Susan E. Myers-Shirk's significant book adds considerable nuance to our understanding of religious liberalism through an intimate look at the history of Protestant pastoral counseling. While this may seem a rather specialized topic—and, in places, it reads that way in this book—overall Myers-Shirk delivers on larger ambitions. “Early pastoral counselors are important,” she explains in her introduction, “not so much for their original theories of counseling or their influence on American psychology but for . . . the insight they give us into the moral sensibility of twentieth-century liberal Protestants” (6). Myers-Shirk develops this claim in a narrative that runs from Progressive Era efforts to incorporate scientific psychology into ministerial practice to the modern divide, in theory and practice, between liberal and conservative Protestant counselors. Along the way, she carefully foregrounds themes of gender, expertise, autonomy, and conscience, themes that help root this tale of one profession in larger religious and cultural contexts.
An essential concern of the book is to rebut the long-standing argument that the acceptance of psychology into Protestant thought abetted secularization. Along with Christopher White in his important, and in many ways complementary, study of psychology and religious liberalism (Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008]), Myers-Shirk mounts a robust and compelling refutation of these secularization claims. Finding a “rapprochement” between science and religion was certainly central to the liberal project, but these efforts “to engage the principles of science,” she contends, “should not be interpreted as evidence of secularization” but rather as evidence of liberals' “eagerness to find some middle ground between two worlds they saw as important and relevant” (10). Clergy who embraced psychology in the 1920s and 1930s were heirs to the Progressive faith in scientific expertise and the Social Gospel ambition to remake the world according to Christian ethics. Psychology and religion, together, allowed these clergy to develop moral sensibilities appropriate for modern life. Over time, these sensibilities shifted from “an earlier emphasis on adjustment, social control, and moral uplift to an emphasis on personal autonomy and loving relationships,” and Myers-Shirk is attentive to the continuing spiritual and religious dimensions of this increasingly psychologized liberalism (13). The work of liberal pastoral counselors “with individuals,” she astutely observes, “was just as much intended to bring in the Kingdom of God through relieving emotional suffering as was settlement house work through relieving social suffering” (70).
The key figure in the early chapters is Anton Boisen, who combined the liberalism of modernists like Harry Emerson Fosdick, the healing ministry of the Boston-based Emmanuel Movement, and his own experience with mental illness to lay the groundwork for a science of pastoral education. By examining the afflicted, Boisen contended, ministers were perfectly situated to advance the science of moral development. Like many liberals, he believed placing pastoral care on such a scientific basis would offer better care—better relief from spiritual maladies—than the revivalism of evangelical Protestantism. Boisen's emphasis on primary research was eventually supplanted by more direct application through individual counseling. Indeed, as ministers began to compete with doctors, psychotherapists, and other healing professionals for status and recognition, direct counseling became evermore significant to their professionalization. Seward Hiltner, a leading author and educator in pastoral counseling, in fact, favorably compared religious therapies to other forms of care. “Prayer, meditation, the Bible, other literature, listening, quietness, understanding,” Myers-Shirk quotes, “are as real as pills and sometimes more helpful” (57). Nevertheless, even as the field moved away from primary science toward client care, Boisen's larger agenda to use psychological methods to bolster traditional Protestant morality remained central to clinical pastoral education in the years prior to World War II.
The deployment of psychology as a tool of national mobilization brought greater legitimacy to all forms of counseling, and the non-directive approach of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers soon emerged as the leading framework. Yet even as pastors shied away from direct moral advice—to the point, in one cited instance, of refusing directly to condemn adultery—the larger religious imperative of social advancement remained. Rogerian counseling, Myers-Shirk remarks, “signaled the beginning of a shift from a kind of liberalism in which moral instruction created a better society to a stance in which moral instruction undermined the possibility of the good society” by destroying autonomy and freedom and conscience (101). This more expansive freedom suited the middle-class, suburban clientele of the postwar years, and made sense in a society battling totalitarianism in its fascist and communist forms. To combat the potential excesses of autonomy and the increasing isolation of modern life, liberal pastoral counselors simultaneously developed a theology and psychology that stressed an ethics of relationships.
Soon freedom and relationships became the very faultiness that divided liberals and conservatives, as matters of gender and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s drove conservative Protestant counselors back to a more directive approach to moral questions, while liberals championed women's rights and equality. As liberals continued their long-standing project of building a godly social order, conservatives reinvigorated arguments about human sinfulness, divine sovereignty, and the need for objective moral standards. Myers-Shirk concludes her work with a call for civil discourse between liberals and conservatives, hoping that her study of moral sensibilities will reveal a common intellectual and religious heritage—most especially, one presumes, the recognition by conservatives of the Christian idealism still present in the liberal values of individual freedom and gender equality.
Along with E. Brooks Holifield's A History of Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983), Helping the Good Shepherd defines the history of pastoral care and counseling in the United States. Scholars and practitioners in those areas will surely welcome her meticulous descriptions of key figures and debates in their field. Though the apparent narrowness of the subject may disincline others from reading this work, it deserves a wide scholarly audience. We are only beginning to extend our understanding of religious liberalism beyond theology into social and cultural arenas, and Myers-Shirk usefully connects the story of religious liberalism with the histories of psychology and gender in the mid-twentieth century.
