ne of the primary manifestations of modernity is the therapeutic culture of western civilization. While there can be varied legiti-0 mate interpretations of "therapeutic," some positive and some negative, we will focus on certain aspects of both medical and psychological therapeutic assumptions that are problematic for Christians growing older in the current cultural context. Whether this present age is called postmodernity, late modernity, or a time of uncertainty, the therapeutic legacy of modernity cannot be denied. The assumptions embedded within that legacy include both psychological and medical claims that form expectations of how we should live as well as how we should die. The excesses of medical therapeutic modernity have frequently perpetuated the self-deception that death can be avoided if we work hard enough and sufficiently trust our rational scientific abilities. The psychotherapeutic mindset of the first half of the twentieth century evolved in the afterglow of high modernity and its convictions regarding an autonomous psychological self. Whether the goal is framed as self-actualization, the freeing of one's psychic structure from dependency conflicts, or the deliverance from externally binding contingencies, there is no question but that the supremacy of self-determination and autonomous rationality has ascended to new heights of significance within our therapeutic culture. Philip Rieff, a sociologist, assessed the far-reaching consequences of this ascendance in his now classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.' Rieff exposed a distressing process by which we had grown to replace the traditional idea of the preeminence of God with nothing more than a personalized, manipulable sense of well-being. He observed that our story

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An extraordinary, if circumscribed, positive shift has occurred since the mid‐twentieth century in the perceived status of Hugh Everett III's 1956 theory of the universal wave function of quantum mechanics, now widely called the Many‐Worlds Interpretation (MWI). Everett's starkly new interpretation denied the existence of a separate classical realm, contending that the experimental data can be seen as presenting a state vector for the whole universe. Since there is no state vector collapse, reality as a whole is strictly deterministic. Explained jointly by the dynamical variables and the state vector, “this reality is not the reality we customarily think of, but is a reality composed of many worlds,” wrote Everett's colleague Bryce DeWitt. In this essay, I account briefly for the change of status in conventional scientific terms, yet chiefly in extended terms of three sets of ideas that I argue can be understood to affect believability in both scientific and religious contexts, illuminating helpfully the MWI phenomenon, and its engagement with theology: orthodoxy and heresy, language and reference, and faith and agnosticism. One's orientation relative to the variable content of these dynamic, socially oriented categories helps to make belief in ideas as metaphysically challenging as Everettian Quantum Mechanics, or particular ideas about God, either more or less believable. The categories will have the same function in a theology engaging Everett's theory, and in any theology at all written in a society deeply marked by what I further argue is a subtle, powerful, and pervasive mode of quasi‐scientific thinking we can call societal constructive agnosticism, of which anyone doing theology today must be aware.

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