Prosperity and the Therapeutic Turn

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

This chapter argues that megachurches around the world have taken a therapeutic turn: Self-help has become a dominant theological theme. Aimed at the cultivation of the self, its main premise is that believers can discover and fulfill their potential. Three areas matter to the theology of self-help: purpose, personal issues, and prosperity. The latter part of the chapter offers sociological explanations that account for the therapeutic turn. It then ends with a critical reflection. Sacralizing self-help fails to confront structural contexts of inequality that engender the very ontological insecurity it wishes to address.

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