Historian Gary Gerstle has argued that neoliberalism has been delegitimized as a political order since the financial crisis of 2008-2011, and a new political order is beginning to take shape. However, while neoliberalism as a political order may be faltering, Bruce Rogers-Vaughn believes that it remains the normative culture of the United States and some other western countries, where it continues to eat away at our social, interpersonal, and psychological health.

Bruce’s book, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, is the fruit of his reflections over three decades as a psychotherapist, counselor, and pastoral theologian in private practice and on the faculty of Vanderbilt Divinity School.

As I read Bruce’s book recently, I was struck by how germane it is to Capita’s work to build a society that fosters strong families, rich culture, great art, deep learning, and beautiful environments. If Bruce is right, neoliberalism’s cultural power over us and its (de)formative influence on our children, families, and communities is the principal barrier we must overcome to achieve our vision—and yours—of a future in which all families and communities flourish. I was curious to speak with him, and he agreed to an interview with me on June 24, 2025.

Joe Waters: Is capitalism, especially the neoliberal variety of the last 50 years or so, destroying our relational and psychological health?

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn: Yes. Just before this discussion, I was reading an essay on common good pluralism on the Capita website. What struck me immediately was how sharply the ideologists who founded neoliberalism in the 1930s would have rejected that essay. They would have dismissed it as a step toward socialism, as they were deeply critical and wary of any form of human collectives.

This history stretches back to the 1930s, and one of the best historians on the subject is Quinn Slobodian. If there’s a single book to read on the topic, it’s his Globalists. Without delving too deeply into the details, it’s important to note that dismantling human collectives and forms of association was central to the neoliberal project’s inception. However, these ideas remained on the margins until about 1980. They started gaining momentum in the 1970s but truly came to political power with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980.

One of the clearest ways to summarize neoliberalism, particularly for this conversation, is as a systematic program designed to dismantle human forms of association. Such associations were perceived as obstacles to the functioning of a free market. For neoliberals, the concept of freedom was intrinsically tied to the ability to make personal, rational choices within a free-market context. This was—and remains—their defining vision of freedom.

One of the things that struck me as novel about your book is the idea that neoliberalism infiltrates the human experience and causes suffering. What sort of suffering are you talking about?

Even today, most discussions about neoliberalism—whether in publications or on YouTube and social media—tend to focus on its economic aspects: deregulation, privatization of industry, and so on. Similarly, the political dimensions of neoliberalism receive significant attention. However, very few people—probably no more than a handful—are addressing what neoliberal governance has done to culture and how it has transformed our understanding of ourselves as human beings and what it means to be a good or moral person.

Neoliberalism has isolated us in profound ways. Under its cultural framework, being a good human being is equated with being an entrepreneur, ambitious, happy, exuberant, always flourishing, and constantly overcoming obstacles. As Wendy Brown aptly describes, we have become “entrepreneurs of the self.” Evidence of this cultural shift is everywhere: just look at anyone’s social media profile. We’re all promoting ourselves as small businesses, “little capitals” in a sense—even when our efforts aren’t monetized.

But how does this affect suffering? First, as I mentioned earlier, neoliberalism systematically dismantles human forms of association. And I mean this at a granular level: families, neighborhoods, communities, sports groups. Robert Putnam’s seminal book, Bowling Alone, described this phenomenon, though he didn’t explicitly call it neoliberalism. Yet he was highlighting the disintegration of civic organizations, unions, and even religious organizations under the neoliberal agenda.

What happens when these forms of association are dismantled? It leaves human beings lonely. I often tell my students, church audiences, and other groups that human beings are inherently social creatures. Like dogs, we don’t thrive outside the pack. When we lose genuine ways of connecting with others—not superficial business networking, but relationships where we are treated as subjects, not objects or commodities—we suffer.

And how do we suffer? We become depressed, anxious, and addicted. If you look at graphs charting the rise of depression, anxiety, and addiction since 1980, they all show steep, upward trajectories. We are suffering more and more. Neoliberalism not only intensifies the volume of suffering globally but also transforms the nature of that suffering. In my book, I explore this transformation in greater depth, examining not just the growing intensity of suffering but how neoliberalism has fundamentally reshaped the ways we experience it.

And then I would imagine, too, how we seek to cure that suffering.

Neoliberal culture and economy create both illness and the supposed cure for it, fundamentally reshaping how caregiving is practiced and perceived. This shift is evident even in psychotherapy, where both its practice and conceptualization are being transformed. I was just a guest on a radio show discussing this topic, The Silent Crisis in Psychotherapy.

The reality is that very few people today seek what was traditionally known as psychotherapy. Instead, what psychotherapy has largely become is psychoeducation. While psychoeducation has its merits and serves important purposes, it is not psychotherapy. The shift reflects a broader cultural preference for quick fixes—an approach that aligns perfectly with neoliberal values. Why? Because neoliberalism prizes efficiency, measured in terms of profits over time, above all else.

This drive for efficiency is pervasive, affecting not only psychotherapy but also medical care and mental health care as a whole. Neoliberalism reshapes these fields to prioritize speed and cost-effectiveness over depth and genuine healing, profoundly altering how we care for ourselves and each other.

Can you say more about how neoliberalism destroyed those human associations that you spoke about? With a union, for example, it seems obvious, but it is less evident for, as an example, religious communities.

With unions, the impact of neoliberalism is obvious. Changes happen at the level of government policies and legislation that actively discourage the development and sustainability of unions. However, the process is far more subtle when it comes to other forms of human collectives and associations. These changes don’t typically occur through policy; instead, they happen at the level of culture.

Let me clarify what I mean by culture to connect the dots you’re asking for. Culture shapes how we think about what it means to be human. It’s influenced by the media we consume—television, radio, YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. Across these forms of media, we’re encouraged to equate freedom with individual autonomy and even competition. However, the individualism of today is distinct from the rugged individualism of the frontier era or even the embedded individualism of industrial capitalism. What we have now is what I’d call dis-embedded individualism: individuals stripped of any meaningful association or connection to others.

How does this happen? By convincing us that we should be free from all obligations to other people. The moment obligations become confining or conflictual, as they inevitably do, we are encouraged to unfriend, exit, and frame this as self-care. This mindset is part of a broader cultural shift that elevates individual self-care and autonomy above all else. It decontextualizes human life, leaving us isolated individuals—like billiard balls bouncing off one another—without genuine integration into communities.

This process is deliberate, though subtle. As someone (possibly Noam Chomsky, though he may not have originated the phrase) once described, it is a “manufacture of consent.” We embrace this willingly because we’ve been influenced through media and political narratives to believe that freedom means absolute autonomy. In this redefinition of freedom, we lose the deeper connections and obligations that make us truly human.

One of the points you raised is that neoliberalism creates forms of suffering—depression, addiction, and so on. Yet, as you also point out in your book, it simultaneously employs a strategy of denial and avoidance when it comes to death and suffering. Could you elaborate on that?

There’s perhaps no better example of neoliberal psychology than the so-called happiness industry and what is now commonly referred to as positive psychology. William Davies, a faculty member at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores this in his book The Happiness Industry. The central premise of this industry aligns perfectly with neoliberal ideals: we are all expected to flourish, constantly overcome challenges, and effectively manage our emotions.

As individual entrepreneurs of the self, it becomes our sole responsibility to regulate our emotional lives. If we become depressed, neoliberalism tells us it’s entirely our fault. The blame doesn’t lie with external factors—such as social conditions, economic inequality, or the difficulty of making ends meet—despite the fact that these are precisely the circumstances neoliberalism creates. Instead, the narrative shifts all accountability to the individual, framing emotional struggles as personal failures rather than as reflections of broader systemic issues.

I think we’re increasingly trying to avoid encounters with death and suffering. This can be seen in various ways. On one hand, there is the rise in medically assisted suicide and the growing advocacy for it. On the other hand, we’re also witnessing a decline in traditional practices around death, such as funerals.

Today, we seem less willing to confront the reality of death in an organized and collective way, as our ancestors once did. Instead, we’re more inclined to cremate the body, hold a private burial, and months later, invite friends and family to a “celebration of life” at a bar.

Yes, Joe, you took the words right out of my mouth. I was just about to say that the body is no longer present. Today, we have memorial services rather than funerals. In my book, I reference Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman observed that in neoliberal cultures, death becomes invisibilized, especially the deaths that are close to us—those of family members, neighbors, or people who matter to us. These deaths no longer happen in our homes, as they once did, except perhaps in the rare instance of some hospice care. Instead, they occur in institutions. And as you pointed out, we now remove the body entirely from the process.

I gave a talk recently at a church in Nashville, Tennessee—I live nearby—and shared a photograph from the 1970s of a body lying in state in an Appalachian home. In the image, a little girl, about nine years old, is standing beside the coffin. Her hand rests on the body, holding a rose. This scene resonated deeply with me because I grew up in Appalachia, and that’s what I remember: death was not hidden. It was a part of life, something we faced together as a community, with the body present and the experience shared collectively.

These times of lying in wake at home, with neighbors bringing casseroles and food, visiting in the presence of the body, and having a wake—those times are no more. Yes, we invisibilize death now.

And as Bauman pointed out, while we invisibilize the deaths close to us—the deaths of family, friends, and neighbors—we turn distant deaths into spectacles. For example, the deaths happening in the Middle East right now are transformed into media spectacles. The news broadcasts these tragedies, turning them into something to be watched rather than experienced or fully understood.

Today, we might suggest that the little girl in the photograph you described is being traumatized by being put in the presence of a dead body, but our ancestors had the wisdom to see that these are facts of life and encountering them over the course of the whole course of one’s whole life, even beginning in childhood, is frankly necessary to acclimatize you to the realities of living.

If you saw the picture I’m referring to, she looks sad. Her grandmother’s lying there dead, but she does not look traumatized. She doesn’t look afraid in the least, which suggests how much this has changed for us.

One of the things I’ve been quite interested in, Bruce, is rituals, broadly speaking, and the rituals that have disappeared.

We’ve considered this particularly regarding how young people clarify purpose, meaning, and destiny. Our colleague and friend, Rick Weissbourd, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, conducted a survey in 2023, which found that around 58% of young adults feel that they lack meaning or purpose. Similarly, Dougald Hine, whom we’re hosting in a few weeks, discusses the critical need for a “staged encounter with death.” As we grow and mature during adolescence, we need some sort of ritualized encounter with our human limits.

In some Native American cultures, this might be a vision quest. Similar rituals exist in Christianity and Judaism, though many have become watered down over time. But the essential point remains: these kinds of rituals are deeply necessary for helping us clarify who we are, where we’re going, and what the destiny of our lives is.

What has neoliberalism done to ritual? And how might we recover what Eugene McCarraher calls an enchantment with something other than money?

I instantly think of the great Catholic theologian and Jesuit Johann Baptist Metz. Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, he observed that one consequence of capitalism’s victory was the severing of our relationships with the dead and the vanquished. According to Metz, it was no longer possible to experience solidarity with the dead. He would have eagerly joined this conversation about the importance of community rituals.

One of the things that happens when we loosen human associations is what Dany-Robert Dufour calls desymbolisation. This process goes hand in hand with deinstitutionalization, the dissolving of human associations. When institutions and associations are dissolved, the narratives tied to them are dissolved as well. Dufour, a philosopher, describes these as soteriological narratives or narratives of salvation. Without these narratives, we lose the stories that give meaning to our lives and connect us to one another across time.

As you mentioned, these meaningful narratives are dissolved, replaced by the narratives of the market, money, and financialization. Along with these narratives, rituals also disappear. Rituals are enacted forms of narrative; when the narratives go, the rituals go with them.

This ties back to your earlier point about the disappearance of funerals, which are now increasingly replaced by memorials at the neighborhood bar. If young people don’t have the opportunity to culturally encounter death—especially the deaths of those close to them—it’s no surprise that they lose their grasp on meaning. Without these encounters, the big questions of life aren’t being asked. Questions like: What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life?

One of the things I think a lot about, which is deeply related, is formation. We talk a great deal about education, and we talked about it even more 10 or 15 years ago, when the education reform movement still had a lot of energy. However, I always felt that this focus on education was a bit incomplete. We really need to focus on formation: civic formation, spiritual formation, human formation.

Frankly, what we’ve allowed is for neoliberal capitalism to take over the task of forming our children and young people. This kind of formation used to happen in the context of institutions—schools, churches, families, and civic organizations—that would enact rituals and initiate individuals into a much longer and deeper story—a story far richer than the shallow narratives of popular culture or the entrepreneurial self.

To turn the conversation toward something more hopeful: Where, in your experience, is this kind of formation still happening? How can we recover a broader, deeper sense of formation? And how might we attach greater value to it across our culture, perhaps even as a form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism?

We always need to remember—and here I’ll use a technical term from Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist revisionist—hegemony. Hegemony refers to cultural dominance, a form of cultural domination, precisely what we’ve been discussing. But it’s important to remember that no hegemony is ever total. Even Gramsci pointed this out. Hegemony may become dominant, but it never eliminates alternative ways of being or thinking.

So, I think you’re right—we need to look for the places where meaningful formation is still happening. Whether in neighborhoods, communities, schools, churches, synagogues, or elsewhere, there are still spaces where young people are being gathered into small groups or even one-on-one relationships. The key issue here is relationship.

When we engage with children, we must relate to them as subjects, not as objects. To borrow psychoanalytic terminology, we treat them as human beings—young human beings, of course—but not as objects for instruction. In contrast, today’s neoliberal model of education doesn’t teach to the student; it teaches to the test.

The students then just become objects. And even beyond teaching to the test, we’re teaching to the market. You see this in the insidious language surrounding education today—it’s all about “workforce development” or “human capital development.” It’s no longer about the formation of a person.

Right. And we actively discourage students from pursuing the humanities. Instead, we funnel them into STEM—science, math, engineering, and so forth—or professional fields like law. Essentially, we push them into disciplines that serve the needs of massive international corporations. That’s where the money is, after all. But in doing so, we lose what used to be the essence of education: a formation that prepared individuals to be citizens, to actively participate in democracy.

And why is that? Because neoliberalism doesn’t favor democracy. It favors monopoly and control.

Coming back to your question, though, meaningful education—the kind that truly matters—still happens in these relationships of intimacy, where a child is genuinely known by a teacher or mentor. In these relationships, information flows through the medium of connection, rather than being delivered solely through a textbook—or worse, through a screen. Today, textbooks themselves are almost antique. The dominant mechanism of education has become the screen, with students interacting on websites.

I’m not saying that’s entirely bad; technology isn’t evil. The issue is how we’re using it, and that’s where the problem lies. We’ve allowed technology to replace the relational aspects of education, which are essential for true formation.

I’m struggling with how neoliberalism has presented itself—and this is probably part of its hegemony, right?—as the only respectable option.

Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative.”

Exactly. And anyone who dissents is painted as a fringe. At the same time, though, I’ve been reflecting on how very old-fashioned institutions—like my own college—provided something deeper than what neoliberalism offers. My undergraduate education was rooted in the humanities and liberal arts at a small Baptist-founded college in South Carolina. It was about something much greater than just the maximization of profit.

We have to give a quick plug here for Furman.

Yes, exactly—Furman University. It was a great experience. The ends envisioned by the Baptists who founded Furman in 1826 were deeply traditional and high-minded: “For Christ and Learning” (still the motto of Furman University). Today, those kinds of goals seem quaint and naive. Even within my adulthood, witnessing how this shift has unfolded is fascinating. Institutions like Furman now struggle in the higher education marketplace, and the reasons for their founding—once so clear—are now foggy to most students there.

Even more striking is the thought that today’s Baptists (though this isn’t limited to Baptists) would likely never establish an institution like Furman, prioritizing the study of Greek, literature, and the humanities to initiate students into an ancient story and invite them into some sort of other-centered vocation like the ministry or teaching as a missionary. That just seems so far-fetched in 2025.

Exactly. They taught literature, religion, philosophy, and other subjects that shaped moral and spiritual understanding. Here’s an irony I’d like to highlight. When my oldest son started at Rhodes College, a similar school in Memphis, Tennessee, I attended a parent orientation where a faculty member presented research on where wealthy families send their children to school and what they encourage them to study. The answer? The humanities.

We now have a system of unequal education. The ruling class—if I may borrow a Marxist phrase—still sends their kids to these schools to receive the kind of education you and I had. However, working- and middle-class families are being pushed into institutions that funnel students into STEM fields. This mirrors the economic inequality of our society.

Exactly. The idea that Baptists in South Carolina today would establish an institution prioritizing Greek, literature, and moral formation feels implausible. The mind of American Christianity is elsewhere entirely.

This shift is evident across the religious spectrum. In right-wing evangelical circles, for instance, you see it in movements like the prosperity gospel. But it’s also present in mainline and progressive forms of religion. Churches increasingly resemble businesses. They have their budgets, properties, marketing strategies, and outreach programs modeled on capitalist enterprises. The measure of a “successful” congregation becomes its growth—bigger budgets, larger buildings, multiple campuses. It’s the church as a neoliberal enterprise, obsessed with infinite growth, ignoring the reality of finite resources.

The metrics that dominate neoliberalism—growth, profit, membership, customers—have replaced older, deeper values. What’s been deemphasized is moral growth, moral ambition, and the formation of people who contribute meaningfully to their communities and the broader collective.

Yes. As a Christian and Baptist minister who attended Samford University—a sister school to Furman—I’ve seen this shift firsthand. Churches now often treat attenders as consumers of spirituality, with pastors tasked with delivering a product that draws crowds. This contrasts sharply with the traditional view of congregations as gatherings of disciples, adherents, and believers.

This isn’t unique to Christianity. Synagogues, mosques, and Buddhist temples have analogies. Historically, these institutions emphasized moral formation, not just for children but for adults throughout their lives. Today, however, the emphasis has shifted toward consumer-driven spirituality.

And that moral formation is crucial, especially when resisting the powers and principalities. A professor of mine at Duke Divinity School used to say, “Jesus said nothing about being nice.” The Gospel is about forming a people capable of resisting domination by those powers—vices both personal and social—and thus being truly free. You see this reflected in the church fathers, like St. Augustine’s critique of the libido dominandi (the lust to dominate). That kind of moral critique is almost absent in Christian discourse today.

Exactly. Think of St. Francis, who walked away from wealth and privilege. Today, Christians often idolize wealth rather than being suspicious of it. Wealth has become a sign of virtue, a pedestal on which we place success.

I’d recommend Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics by Ched Myers. He highlights that the Gospel’s original message was largely economic—it proclaimed freedom to those in debt and bondage. But we’ve lost that aspect of the Gospel, not just in evangelical churches but also in mainline and Catholic traditions.

Let’s not forget that Jesus lived under Roman occupation. The Gospels can’t be understood outside of that colonial context. As I’ve said before, neoliberalism is a modern form of colonialism. We don’t use tanks and bombs as much anymore; instead, we use banks and financial institutions.

The economist Michael Hudson says, “Finance is warfare by other means.” Private equity is one example—it produces the same outcome as traditional warfare: it leaves most of the world’s population destitute. Today, 85% of the world’s population lives below the U.S. poverty line, even when adjusted for the cost of living. That’s staggering.

Everything you’ve said resonates deeply with what I hear from friends who are teachers or college professors. Many are engaged in “pastoral” work, shepherding towards healing and wholeness. Can you talk more about the resistance to neoliberalism that you think is needed?

Absolutely. Resistance happens wherever love appears. Love is inherently subversive in a neoliberal world. Robert Johann, a Jesuit, wrote The Meaning of Love, arguing that love is not transactional. It’s not “I love you because…”—that’s not love. Love is a direct appreciation of another person as a human being in all their uniqueness.

And Davies, in his review of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, makes an excellent point: wherever love happens, there is resistance. Love resists the commodification of human relationships, whether in friendships, families, or communities.

However, neoliberalism accepts love only on an individual scale, between two people. When we try to structure society around love, that’s where resistance arises. The Italian politician Igino Giordani once said, “Politics is love in action.” How do we scale love into the structures of our societies, particularly our politics?

If the word love is uncomfortable for some, let’s call it structures of care. Structures of care include Social Security, Medicare for All, environmental protection, and other collective goods. These are demonized in U.S. politics today, framed as unaffordable, even though the real budget buster is war.

Providing health care for everyone, for example, isn’t communism—it’s a commitment to the common good. All major religions have taught this. But neoliberalism reduces love to individual optimization, stripping it of its communal, transformative power.

Joe Waters is Capita’s Co-Founder and CEO