ABSTRACT
This chapter banks off Philip Rieff’s claim that the United States has become a therapeutic society and then to Linda Mercadante’s conclusion that segments of being Spiritual but Not Religious (SBNR) are best understood in light of Rieff’s thesis. The cultural soup we now inhabit takes for granted a spiritual search guided by psychological terms like self-actualization, individuation, and peak-experiences. Adding social scientific sophistication to this line of thought, the chapter shows how this soup was fueled in part by the social space of the ritualistic therapy session. The latter, framed as liminal, has served to both deconstruct the reigning religio-cultural superego (as with Freud) and authorized “unchurched” spiritual experiences (as with Jung), together fostering the psychological orientation of being SBNR. The chapter then provides empirical evidence which challenges the claim, most persuasively argued in Carrette and King’s Selling Spirituality, that such spaces have primarily resulted in a form of spiritual narcissism.
