Ministers of the Mind: Protestant Pastoral Counseling in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

The February 23, 2009, cover of Time featured a white woman, eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer, alongside the headline "How Faith Can Heal." The articles inside included a piece by Jeffrey Kluger on "The Biology of Belief"; a three-way conversation featuring a chaplain, a radiologist, and a psychiatrist; a photo essay illustrating ritual healing practices in Cuba and Siberia; and a final round-up bearing the headline "Research Institutes: The study of religion and medicine is clearly a growth market."

While theological seminaries and medical schools preserve separate identities and certifying bodies, this recent issue of Time is one more sign pointing to the myriad ways in which religion and healing have remained intertwined throughout American history.¹ In the Anglo-American colonies, it was not uncommon for Christian ministers such as Cotton Mather and John Wesley to include medicine in their ministry or even to write medical manuals. From the nineteenth century into the present day, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and Holiness people have held massive revivals at which the power of the Holy Spirit gave them the faith to heal illness. (In recent decades, these revivals are often conducted over the television.) In the late nineteenth century, the Mind Cure movement and new religions such as Christian Science interpreted and addressed physical ailments in spiritual terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic immigrant populations brought to the United States a vibrant repertoire of saint- and shrine-based healing practices whose effectiveness often still is "proven" by a doctor's letter or an x-ray. And in the early part of the twentieth century, hospitals throughout the country were founded and funded by religious denominations. To this day it is common to find in American cities a St. Vincent's, Deaconess, or Mt. Sinai Hospital.²

In his widely read social history of American medicine, Paul Starr gives the impression that by the early twentieth century, biomedicine had grown so powerful and compelling that other forms of healing had essentially faded away or, at best, retained a minimal hold in the culture.³ In fact, although biomedicine attained a certain independence and hegemony that became reified in state and federal law, religion and healing continued and still continue to intertwine in American lived experience. The Emmanuel Movement, a collaborative venture between Episcopal priests and physicians in Boston, influenced the early version of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s. The non-denominational, yet clearly Protestant, ethos of the Twelve Steps are so thoroughly embraced by modern science that courts and medical doctors regularly send defendants and patients to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. To take a rather different example, by the end of the twentieth century, New Age and self-help movements, together with holistic and alternative medicine treatments, wove together religious and medical understandings in ways that are so compelling that it has become quite commonplace to find some sort of spiritually oriented healing techniques offered to oncology patients at large hospitals. And finally, a quick perusal of religious services' listings in current urban newspapers shows that even the most educated and affluent Episcopalian and Reform Jewish congregations have introduced healing services into their communities.

Susan E. Myers-Shirk's Helping the Good Shepherd is a detailed exploration of one strand in the complex warp and weave of religion and healing in America. Tracking the development of Protestant pastoral counseling from 1925–1975, Myers-Shirk offers an intellectual history of a religious movement that absorbed—and modified—the twentieth-century secular psychological and psychotherapeutic theories of Freud, Rogers, May, Mead, and others.

The introduction opens with a fascinating analysis of the differences in approach between a mid–nineteenth-century minister and a mid–twentieth-century minister engaged in pastoral counseling. Parallel cases from each of their memoirs show the earlier minister self-consciously using his ministerial authority to urge a sinner to repent. In contrast, the later minister eschews all mention...