Andrew Root, Shrinking,
and Therapy in an Age of Despair
A Feature Review Essay on
Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness
Andrew Root
Paperback: Baker Academic, 2025
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]
Essay by Wesley Vander Lugt and Stephanie Ann Vander Lugt
We are big fans of theologian Andrew Root and the TV show Shrinking, but we don’t think they accurately locate the role of psychotherapy within our secular age. Contrary to Root, we believe therapy is a crucial ally alongside Christian ministry and evangelism. And contrary to Shrinking, we believe therapy can be a powerful way of accompanying people through their pain, trauma, and struggle while respecting important boundaries and therapeutic practices.
Andrew Root is Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary and a prolific author, including his six-volume series on Ministry in a Secular Age. Root’s Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness technically falls outside this series but matches it in both style and purpose. It is a fascinating mixture of cultural commentary, fictional narrative, theological reflection, and ecclesiological prescription, demonstrating “cultural philosophy in conversation with a theology of the cross” (xiii). Root explores why modern life is oriented toward happiness and why “immanent contentment” is ultimately unsatisfying. He argues that as long as we’re chasing happiness, self-fulfillment, and authenticity, we won’t be able to conquer our underlying sadness. We need to face our sadness and its source head on. We need people to join us in our sorrow. Ultimately, we need a God who knows our sorrow, encounters us there, and transforms our sorrow into life.
In other words, we need evangelism. Despite evangelism being the “schmole of American Protestantism” (20), Root wants to welcome evangelism back into the identity and mission of the church. By evangelism, Root does not mean presenting a propositional gospel message to unbelievers, aiming for personal repentance and faith in Jesus for eternal life. Root means joining people in their sorrow and ministering the good news that God in Christ knows our sorrow. Whereas most forms of secular evangelism (advertising, recruiting, branding) promise to lead us away from sorrow into greater happiness, the church’s evangelism is an invitation to participate in God’s life in and through sorrow and to receive the consolation of Jesus.
On many levels, Evangelism in an Age of Despair presents a culturally subversive, theologically compelling, and practically generative plea for reimagining evangelism. And while many aspects of the book deserve appreciative and critical engagement, we want to engage with Root’s critique of psychotherapy. We do so as ordained ministers and as a theologian (Wesley) and therapist (Stephanie) who believe wholeheartedly in the need for both therapy and incarnational ministry in our late-modern world. And since we’ve been watching Shrinking, we want to relate the themes of this TV show to Root’s suspicion of therapy and his proposal for sorrow-engaged evangelism.
Root rightly acknowledges that we live in an age of deep anxiety in which many people are lonely, isolated, and sad. But we also live in an age of competition, so he contends that “there are few who will walk into sorrow who are not paid to do so” (26). While Root acknowledges that therapy can do some good and is necessary at times, he questions “whether paid consolation is really consolation.”
While we understand Root’s concern about the professionalization of consolation, this observation is misleading. Not only do therapists provide much more than consolation, but also when people are well-trained to provide specialized care and treatment, we should expect them to get compensated. Patients may not pay hospital chaplains directly, but the hospital compensates them as part of their services. Congregants aren’t billed by the hour for pastoral counseling, but pastors are compensated for this as a part of their role. Anyone can enter someone else’s pain and sorrow out of love and concern, but therapists are equipped to do so with robust understanding and unique skills. Clients pay therapists not just for consolation, but for critical tools, experiences, and resources for their healing journey.
Root situates the prominence of therapy in late-modern society within the all-consuming, elusive pursuit of happiness. “We all feel traumatized,” Root claims, because we can’t escape sadness and achieve happiness, despite the constant promise that we can find it or buy it (126-27). Enter the therapist, who helps people manage the stress and discomfort of this incongruence. To bolster this point of view, Root quotes Francis Fukuyama’s book Identity: “The therapist is simply interested in making his or her patients feel better about themselves” (156). In its worst form, therapy becomes a form of stress management where “being okay, as opposed to being transformed, becomes the highest good” (163).
While there may be some therapists who take this approach (like the eHelp services Root references), most therapists would see this as a woefully inadequate description of their work. Therapists and social workers do deep personal work with clients while also attuned to social and historical realities, like generational traumas of systematic oppression, that shape lives in complex ways beyond the individual pursuit of happiness. Because of Root’s short-sighted view of therapy as stress management for the unhappy, however, he rejects the possibility that therapy can be a way of accompanying people in their sorrow. Something more personal and real is needed for genuine transformation.
Interestingly, Shrinking is based on a similar premise. Jimmy (played by Jason Segel) is a therapist who is reeling from his wife’s death, and it leads him to improvise some unconventional methods. Contrary to his supervisor (played by Harrison Ford), Jimmy is not content merely to talk to people about their problems. He wants to join them in their sorrow, at least in part because that’s what he wants people to do for him. Without revealing too many spoilers, Jimmy gets into trouble by traversing beyond traditional forms of therapy, but it also brings him to life, and it blurs the boundaries between his clients and everyone else in his life who carries sorrow. Although Shrinking assumes an atheistic universe without any sense of transcendent salvation, it presents something similar to Root’s appeal for evangelism: joining people in their sorrow as the path toward transformation.
Unfortunately, both Root and Shrinking diminish what therapy can be and therefore celebrate the breaking of important boundaries (Shrinking) and denigrate the genuine healing therapy can provide (Root). That being said, we agree with Root that some approaches have bought into the “therapeutic gospel” as described in Eva Moskowitz’s book In Therapy We Trust, namely, that happiness is the goal, all problems have psychological causes, and these causes are inevitably treatable (157). There are forms of therapies that merely seek to diminish stress and maximize happiness, but not all therapists operate within this reductionistic, immanent frame, and certainly not all therapists make “rapid armchair diagnoses” that ignore the soul (160).
In fact, there is a growing dissonance and controversy within the psychotherapy community around the practice of diagnosing, but most insurance providers will not cover therapy without a formal diagnosis, making this a difficult systemic issue. In addition, many therapists would reject the notion that their approach ignores the soul, especially if “soul” means the entirety of one’s living, breathing being (body, mind, and spirit). There are some therapeutic approaches that focus on alleviating symptoms–take X to deal with Y–yet there are other, more holistic approaches that pursue transformational change, uncovering and addressing underlying causes of distress and trauma to support deeper healing. The trauma that many people carry is not merely a feeling of sadness, as Root seems to imply, but a complex reality that requires skilled, embodied, and complex treatment. This kind of therapy is not just about talking clients toward greater happiness, but guiding clients toward unprecedented new freedom.
Unlike Jimmy in Shrinking, therefore, therapists don’t need to get in a boxing ring with clients or invite them to live in their house to be effective (therapeutic boundaries really are crucial to protect both the client and the therapist). And unlike Root’s assumption, therapists are not limited to self-help talk therapy. There are therapeutic approaches that focus on transformational change through a range of embodied modalities—Coherence Therapy, EMDR, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, and others—that equip therapists to address and heal the root causes of debilitating suffering. In addition, while therapist-client boundaries are important, these can exist alongside a commitment to accompany a client through life’s joys and sorrows. We will always need pastors and friends to be with us in our sorrow and to minister the gospel of Jesus, but therapists have a unique role in assessing the complex source of distress and offering appropriate treatment.
In other words, sorrow may describe one part of our human situation and highlight the need for accompaniment, but it is not sufficient to describe what many people experience and why they need therapy and treatment. For example, if someone is suffering from debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder or panic symptoms, they are caught in a maladaptive internal pattern that needs targeted interventions to reduce the disturbance and promote healing. In these cases and many others, compassionate presence is necessary but not sufficient, and most ministers are not trained to offer this kind of clinical support. We might add that most theologians are not adequately trained to speak in holistically informed ways on topics like trauma, sorrow, and mental illness. In future work, therefore, we hope Root might acknowledge this or at least draw on research and resources utilized and appreciated by mental health professionals, such as Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow or Bessel van der Kolk’s more popular The Body Keeps the Score.
These resources and others explain how reducing everyone’s burden to the experience of “sorrow” overlooks the reality of chronic and severe mental illness. For individuals living with conditions like paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other persistent mental health challenges, forgoing professional treatment can be harmful and potentially dangerous. Again, these individuals need the compassionate presence of pastors, evangelists, and friends–people who can walk with them in their suffering–but they also need appropriate medical, pharmacological, and psychological care.
In sum, we need therapy in an age of despair just as much as we need evangelism, but for different reasons. While therapy can free us from the inevitability of despair, evangelism as Root describes it can save us from the loneliness and meaninglessness of despair. While therapists should not claim to be evangelists (contra Jimmy in Shrinking), and evangelists should not claim to be therapists (Root gets this right), therapy and evangelism are complementary modes of engagement within our journeys of hurt and holistic healing. Root misses the mark by assuming that therapy is inherently immanent and self-centered whereas evangelism is soul-centered and opens us to the God who ministers to us in our sorrow. People can experience God’s presence and healing action in both therapy and evangelism, and both are needed for integrative care.
As it turns out, Shrinking may present a better view of integrative care than Root does, despite omitting the spiritual dimension, because it shows how therapy, friendship, and family can work together as people seek wholeness. We believe that Christians should be passionate advocates of fully integrated care, supporting approaches that recognize clients and patients as whole people with physical, emotional, material, mental, and spiritual needs. Research increasingly shows that integrated care is the most effective way to support overall well-being, and entire healthcare systems are moving in that direction. In these places, doctors, mental health clinicians, social workers, and pastors work together and have irreplaceable and complementary roles in joining people in their unhealth, suffering, and sorrow.
Despite our critiques of Root’s book, Evangelism in an Age of Despair can help all of us—therapists and evangelists included—to reimagine the meaning of sorrow. And despite its shortcomings and crassness (viewer discretion advised), Shrinking helps us identify what life is all about: being with each other in our sorrow, even when it lacks an imminent solution. In this way, Shrinking becomes a bridge to the gospel Root articulates: God knows our sorrow and has promised to be with us now and forever, when every sorrow will transform into a song.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Wesley Vander Lugt is a pastor-theologian, writer, educator, nonprofit leader, and arts advocate. He teaches theology and directs the Leighton Ford Center for Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Charlotte and is the Co-Founder of Kinship Plot, a community of learning and practice cultivating resonant relationships of every kind. He is the author of several books, including Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breathes (Eerdmans, 2024).
Stephanie Ann Vander Lugt
Stephanie Ann Vander Lugt (MA, MSW, LCSWA, LCASA) is a licensed clinician, ordained minister, and cofounder of Kinship Plot, where she blends justice, faith, healing, and ecology to foster personal and communal transformation. With over fifteen years of experience in nonprofit work, she brings compassion and expertise to holistic well-being and spiritual care, describing her vocation as healing people, land, and communities.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
