For much of human history, religions weren't just making claims about gods or the afterlife.

They've also been the primary authorities on human behavior, morality, suffering, desire,

grief, identity, and what it means to be a healthy person.

If you were struggling with guilt, hearing voices, experiencing depression, or trying to

understand your place in the world,

the answer has been much more likely to come from a shaman or a priest than any kind of clinician.

Then something changed.

As science began to explain more of the natural world, religion gradually lost its authority

over questions of astronomy and geology and biology. And then a hundred

years ago, psychology represented a new challenge because it moved into territory that many

religious traditions had long considered their own. The mind, the self, the soul. Ignoring

whether suffering was caused by sin, psychology asked about trauma. Instead of asking

whether behavior was morally wrong, it asked about where that behavior came from and what it might

be propping up. No longer assuming a divine purpose or evil temptation behind every thought and feeling, it treated human experience

as something that could be studied, measured, and possibly understood. Modern culture fails to

account for just how radical this break from orthodoxy really is, or how genuinely upstart and

hampered cutting-edge psychology remains even today.

Whether it's the Catholic that decries mental health care as satanic, or the Protestant's

insistence on self-reliance, or the institutional barriers to gender, psychedelic, or sexuality

research, psychology remains in a front to much of religious

tradition. Is this brave new world really ready to embrace the soft sciences on this side of the

Galilean spirit? Or are we fools to imagine that laboratories have anything to teach us about what it

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