How Did Psychology Enter The Church?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. For the last few weeks Dave and I have been discussing issues related to psychology in the church in this first segment of our program, and it’s a subject, as we’ve said, that is not without controversy among Christians. Well, Dave, controversy aside, it’s a very critical topic that needs to be addressed, and people would say, "Well, why is that?" Well, first and foremost, the basic methods and concepts of psychological counseling are completely at odds with what the Bible teaches. Secondly, the problem is exacerbated because the evangelical church has become one of the primary sources of referrals for counseling services of clinical psychologists. Thirdly, it’s a statement by evangelical churches to their own congregations, as well as to the world, that the Word of God is not sufficient for mental, emotional, and behavioral issues, that is, the everyday problems of living, and therefore the church can’t handle such problems. And this, of course, is a new wrinkle for the church, which has been ministering to the needs of believers for nearly 2,000 years. Dave, how did the evangelical church get caught up in psychotherapy?

Dave: Well, Tom, that would be [something] to analyze, but there are a number of factors.The truth is that society wasn’t that much involved in psychotherapy until after World War II...a little bit after World War I, but after World War II we got a lot of problems with guys coming back, and they’ve got battle fatigue, or—they keep changing the names. And I guess the universities realizes that here is a growing industry we could tap in to. I think the psychologists, and so forth, realized that. When I was—when was I in university? I think I began in 1946. Very, very few people were psych majors in those days, and they were not looked up to on the campus. (I’m just giving my own opinion.) I was both at UCLA and Oregon State University, and people looked upon them as kind of crazies. They had problems, emotional problems, and they couldn’t deal with them, and so they are studying this to try to figure themselves out. The professors tended to be, not just eccentric, but weird. But somehow, maybe it was an easy major to get into, Tom, I’m not sure. I remember even later than that when my wife and I owned, and I was the administrator of, a convalescent hospital, the doctors, the MDs, who cared for the patients, they didn’t have too high a regard for the psychiatrist either. And they would tell me stories about this guy who couldn’t really make it in medical school, and he wasn’t quite up to the standards, but he did pass, and he decided to go into psychiatry.

Tom: Dave, let me just put a little insert there.You know, my father was a psychiatrist, and as a medical doctor coming out of the war—he was a doctor during II World War—and his first occupation within medicine was family practice, and then he decided that he wanted to get out of medicine—seriously! And what he did in attempting to do that, he turned to psychiatry, because as we mentioned on the program over the past couple of weeks, psychotherapy, psychological counseling, has to do with conversation; it doesn’t have to do with medicine at all!

Dave: Although they do dispense some medication.

Tom: Right, they can write prescriptions, and certainly, over the last sixty years, the orientation of psychiatry has changed somewhat, but basically he wanted to get out of medicine. He wanted to get into something that, as you’ve described, had to do with conversation, had to do with talk, was much easier, although it had lots of ramifications, as we know, because in this field it has one of the highest occupational hazard rates, which we will talk about in the days to come.

Dave: Tom, let’s elaborate on that a little bit. He didn’t become a neurologist or a neurosurgeon, which is working on the brain, but a psychiatrist. And you don’t have to bother with physical bodies, you don’t really bother with the physical brain, because all this talk about chemical imbalances, there are no chemical imbalances pertaining to any maladies that anyone has ever discovered. And we’ve probably quoted Peter Breggin, one of the world’s leading experts on psychotropic drugs, who says the only chemical imbalances we know of are those that are caused by the drugs they give them to cure the chemical imbalances that they never diagnosed. So, what your Dad was doing, now, he doesn’t have to deal with bodies and some of that, I guess, could be rather unpleasant.

Tom: Dave, I think I have to insert something here just very briefly. My dad, at the time—we’re talking about medicine in the fifties, psychiatry in the fifties—they did do lobotomies and certainly electric shock therapy, and so on, but that’s as close to the physical as they ever got.

Dave: That was horrible! So, you don’t have the unpleasantness of examining bodies, which certainly that would be one thing that would keep me from going into medicine, but now you can talk to people: "Well, what’s your problem? How are you feeling?" and so forth. It's rather uncertain. Tom. I wish I could remember all the people...we could make a movie out of some of the people that I have talked with and seen over the years, and I’m not orderly enough to have kept track of them—I probably have somewhere in a file. But I remember a Jewish wife of a Jewish psychiatrist. Well, she had been divorced by him—there's a lot of divorce among the psychiatrists.

Tom: A lot of suicides, a lot of drug use, alcohol abuse, on and on.

Dave: Well, it's said, the highest of any profession. And she would tell me, "You ought to hear what they say about their patients at those cocktail parties. I mean, they make fun of them." And you know that Freud said that a patient is only good for making money.You’re not going to cure them, you’re not really going to really help them. I can remember when I was in the business world, I remember a secretary or two, I can think of a bookkeeper—they thought they needed psychiatric help. And I can tell you, Tom, when they got hooked on this weekly session, they never got off of it, at least the last I knew of them. It’s not something that you get cured from.

Now, Tom, why also would the church go into this? Well, it turned out to be a growth industry. The psychiatric hospitals were just overloaded, talking people into needing this. And you know what the DSM is; you’ve got all of these...you increasingly have more and more and more psychiatric problems.

Tom: The DSM being the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of (so-called) Mental Disorders, the bible of what they believe is wrong with people. It started out, there were, I think, less than 150 diagnoses that were written down.

Dave: There were less than that, Tom, back in my days.

Tom: Yeah, now there are 375 at the DSM IV.

Dave: Yeah, so it’s a growing industry. If you want to get into the growth industry, get into psychiatric hospitals! There are more beds; they increase, increase, increase. I remember sitting next to a lady in First Class (that’s where you meet these types of people, generally). She was quite angry. She was a psychologist, and she had just come from one of these conventions, and she said, "They are adding more to the DSM, and how do they do it? They vote on it! It’s not scientific." The thing she was most angry about was, "Now I’ve got to buy a new one!" [laughing] So, Tom, that is another thing to mention, that they vote on this. But anyway, back to your question: How did the church get into this?

Tom: Well, let’s go back; Let’s give them some names. Let’s go back to Norman Vincent Peale, for example.

Dave: All right.

Tom: He promoted psychological counseling like nobody else. He really pioneered the integration of psychological concepts with biblical teachings with the help of a psychiatrist named Smiley Blanton. So, he was a big name, and that was a great influence. Now you mentioned that it was a growing industry. One of the things that helped the psychiatric industry — the psychological counseling industry — to grow was that (and my father participated in this, so I am speaking really first hand from my experience with my family) they would put on luncheons. The psychiatric organizations in different communities would put on luncheons, and they would invite priests and pastors. And at the luncheon they would explain that they were sort of all in the same business, dealing with problems of mankind, and they all wanted to help. Yet, there were areas that were sort of out of bounds for the pastors, and that only those with psychiatric or psychological credentials could really perform well and be helpful.

Dave: Were licensed for doing that.

Tom: Right.So, that was a bill of goods that the psychiatric community sold to the church.

Dave: Well, Tom, plus the growth of science. I believe in science — science has done much good, but it has also done much harm, and part of the harm comes from the fact that we worship science! I’m saying, "we" — our society, today. "Oh, science says? Oh, well, you say science says? Well, if science says, then it must be true."

And we know that scientific theories come and go — mainly they can’t tell you what anything is, what energy or gravity, or anything is, and they can’t tell you why there was a big bang, if there really was one, and so forth. But the church — I think I mentioned it last time — they thought, "Well, we really missed it when we opposed evolution, and that kind of put us on the fringe. So we are not academically respected, and we’re not scientific. Now, well, psychology, that’s a science, isn’t it?" This is what they were told. It is not a science, and you already explained the three-year study by the National Science Foundation — it is not and cannot be a science.

But anyway, that myth still works. Well now, we can be scientific, and I remember an ad by Liberty University: Oh, become licensed for curing souls, you know, get into the curing souls business, but now you can have a license and be scientific about this. Well, Tom, it was a delusion again, but people went for it.

Tom: Pastors decided to go back to school and get their degrees in psychological counseling. Many left their pulpits altogether.

Dave: So, what are you going to do? You’ve got a license, and you have an organization behind you, the American Psychological Association, or whatever, various ones, and they are pushing the agenda. Tom, I remember, you remember,  when part of what they were pushing was, "Look, we need to put all of the government officials, all the world leaders, under the care of psychiatrists. They need some counseling to be delivered from these aggressive instincts. They also need some drugs that will calm them down a little bit, and we can have a world of peace, love, and brotherhood, and psychiatry, psychology, will rule the day."

So, it soon became accepted that the psychologist would tell you whether you were crazy or not. The psychologist would determine what was normal, and of course everybody is abnormal in some ways, and so, more and more people were persuaded that they needed psychological help. More and more people were persuaded that there was something wrong with them. You remember the old saying, even the kids in school would say: "Oh, you look so bad today! Oh, don’t you feel sick? Oh, you look so pale!" And they are trying to get them to feel sick, and you can talk somebody into something. So now, society is being talked into the idea that we all have some neuroses.

Tom: And, Dave, there were some cons that went along with this, some — really — scams, as it were. They were told, or the setup was this: We need a medical doctor for our physical illnesses. We need pastors, priests, for our spiritual needs, and then we need psychologists, psychiatrists, for our mental needs. I mean, totally bogus, yet it intimidated many, many pastors, as we’ve been saying. Dave, should they have been intimidated? What I’m talking about is, these evangelical pastors, who you would think would hold to the Bible, who would go by what the Word of God says, should they have been intimidated?

Dave: Well, Tom, we’re talking about mental problems for which we need experts who have been licensed—

Tom: Or so we’re told.

Dave: Right, that’s what they were told, what they are still being told. Now we’re in a nonphysical dimension, the mind, mentality. What is this? Nobody can even tell you, but it certainly is not part of the brain, okay?

We’re in the realm of spiritual, moral, ethical desires or recognition of what is right and what is wrong. And what should I do? How should I act? Why should I be happy? Why am I sad? Well, the Bible deals with all of that, and these evangelical pastors should have had confidence in what the Bible says. Obviously, Paul had all kinds of problems. He wrote from prison: “My God shall supply all your needs through His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” He prayed for people from prison. He said, "Rejoice" (he’s in prison) “Rejoice evermore. In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. Let your needs, your requests, be made known unto God with prayer and supplication, but with thanksgiving, and the peace of God that passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Now, the psychiatrists and the psychologists can’t give you that.

Tom: Well, Dave, also, they pretend to have insights — "pretension" is the best word I can think of — they would say that they have insights into the heart and soul of man. Yet, what did Solomon say? I mean, this is the wisest man, according to the Scriptures, that God ever created, all right? He says, “For thou, God, even thou only knowest the hearts of all the children of men.” So, that’s 1 Kings:8:39Then hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive, and do, and give to every man according to his ways, whose heart thou knowest; (for thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men;)
See All..., or we could go to Jeremiah. Jeremiah said that “…the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Only God knows the heart, so these are pretenders after what only God can do!

Dave: Tom, you’re talking about the heart. Many, and probably most, psychiatrists, wouldn’t even acknowledge that. They would go more by Freud’s medical model — it’s some problem in the brain. And, I think I quoted, or maybe I didn’t, on this program, Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, the DNA code, and he literally said, "You are just a bag of molecules." He begins — one of his books is titled The Astonishing Hypothesis. It really is astonishing, because it’s contrary to all common sense and every experience any person ever had, but he said, "Your desires, your ambitions, your hopes, your fears, your anxieties, your moral standards — all of this is a delusion." It is simply the result of your molecules dreaming this up for you.

Now, Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene,  says, "It’s all a delusion." We just happen to be a bag of DNA; our genes are running the show, and they are using us to perpetuate their own desire for survival, which is pure nonsense, because then he says, "Genes can’t think. Genes don’t know right and wrong; genes can’t predict the future," and so forth. So, Tom, we began to worship science. Science turned away from God, Science said, "We can explain it all by the genes, by the protein molecules, the synapses, the electrical current, or chemical actions in the brain." Now you’ve got to go to an expert — and let me just quote Peter Breggin again. He says, “When you do that you have reduced a human being to just a bunch of molecules and chemical reactions and you have destroyed man as God made him.”

Tom: Dave, the Lord willing, we’re going to continue delving into this because, as we pointed out at the beginning of the program, and in past programs, this is a major problem in the church. The church has taken psychotherapy to its heart, to its bosom, and by doing that it has changed what those who have professed to be Christians believe. They now have a mixture of what the world is presenting, most of it delusionary, certainly not scientific, in terms of true science, but yet they have bought into this and it has changed the way we live, the way we act, what we think, in such a way that we are living, most who profess to be Christians, are living contrary to what the Word of God teaches, and that is grievous.

Dave: And we have lost our faith in God and in His Word, and we are to live by faith in Him. So, we’ve got major problems!