Reading · Rat Park with Carl Erik Fisher

Happy pub day to religious scholar Liz Bucar and her great new book, Beyond Wellness! I recommend it highly. It’s warm, direct, clear, and bold—driven by a desire to bring the lessons of her field to bear on problems that matter, while staying grounded in serious scholarship.

Liz is a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, as well as a certified yoga instructor. I’ve been following her Substack, Religion, Reimagined for a while now, and I’ve found it genuinely useful as someone who thinks a lot about how secularized spiritual practices show up in mental health, recovery, and everyday life, including how the moral and ethical roots of such practices might be missed. As regular readers know, I’m especially interested in meditation and other contemplative practices, as well as the broader question of how flourishing relates to recovery. It's all there in Liz's new book—in fact, a huge swath of her work relates directly to recovery and flourishing: addiction, family dynamics, even a chapter on 12-step programs.

Fisher: You share about your experience with your father’s drinking: hints of his problems from your earlier life, all the way through to a family intervention when he was seventy. Can you say more about how you made sense of his drinking’s impact on you? Later in the book, you mention that you went to one 12-step meeting for family members affected by substance problems, partly as research for the book, but also with some personal relevance, which I’ll ask about a little later. But before that, did you ever consider Al-Anon, Adult Children of Alcoholics, or similar groups? And what guidance—religious, spiritual, or otherwise—did you receive as you prepared for that intervention? I’m thinking, for example, of how many therapists or interventionists sometimes advocate for a particular worldview or understanding of addiction, subtly or not.

Bucar: Addiction was never really talked about in my household growing up. I can make sense of my father’s drinking and its impact on me much more clearly in retrospect than I could at the time. It was a cause of my parents’ divorce when I was a senior in high school. And it’s why I’m not a drinker as an adult. I’ve actually told people directly: I don’t drink because my dad drinks too much. So it shaped how I think about substances and how careful I am with myself. But I hadn’t ever thought it affected my other personal relationships (but of course it does).

I never considered Al-Anon or Adult Children of Alcoholics before doing the research for this book.

When we prepared for the intervention, we hired an outside person to help, partly because of some complicated family dynamics with my stepmother. I don’t remember any of his guidance being religious or spiritual in content, which, given who he was talking to, probably wouldn’t have worked for me or my siblings anyway.

My biggest preparation was writing. We all flew to Florida and surprised my dad. He was shocked that we knew what was going on, and that we’d all show up like that. But what I really did to prepare was write him a very heartfelt letter. I poured a lot into it. That was my version of getting ready.

Fisher: I like your framing of a “spiritual salad bar.” It’s resonant with broad critiques of wellness culture and secularized spirituality, and I think most people in those worlds have at least the vague sense that something’s not quite right with many of today’s disconnected and commoditized practices. As a brief intro to your book, could you give us a taste: what exactly is the problem with a spiritual salad bar? To the extent that people draw on this or that religious tradition for an isolated practice or insight, what specifically can be the problem with that?

Bucar: I want to be clear that my problem isn’t with the combining itself. Pick-and-choose is basically what a lot of religion is, especially in the U.S. right now. People mix and match. We’re not ordering off a fixed menu anymore, and I’m okay with that.

My concern is that we often don’t know what we’re putting on our plates. We don’t know what the ingredients are. And these practices are powerful enough to change us, to remake us in ways we might not want, or even hurt us. Just because your Instagram feed started serving something up doesn’t mean it’s new, or that it comes from nowhere.

The communities and intellectual traditions these practices come from have ways of understanding what they’re for. So the questions I want people to ask are: What worldview is implied in this practice? Is that consistent with my own values? How is this practice trying to remake me, and is that the person I want to become? That’s really what I mean by not knowing what you’re putting on your plate.

Fisher: You say early in the book that understanding the religious roots of contemporary secularized practices—e.g., mindfulness or yoga—can be better for one’s well-being and the well-being of others. This seems generally true, but I want to push on that word “well-being” a little further.

It calls to mind Against Happiness, a book and set of notions I discussed on my own Substack not too long ago in the context of competing definitions of and pathways to recovery. The argument there is that not just in pop psych but even in the best available scholarship today, we have no idea what “happiness” or “well-being” means. It is a conceptual mess. Any definitions of well-being, thriving, or flourishing are necessarily value-laden, bound up in norms— moral, political, or otherwise. From that book:

“The concepts of a good life, well-being, and happiness—are normative. They are like such concepts as physical health and mental well-being. They embed norms and ideals and express values. A person lives a good life, lives well, is happy relative to some standard. The standard can be one the person herself endorses, or one endorsed by others—her community, culture, nation-state—or by certain experts, theologians, philosophers, psychologists, or policy wonks.”

To be clear, I’m sympathetic to much of what you argue. But let me ask a couple of critical questions:

First, what’s your definition of well-being?
Second, isn’t there a risk of a normative salad bar here? For example, I’m drawn to Buddhist teachings on interdependence, and I’m wary of the misogyny embedded in many traditions. But if I take the one and leave the other, who am I to pick and choose among the norms a tradition offers as a package? Doesn’t that selectivity run directly against the “not-God” principle — the call to decenter yourself and be genuinely humble about what you think you know?

Bucar: On well-being: I’m deliberately offering real well-being as something distinct from the concept of wellness. I think wellness is too thin. It’s too focused on biomarkers, individual optimization, chasing perfection. I wear a Whoop, and my Whoop age is apparently ten years younger than my biological age and that tells you almost nothing about whether I’m actually flourishing. So I prefer “well-being” because I want to make space for what real human flourishing requires, which is much larger than that.

And yes, that definition is normative. It’s value-laden. I’m okay with that. Ethics is at the center of a good human life. What we owe each other, our responsibilities to others, is part of what flourishing means. Community isn’t just belonging and getting support; it’s also what you owe. So I’m not worried if a conversation about well-being involves norms and values and disagreement. I’m interested in that conversation.

On the normative salad bar problem: if you read my Substack, you probably already know that I’m interested in reimagining forms of religion that align with my own values, politically engaged, not withdrawn from the world. So when it comes to Buddhism, for instance, I’m drawn to engaged Buddhism. I know that’s not what every Buddhist lineage emphasizes, and that’s fine. But I want a form that helps me understand how to respond to systemic racism or violence in the world.

On misogyny: I never blame misogyny on religious traditions themselves. These traditions don’t come from nowhere. They have particular historical and cultural contexts, and patriarchy is everywhere. It gets embedded into texts and practices. Part of what I mean by reimagining religion is doing some critical reinterpretation of those strands. That’s the skeptic in me.

As for the not-God principle--that’s a perfect example of what I mean. I may not be able to accept a particular conception of God, or I don’t think you can prove God exists, or I don’t even care if you can. But I can accept that I’m not God. That’s a genuinely theological idea, and a powerful one, even for someone with no religious affiliation.

Fisher: On that point, I know this is not your intention, but the word “reconnecting” can carry conservative or even reactionary overtones, can’t it? I’m wary of the idea that the original context of a practice validates it. You give specific examples throughout the book, but I wanted to invite a more general reflection: how to walk the line between being usefully rooted in tradition, versus reactively reaching for traditional values?

Bucar: This is a really good question, and in some ways it’s a challenge embedded in my own subtitle. I wanted to convey that these practices have a religious context that’s been stripped away, that we’re getting them without their container. But I’m absolutely not arguing for going back to some pure, original, “authentic” version of a practice. I put authentic in quotes for a reason. That’s a fool’s errand. That’s not how religious traditions work. They are always changing through time.

What I’m really saying is something like: the type of mindfulness meditation that became mainstream in hospitals and schools is based on a particular form of Buddhist meditation, which itself had a specific context, and losing that context might mean the practice isn’t doing what it could do for us today. That’s what interests me. Not recovering some original essence, but understanding what gets lost in translation, and why that might matter.

Fisher: In the chapter on mindfulness and Buddhism, you mention therapists who propose “second generation mindfulness-based interventions” that are “embedded in Buddhist worldviews and a larger Buddhist ethical context that would foster social engagement.” I have to admit that this makes me very uncomfortable. I think that therapists in general should not be acting as covert (or overt!) missionaries for a particular worldview, but rather helping clients to explore their own values, as freely chosen as possible. Now, you could argue there’s a place for explicitly faith-based therapy: someone who holds herself out as primarily a Christian counselor is clear that she’s working within that framework. But “second generation mindfulness-based interventions” doesn’t signal that kind of transparency (for precisely the reasons you explain in your book).

There’s a vulnerability issue here. Consider how most people wind up in therapy. People often start the process fairly quickly, at tough moments, through relatively informal channels—they ask their friends or professionals for referral options and sort of end up where they end up, more often than not. I’d argue that especially in these cases, it’s imperative that professionals act as fiduciaries, including being a fiduciary to the client’s own values and beliefs. Some therapists are surely very careful about this, but we know from other areas of therapy that many are not. What do you think? How does your work on religion and spirituality help those of us in mental health to understand and navigate these concerns?

Bucar: I should preface this by saying I’m not a therapist or a mental health specialist. But what you’re raising, I think, is really a question of consent.

If a therapist knows a technique comes from a particular religious worldview, and their client doesn’t share that worldview, do they have a duty to say so? My first instinct is yes, I believe in consent, and more information is generally better.

My colleague Ira Helderman has a piece in Psychology Today from 2020 called “The Origins of Mindfulness and Informed Consent” that pushes back on that a little. His argument is that therapists don’t typically give clients the full developmental history of every technique they use. Informed consent in therapy tends to focus on risks and benefits, not intellectual genealogy.

He also raises a harder problem: the actual origins of contemporary mindfulness are genuinely difficult to trace. These practices have been so thoroughly transformed that scholars like Robert Sharf have asked whether modern mindfulness is even Buddhist anymore. In some ways it looks more Protestant than Buddhist. It’s been individualized, internalized, stripped of community and ritual. So imagine a client who’s deconstructing an evangelical upbringing. Would you need to tell them that mindfulness carries some Protestant logic in it? It gets complicated fast.

Fisher: In your discussion of AA, you walk through court cases involving mandated treatment and mutual-help group attendance. I find these legal cases useful precisely because they sit at the meeting point between individual and social concerns. In one case you discuss, someone incarcerated in New York was given the option to participate in an extended visitation program as a reward for good behavior, but a condition of that program was participation in a substance use treatment program including AA meetings. He challenged this program on the grounds that AA is religious—and so the case became, in part, a test of what counts as treatment versus religious practice.

This gets at a confusion I see through public and even clinical understandings of AA. Twelve-step programs are not treatment per se. They are nonprofessional mutual help organizations. However, they were taken up into clinical practice by the Minnesota Model developed in the 1950s, which wove 12-step principles and practices into a structured treatment framework, giving them a quasi-clinical vocabulary and delivering them alongside professional counseling. This blurred the lines, for better or worse, between mutual help and professional care. That integration also had feedback on how people in AA perceived their practices. And there’s a lot of heterogeneity and regional variation. So the question of what AA “is” can be genuinely complicated.

The recovery researcher John Kelly, whom I’ve previously interviewed, has a very good article asking whether AA is “religious, spiritual, neither?” His argument is that while AA’s original main text, the “Big Book,” says that recovery is achieved through a spiritual awakening, 25 years of behavioral change research show that AA’s beneficial effects are carried predominantly by social, cognitive, and affective mechanisms: enhancing recovery-supportive social networks, boosting coping skills, and helping people to work with difficult emotions, for example.

You are the expert about what it means to call something spiritual, religious, or neither. What do you make of this? Does the label matter, and if so, how and in which contexts? How might the answers look different depending on which conception of religion or spirituality you’re working with?

Bucar: Religious studies scholars notoriously disagree about how to define religion, so I’ll say upfront this is contested territory. But I think it’s entirely reasonable to call AA religious, for precisely the reasons Kelly concedes. The Big Book references spiritual awakening. AA’s origins are in the Oxford Group. The language throughout has a kind of pseudo-liturgical quality. So yes, I think it has religious content.

And I think the label matters, which is part of what I write about in Beyond Wellness, because the perception of AA as religious is part of what made it not work for my dad. For many people, a negative reaction to religion means a negative reaction to AA. That’s real, and consequential.

I’d also push back on the clean line between “religious” and “spiritual.” In common usage people treat those as distinct--spiritual is the good stuff you can do alone, religious is the institutional baggage. But most religious studies scholars would tell you that’s a branding distinction, not a real one. Spirituality is just the parts of religion we’ve decided to keep outside of institutions. It’s still religion.

Fisher: I was glad to see your interest in framing addiction as something in all of us, and I really appreciate you sharing your experience of going to an Al-Anon meeting—both what was helpful and what was uncomfortable. One of your reflections: “I thought it was my job to smooth out the rough edges of others. I thought if I was a good enough daughter, friend, partner, or mother, the people in my life would be healthy.” That’s striking. You also mention that on that first night you went to a mutual help meeting, you chose not to share. Do you have any further thoughts on this experience now that the book is done and you’ve continued writing publicly in the interim? Have you explored this further: Al-Anon, Adult Children of Alcoholics, or otherwise? And to bring it back to your book, how do these considerations connect, if at all, to your book’s concluding arguments about beneficial ways of restoring religious roots of spiritual practices?

Bucar: I haven’t gone back to Al-Anon or Adult Children of Alcoholics since writing the book. But this question does bring things full circle.

If you asked my agent or publisher why I started my Substack, you’re right, they’d say it was to build platform. But my Substack was also meant to be a place for me to keep chewing on the book’s ideas, to think through how they help me understand what’s going on in the world, and also what’s going on in my own life. And that personal dimension is really the smaller part of a larger project I think my work is doing and will keep doing: reimagining religion. Thinking about what religion could look like now, for those of us who aren’t part of a religious community, or who are but want to use religious pluralism and difference as a way to expand their own faith and imagination.

The book starts with these popular wellness practices as a kind of on-ramp. I’m trying to get people to stay with me long enough to see that there might be something interesting in the religious roots, something they didn’t expect to find useful or compelling. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the invitation is there. My Substack has been me continuing to think out loud about all of it, even after the book left my hands.

Religion, Recovery, and the Problems of Wellness: Q&A with Liz Bucar

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