The therapy world has exploded in recent years. Not only has going to therapy been totally destigmatized and is even seen as a status symbol, but the research and clinical sides of the industry have developed an enormous range of different types of treatment.

But how are Christians supposed to view the therapy world? Just because a particular treatment has been touted as effective, does that mean a believer can give it a stamp of approval?

On a recent episode of “Relatable,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey dove into the secular therapy world and exposed several popular practices as unbiblical — one of which is the concept of the “inner child.”

The “biggest threat” to Christian women in particular, says Allie, is “not progressivism,” “not feminism,” “not the New Age,” and “not toxic empathy.”

“It’s therapy culture,” she says bluntly.

“I actually believe that the progressivism, feminism, toxic empathy, emotionalism, me-centeredness, New Age-ish stuff that unfortunately infects so many women’s Bible studies … and conferences are all downstream from the secular therapy, pop psychology, pseudo-spiritualism that we find on social media that is dedicated to women’s therapy and therapy concepts.”

For Allie, a lot of “therapeutic language” is just “an excuse for complaining and self-centeredness” and “a replacement for sanctification, for self-denial, for generosity, and the hard work of Holy Spirit-empowered holiness.”

She says that nowhere is this more evident than in the concept of the “inner child.”

In the therapy world, the “inner child” refers to the part of your adult self that still carries the emotions, needs, wounds, and beliefs formed during childhood. Therapeutic treatments often include patients learning to identify, reconnect with, and heal their childhood wounds, unmet needs, and emotions through techniques like visualization, reparenting exercises, emotional processing, and inner dialogue work.

But Allie says that “there’s no such thing as an inner child in the Christian worldview.”

While she validates the existence of “childhood memories,” “childhood experiences that shaped us,” and “childhood pain,” she argues that “the concept of an emotional or spiritual existence of an internal version of ourselves at 6 or 8 or 12 years old does not exist.”

Further, the concept of an inner child has problematic origins for the Christian, she says.

Sigmund Freud “popularized the idea that repressed childhood trauma is what drives much of our adult behavior,” but this perspective, Allie argues, denies our “sin nature that we inherited from Adam.”

One of Freud’s protégés, Carl Jung, then expanded on the idea of an internal child, which he called “the divine child” — a symbol for the pure, whole, innocent, and miraculous potential inside each person.

But Allie condemns this concept, as it also denies the biblical reality of sin nature. It has also, however, birthed and fed the New Age notion of the “inner goddess” — a divine or sacred internal energy or essence in each person that, if awakened, allows one to reclaim personal wholeness and embody her highest self.

“This underlying assumption that if it weren’t for all of these other factors, my inner self would be perfect and perfectly loved and if I can find her and find a way to perfectly love her and heal her, then I’ll just be okay — that is a secular New Age idea. It’s not a biblical idea,” says Allie, citing Jeremiah 17:9, which warns that “the heart is deceitful above all things.”

Ultimately, the inner child and other concepts that turn our gaze inward put the focus on us instead of God — the true healer, says Allie.

“This journey to finding the untainted, perfect, divine self inside of us is a losing battle that actually will just encourage more self-focus, which is the thing that is oppressing and trapping us, not the thing that’s going to liberate us.”

To hear Allie’s full biblical breakdown of the inner child — as well as more therapy treatments that she argues are unbiblical — watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Blaze media, Blazetv, Divine self, Inner child, Relatable, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Secular therapy, Shadow work, Somatic therapy, Therapy, Therapy culture, Therapy industry 

Gallup has been asking Americans for decades about the importance of religion in their lives. For both sexes and across various age groups, the general trend since 2000 has been downward.

With the exception of an increase from 2010 to 2013, this was certainly the case among men ages 18-29, but no longer.

‘A similar increase has occurred among young Republican women.’

A possible course correction athwart the forces of atomization and disenchantment appears to be under way, with young men stating en masse that religion is now “very important” to them.

Whereas in 2022-2023, only 28% of this cohort said religion was very important to them, that number skyrocketed to 42% in 2024-2025.

Women lag

Women in the same age group are plumbing new lows, with only 29% of respondents reporting that religion was very important to them in 2024-2025, down from 52% in 2000-2001. In every other age category, women lead men when assessing religion as very important.

Young men’s sense of religion’s importance has been more than rhetorical.

Church attendance shot up seven points between 2022-2023 and 2024-2025, hitting 40% — a virtual tie with young women and its highest level since 2012-2013. This year’s data, showing that young men are continuing to attend places of worship weekly or monthly, suggests this was no flash in the pan.

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KEVIN WURM/AFP/Getty Images

Bipartisan boom

When broken down by party affiliation, the latest reported term-over-term increase for young men was seven points for Republican men— from 45% in 2022-2023 to 52% most recently — and 3% for Democrat men — from 23% to 26%.

Not only did 2024-2025 see a spike in religious attendance, it saw the highest recorded identification with a specific religious affiliation — 63% — since 2012-2013. Of course, there are higher records to beat, including the decades-long high of 80% in 2000-2001.

Religious affiliation among women in the age group also increased since the previous term, hitting 60% in 2024-2025 — the first increase since 2002-2003.

Record conversions

“The finding that Republicans have driven heightened religious attendance among young men — and that a similar increase has occurred among young Republican women — suggests political dynamics may be playing a role in religious changes among the nation’s young adults,” said Gallup.

Young men’s turn to religion comes at a time of record convert baptisms both for the Catholic and Mormon churches in America. It also comes amid a period of relatively stabilized religiosity after years of decline and disaffiliation.

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​Belief, Catholic church, Christianity, Church attendance, Disaffiliation, Disenchantment, Faith, Gallup, Identification, Mormon church, Polling, Religion, Statistics, Women, Young men 

Ten years have passed since I last spoke to my grandfather as himself. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.

The man who forgot me isn’t the one I carry. I carry the other one. The one who took me for long walks, who collected acorns the way other men pocket loose change. He taught me never to speak ill of others, advice I have absorbed deeply and applied far less than he would have liked.

He never had a bad word to say about anyone. Not once. As an Irishman, this made him practically a medical curiosity.

We fed livestock together in the early mornings, breath visible, ground hard underfoot. He had a tenderness with cattle and sheep that I have never seen replicated . A slow hand to the forehead, a particular stillness, and the animal would simply decide to trust him. Even the wild ones. Especially the wild ones.

Unshakable faith

In the garden, he taught me to plant vegetables with something approaching ceremony. Potatoes pressed into drills with two hands, like an offering. Scallions in lines so deliberate they made the rest of existence feel approximate. Soil under the fingernail. The unshakable faith that what you plant will, in its own time, pay you back.

He taught me how to play piano and the Irish flute — hours of patient instruction that I traded, around age 13, for sports and the dubious pleasures of warm cider in a field. I stopped. He said nothing. I am still grateful and still guilty in roughly equal measure. He was the kindest man I have ever known.

He never had a bad word to say about anyone. Not once. As an Irishman, this made him practically a medical curiosity. We are, by temperament and long tradition, a people who can elevate mild inconvenience into competitive suffering. He never caught that particular bug.

A passing cloud

Then Alzheimer’s arrived. Before it takes the body, it takes the person, which makes the grief savage in its specificity. You mourn someone still breathing in front of you, still drinking tea, still occasionally smiling, while the version you knew withdraws without a forwarding address.

The first time he didn’t recognize me, I expected hesitation. What I received was blankness. Placid, absolute blankness. A face I had known my whole life, looking at me like I was a stranger who had wandered into the wrong room. For him, likely a passing cloud. For me, a clean line dividing before from after.

My grandmother outlived him by months. The official cause was a heart attack. The accurate cause was a broken heart, and I mean that with clinical precision rather than poetic license. She simply had no further use for mornings without him. Fifty years of reaching for the same hand, and when the hand was gone, she simply lost the argument for continuing. There is a particular brutality in watching love become a countdown.

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Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/Andia/Getty Images

A complicated picture

For decades, the dominant scientific theory treated Alzheimer’s as a single-villain story: amyloid plaques accumulating in the brain. One cause; one target. It was neat and tidy.

It was also completely wrong. Researchers now describe a far more complicated picture. Tangled Tau proteins. Genetic vulnerabilities. Metabolic failures. Disruptions originating in the gut, of all places.

The brain fails as part of a longer story. The first forgotten name is never the beginning, but only the moment the beginning becomes impossible to ignore. Medicine, in other words, spent decades treating the final chapter as the only one worth reading.

Newer treatments show modest results. They slow the decline, but they don’t reverse it. They don’t put a man back at his kitchen table, telling a story his family has heard so many times they could recite it backward, about meeting his wife at a dance, and making it feel, on the 43rd telling, like something worth leaning in for.

The current scientific ambition, at least, has grown more honest: attack the disease across every front simultaneously. Target the proteins, the aging cells, the metabolic dysfunction, and the genetic predispositions. Treat the system, not the symptom.

Bone-deep

My grandfather would have grasped this without a single journal article. He understood, bone-deep, that everything connects. Soil quality shapes the crop. Weather shapes the soil. The animals depend on both. You can’t fix a failing field by fixating on one plant.

There is something resembling hope in this shift. It arrives too late for him and for her. But the possibility exists that fewer families will sit across from someone they love and watch recognition drain from a familiar face. Over 7 million Americans currently live with Alzheimer’s. The people who love them number considerably more, and their suffering doesn’t appear in the statistics.

My grandfather carried me when I was too tired to walk and when I was too sick to stand. In return, I carry him. The man who never gave anyone a reason to be forgotten. It is the least I can do and nowhere near enough. And I will do it anyway, gladly, until I no longer can.

​Alzheimer’s disease, Ireland, Lifestyle, Health, Family, First person 

Yesterday, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey debated New York Times columnist David French, who has long identified as an evangelical Christian and a conservative.

Despite their shared theological and political identities, Stuckey and French clash on a number of issues, including transgender pronouns and gender ideology, abortion, and Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, among others.

In their 95-minute debate, the duo respectfully went head-to-head on topics that have drawn strong criticism of French from many on the conservative right.

Here are three highlights from the debate:

Talarico dispute

Allie brought up French’s recent article in which he praised Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico as a Christian who sets a positive example of the faith in politics compared to “MAGA Christianity.”

In contrast, Allie has sharply criticized Talarico’s progressive theological views, accusing him of twisting Scripture to support abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and left-wing policies

But French doubled down: “I’m just really not willing to say James Talarico is not a Christian.”

He continued, “When I look at our political discourse around Christianity in this country and political Christianity, it’s so broken. … We’re writing people out of Christianity based on policy positions.”

Allie pushed back, arguing that Talarico is pushing far more than policy positions.

“They’re not policy positions to say God is non-binary … or to say our trans neighbors need abortion care too, or to say that, ‘I think all religions share the same central truth,’” she countered, insisting that these are primarily “theological” issues.

Given that Talarico refuses to “affirm Genesis 1,” Allie made it clear that it’s “going to be tough” to agree that he’s the Christian he identifies as.

The Harris vote

In another part of the debate, Allie brought up French’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris.

“I don’t understand voting for someone like Kamala Harris,” she said, referencing the Biden DOJ’s removal of SNAP benefits for public schools that refused to allow biological males to use girls’ facilities or compete on girls’ teams.

She also pointed to Harris’ pledge to restore the Roe v. Wade framework and her opposition to bills banning late-term abortions.

“I agree with you on so many of these issues. … I just don’t think I could ever vote for Kamala Harris,” she reiterated.

French countered by arguing that for him, the Russia-Ukraine War took precedence over gender and abortion issues.

“I would place a war in which a million people are being killed and injured, which could potentially lead to a World War III that we may not survive as a species … way above things like pronouns,” he said.

But Allie pushed back on what she saw as “diminishment” of her original argument.

“You know I’m not just talking about pronouns,” she resisted.

“I’m talking about medical guidance for hospitals to chemically castrate kids. I’m talking about in Democrat states … taking kids out of the custody of their parents because the parents won’t affirm this newfound gender of the child,” she continued.

Pronoun clash

Allie also called out what she perceived to be conflicting statements regarding French’s position on “pronoun politeness.”

Last year during a podcast, French referred to his male colleague (Brian Riedl) who identifies as a woman using female pronouns — an act many, including Allie, perceived as a contradiction to his 2018 article, in which he wrote, “The use of a pronoun isn’t a matter of mere manners. It’s a declaration of a fact. I won’t call Chelsea Manning ‘she’ for a very simple reason. He’s a man.”

“Is your stance one of pronoun politeness that you believe that a man who identifies as a woman should be referred to as ‘she/her’?” Allie inquired.

French claimed he “didn’t remember” using female pronouns to refer to Riedl and partially reaffirmed his 2018 statement.

After praising Riedl as a “brilliant analyst,” French stated, “I’m going to be kind to [trans people], but I also don’t want to say things that I don’t believe are true, and so the way I deal with that is, I use people’s names.”

He caveated, however, by declaring that he’s “definitely not going to go out of [his] way” to call trans-identifying people by the pronouns matching their biological sex.

Allie replied, “I don’t see it as unkind calling someone, whether it’s to their face or not to their face, the gender that God made them.”

But French dissented. “Oh, I think if somebody is dealing with gender dysphoria, … I don’t see the value in me saying something to them that I know and they know is going to be hurtful to them.”

“It’s just normal, complete politeness and manners,” he continued.

“I’m just not going to go out of my way to say something that I know is going to be hurtful just because I can justify it as being true. All true words are not kind by virtue of just simply being true.”

Allie conceded, “I agree that you don’t have to be rude to someone and say, ‘That shirt looks bad on you.’”

“But when it comes to [gender], when we know it’s a lie that damages someone, that hurts them spiritually and physically and emotionally, hurts their family, I just can’t get on board with assenting to the idea that 2+2=5.”

Overall, the debate offered a revealing look at the growing divide within evangelical Christianity over truth, compassion, and cultural engagement. Watch the full hour-and-a-half exchange below.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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