Sowing Hope: Integrating Faith and Mental Health in a Fragmented World

When our kids were home during the COVID-19 pandemic season, like many families, ours took on new projects to pass the time. Through hours of work and much creativity (particularly from my wife and son), our yard yielded a strange and new beauty through planting in our garden. What makes our garden interesting is its “both-and” abundance; rather than neatly sequestered rows or boxes, the garden holds together many helpful varieties of plants, leading to flourishing.

As Christians, we are called to respond in wise compassion to the serious mental health challenges in our communities which have heightened since the pandemic.

Navigating a Divided Landscape

Statistically, rates of mental illness, substance abuse disorder, and suicide have risen sharply, especially among youth. And yet, in assessing the “problem,” we can be tempted to have a one-sided response to conform to the deep cultural fractures that characterize our era. We often feel tempted to compartmentalize our work in response to these needs, creating siloed gardens that reflect our fragmented cultural landscape.

In this divided landscape, some churches see their role as primarily reinforcing a civic message: to raise mental health awareness, reduce stigma, and support growth in the mental health infrastructure. They rightly point to the scores of people without access to treatment and lament the stark shortage of mental health clinicians. They distance themselves from an “emotional prosperity gospel” where depression or anxiety are stigmatized as reflecting deficient faith.

However, at times, this reaction can partition faith and mental health into distinct realms. Mental health awareness is encouraged within churches, but exploring the root of anger, despair, and grief is often left to counselors and psychiatrists rather than welcomed into the sanctuary. Psalms of lament are passed over. The church becomes simply a “referral space” to the “mental health specialists” when mental health challenges arise. Faith has nothing to add.

In contrast, other Christians caution against the pervasive influence of “therapeutic” culture, arguing it overlooks genuine needs and can overshadow faith’s emphasis on truth and goodness. For example, in an extensive study of the faith of young adults, sociologists observe a phenomenon dubbed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” which tends to “colonize” historic faiths, like the   Christian faith.

In this approach, the central telos of life and the function of religion are therapeutic: “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”

Other studies indicate how, on a functional level, the psychiatrist or therapist (or wellness influencer) can be a new “priest” to mediate healing, leading to an individualistic, dangerously self-centered quasi-religious practice. In response, these Christians plant gardens that speak about truth and virtue but fence off discussions of mental health and mental disorders.

The ideology of the “therapeutic” can dangerously oversimplify faith. People may unquestionably embrace pop psychology as the only source of divine inspiration.

Faithful Integration

These divergent reactions present a false dichotomy. On one side, Christians embrace the insights from the psychological and social sciences but do so at the cost of a robust theology. On the other side, Christians display wariness about the idolatry of the therapeutic yet neglect genuine scientific insights.

A thoughtful Christian faith and the knowledge and expertise of a counselor in clinical practice belong together. As John Calvin rightly noted, the Psalms give us “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.”

It is a gift from God for our prayer and formation, for “there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.” The Triune God is our healer, and God’s word is our food and nourishment.

And yet, we need clinical counselors who can distinguish valuable therapeutic concepts from those prone to misuse, especially within religious contexts. Concepts like ‘self-esteem’ and ‘trauma’ are particularly susceptible. Without this discernment, they risk not only psychological ineffectiveness but also confusion among followers of Jesus if perceived as definitive solutions to their deepest hopes. As the Psalmist confesses, “You alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8).

Cultivating Counselors

In the Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at Western Theological Seminary, students will join a community striving to integrate Christian formation with the professional excellence of a secular counseling program.

Rather than fencing off a medicalized approach to mental health from faith or eschewing expertise in mental health, the seminary’s counseling program seeks to cultivate beautiful, biodiverse gardens that bring together what many separate.

Such an approach is a gift to the ecosystem of the church and the world. For Christians, as Makoto Fujimura points out, “Culture is not a territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated.”