Stephanie Muravchik's new book is a carefully researched examination of three psychospiritual movements in modern America: Clinical Pastoral Education, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Salvation Army. Muravchik argues that therapeutic ideas and practices helped these groups become more effective in rehabilitating lost souls, converting people to Christ, and fostering attitudes conducive to faith and civic responsibility. By pointing out how people in these movements used psychology to buttress and reform faith and religious practice, Muravchik calls into question analyses that have seen psychology as a secular substitute for religion or as a source of disenchantment. Muravchik's research is a useful corrective to an older literature (for example, that of Philip Rieff) that linked the rise of “the therapeutic” to pernicious individualism, political apathy, and religious disenchantment. It is in line with other studies in the last thirty years calling into question the link between the rise of science and the decline of Christianity.

One strength of the book is that it examines religion and psychology among popular movements. Much of the historiography on psychology and religion focuses on intellectuals, but Muravchik introduces us to the shifting terrain of everyday hopes and struggles among young pastors, recovering alcoholics, the urban poor, and others improvising their faith in daily life. She introduces us to fascinating and understudied figures and has a knack for incorporating biographical notes and anecdotes that bring her narrative to life. Though she includes voices from a variety of perspectives, especially liberal and conservative, there is an elective affinity that is clearly on display between science and liberal Protestantism. Liberal Protestants were the first to borrow psychology and incorporate its techniques into pastoral training.

Muravchik might have probed in more detail the relationship between liberal religion and psychology. She is certainly correct in arguing that science in general and psychology in particular did not destroy religion in America; but was psychology corrosive of particular forms of faith and of evangelicalism in particular? Did it lead toward liberal positions? When the Salvation Army substituted work therapy and spiritual rehabilitation for traditional evangelicalism how were they changing the religiousness of members? Were they promoting a “spirituality” that marked this group as something quite different from an older religiousness? Did the psychospiritual impulse, with its emphasis on experience, its generic god-talk, and its distaste for dogmatic religion, abet a type of religious liberalism? Had she taken up these questions, Muravchik might have provided a slightly more nuanced view of what happened to Christians when they borrowed therapeutic ideas and practices.

Good books leave you wanting more at the end. This was a very good book and by the end I wanted more analysis of the strains and tensions involved when people borrowed from science. Muravchik hints at this throughout the book. There is no doubt that psychological notions challenged and even replaced religious ones for many people, including especially early twentieth-century pastors and intellectuals who were the first to struggle to contain the more critical implications of new sciences. Examining the difficulties involved in borrowing psychological therapies in these popular movements—especially looking at conversations about what was being lost or destroyed when believers borrowed from science—would not have taken away from Muravchik's argument that the therapeutic abetted faith. This inclusion would have strengthened her ability to understand how people improvised working solutions, ignored tensions when they had to, and built the faith-affirming psychoreligious hybrids she examines. More analysis of the tensions involved in incorporating therapy into religion also would have helped us see in finer detail how processes involved in mixing and combining religious and secular worldviews led to change over time. These would have been valuable additions.

Muravchik's book is filled with thoughtful and provocative claims. One of her most provocative was that therapeutic impulses led to civic-mindedness and democratic agency. This fascinating idea, if developed further, would go a long way to revising a longstanding assumption about the impact of therapeutic culture in America. Many commentators have argued that therapeutic discourses have diminished us over time. Muravchik points to another possibility: that the rise of therapeutic culture fostered the creation of new spiritual organizations that joined us together, created bonds of community, and fostered a sense of duty and responsibility to others. This was just one intriguing possibility in a thoughtful book that opened up new ways of thinking about American Christianity, psychology, and the therapeutic in American culture.