fail. We fail at diets.” And even those that are philosophical are generally uncontroversial: “God loves you just as you are—but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.”
But one slogan has come to dominate Kelly’s work: his call for us to be the best version of ourselves. Kelly, in fact, seems to have settled on this slogan as a kind of summary of his teaching. And it is problematic.
On the one hand, the call to become the best version of ourselves might be taken as consistent with Christ’s own command that we be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:48). In this sense, it would be consistent with what the Church teaches.
The difficulty with Kelly’s work is that it tends to present “the best version of myself” as a thing to be achieved, whereas the Church recognizes the perfection Christ commands as a thing that must be received.
This is a vital distinction. The difference between receiving perfection and trying to achieve perfection is the difference between Christianity and the Tower of Babel. It is the difference between accepting Christ as the Savior on whose mercy I am entirely dependent and undertaking to save myself by mastering skills or learning lessons. One of these is the way of life; the other is futile.
In the sacraments of the Church, Christ has given us the way to perfection, because in those sacraments, he gives himself to us. Ultimately, the sacraments are the way of perfection because in them we receive Christ.
Unfortunately, Kelly too often presents the way of perfection not in the Christian sense of reception of God through sacraments, but in a more Buddhist or worldly sense. Perfection, for Kelly, is a kind of balance we achieve.
He says for example, that the best version of ourselves is “something we achieve in some moments and not in others.” He tells us that “the Answer for you and me, is to try to live in that delicate balance between striving to improve in character while celebrating our unique personality and God-given talents.”
Kelly does not come off as intentionally teaching a non-Christian way of perfection. He seems, rather, to have blended standard self-help approaches with Christian teachings, failing to notice that the two will not fit together.
“Could you have a better dream for your children than to want them to become the best version of themselves?” he asks.
Well, yes, because this vague language replaces the traditional salvation language of the Church without improving on it. In what way is this “dream” better than the desire for heaven, the desire for Jesus, the desire for holiness and salvation?
Although Kelly seems devoted to Christ and his Church, here he subtly brings a theologically foreign idea into the Catholic context, and it doesn’t fit. It would probably over-theologize a slogan to say that this one is Pelagian, but it does have a hint of the do-it-yourself salvation that we associate with Pelagianism. His manner of expression is close enough to feel like Christianity, but it does not quite match up with Christian hope, a hope entirely free of the subtle self-centeredness of worrying about which version of myself I am achieving.
Christian hope is not like that. We hope for the whole world to come to faith in Christ so that the whole world can be saved—a thing so much grander than trying to be our best.
When Catholic self-help gurus cross a line, either openly or subtly, from drawing on the wisdom of the Church to reframing the meaning of Christian life, we have a problem.
Any self-help program, no matter how Catholic it might sound, must be rejected if it tends to draw us into an emphasis on the self while obscuring the call to live for Christ and for others.
People should get help where help is needed, and lots of today’s Catholic self-help efforts are doing genuine good. But whenever Christianity is reduced to self-help, it loses important dimensions of sacrament, mission, and grace.
Christianity is a high calling, one that requires us to lose our self-centeredness as we grow in love. It’s okay to need help with that. But when self-help gurus within the Church begin to shift the meaning of Christianity to make it less about the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ and the sacraments and more about me and my efforts, it has gone too far.