Journal documents how clergy adapted as more people turned to therapy over religion.
One hundred years ago or more, if you had problems in your marriage or suffered from depression, you might turn to your pastor. In response, he’d address your problems in explicitly Christian terms.
“The problem was sin, and the solution was salvation,” writes John Bernau, a sociologist at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
Christian clergy held the clear monopoly on helping people attend to their problems for centuries. But during the early 20th century, religion and medicine were engaged in a dialogue on emerging psychological care.
Offering a slice of that discussion, a February article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion documents trends in the way pastors wrote about their role as counselors as it became commonplace for people to turn to psychologists rather than spiritual leaders with their problems.
Using computational text analysis, Bernau read through over 70 years of articles in the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, an interdisciplinary journal including both spiritual care and psychotherapy.
The sociologist found the words God, Christian, Jesus, Christ, and church were used in about 5 percent of the article content in the early 1950s, dropping to about 1 percent today. Now, the word God is used alongside other words like love, heart, life, and care.
He suggests the religious language is replaced with individualistic language, favoring the kind of personal narrative and experience that came to be the norm in therapy by mental health professionals.
He noted that since the 1960s, pastors’ language lost its denominational specificity in favor of a more ecumenical and open approach, deferring to meeting on believers’ terms.
“(A person’s) ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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