The Gospel Coalition’s New Year’s resolution apparently is shoring up pastoral power by shaming conservative evangelical women for seeking therapy.
“In my role as a women’s ministry director over the past 15 years, I’ve observed an increase in church women struggling with emotional and relational issues and a decrease in women coming to pastors, women’s ministry directors and small-group leaders for help,” TGC’s Laura Kleinschmidt laments. “Many women are turning to therapy instead.”
Laura Kleinschmidt
Kleinschmidt appears to be a dream choice for the men of TGC to enlist for their cause. She has a master’s degree in counseling from Westminster Theological Seminary, which gives her credibility in the world of white evangelicalism. But she knows her place. Her TGC bio says she’s the “director of women’s ministries … where she assists the pastors in pastoral care and leads women’s events.” And her website shows photos of her speaking to an audience from behind a pulpit but carefully captions the photos by calling them “Laura’s talks recorded at women’s events.”
She’s being platformed by complementarian men who want to make sure she knows she’s simply a director, not a pastor, who gives talks, not sermons. In fact, she’s not even an assistant pastor. In the spirit of Dwight Schrute on The Office, she’s merely an assistant to the pastor.
I share these nuances not to mock her but to reveal how the men of TGC operate. They think they can get away with their sexism by enlisting women they control like Kleinschmidt to shame other women into submission. So it’s no surprise that Kleinschmidt would observe an increase in conservative evangelical women having emotional and relational issues and being less interested in going to their pastors.
Not to mention the aversion too many conservative pastors have toward therapy.
It’s about male authority, not women’s well-being
Kleinschmidt’s primary concern isn’t the well-being of women but the authority of God through the authority of men over women. In contrast to what she calls “secular therapeutic culture” where she thinks people live “under the authority of that therapist,” she argues God is “the final authority over the psychological.” Then she builds the case for women submitting to their pastors, who according to TGC, all must be men.
In an interview with BNG, Shane Moe, who is a licensed therapist, said: “I definitely think there’s defensive concern among a lot of male pastors (likely including her own) about losing authority over the women in their churches and that these pastors and churches are anxiously (and often accurately) experiencing therapists as a threat to that authority.”
Shane Moe
This threat is inescapable in complementarian Christianity, where men must be considered to be in authoritative positions over women in the home, the church and often in society.
Moe explains: “Licensed therapists tend to promote equality (with the research significantly suggesting that marriages marked by equality generally promote better emotional and relational health for both partners), which is likely to prove an obstacle to, and to undercut, the aims of any patriarchal pastors who endeavor to promote hierarchical marriages and men’s entitlement to female submission. And of course, insofar as they identify themselves as representatives of and spokesmen for God — and effectively identify their interpretations of the Bible with God’s authority — these pastors (and churches) are likely to see any women foregoing, questioning or rejecting their or their church’s authority as foregoing, questioning or rejecting God’s authority.”
Who women trust to help them
Kleinschmidt does seem to want to help women. She mentions how church leaders “long to lead them to the rock that is higher than us all.” She says her church creates biblical resources and short-term small groups, while encouraging the women in their churches to “come to us early in their emotional and relational struggles so we can minister to them through the word and prayer.”
But apparently, conservative evangelical women are signaling they need more support than their pastors’ thoughts and prayers.
“I think the issue of authority with respect to therapy and therapists versus churches and pastors here really comes down to the issues of trust and trustworthiness, or to who and what so many women have found to be actually more helpful (to say nothing of more safe), and consequently more trustworthy, for relieving their emotional and relational burdens or distress,” Moe suggested. “At the end of the day, I think an increasing number of women are addressing concerns in these areas through therapy and therapists rather than through churches and pastors because, frankly, countless women (and others more broadly, regardless of gender) have found therapy to be significantly more effective and helpful for addressing their emotional and relational burdens, with so many having fervently and agonizingly tried their churches’ practices and ‘prescriptions’ for years to little or no avail.”
“Countless women have found therapy to be significantly more effective and helpful for addressing their emotional and relational burdens.”
Kleinschmidt says pastors can help women believe their doctrine and then “functionally live all of life before the face of God.”
But in the complementarian world where their gospel functionally becomes about male authority and female submission, Moe says for many women their doctrines “ultimately sustain, amplify and multiply their problems, burdens or distress — largely just giving them more they need to heal from. Which, interestingly enough, can render these churches tantamount to ‘selling’ both the problem and its ‘solution’ — or even selling the problem as the solution — which can be a pretty effective way to sustain a business.”
So Moe says perhaps this is why statistics from Barna, Lifeway and others show “70% of female domestic violence victims going first to their pastors for help and only 10% of them saying they would ever do so again given how unhelpful and even harmful their pastor’s responses were.”
Being right vs. being helpful
Kleinschmidt emphasizes having an unchanging “confessional doctrine of man.” She argues that a woman’s “doctrine of man … determines whom they go to for help when troubled.” And she fears “the influence of our therapeutic culture is leading many congregants to a functional change in their doctrine of man.”
Moe observes: “I found it a bit ironic that she contrasts a confessional belief or anthropology with a functional one in the article here. In contrast to the term ‘functional’ generally referring to something being useful, productive or effective, the concept of confessional here — especially in the context of this article and more broadly in that of churches’ doctrinal commitments or traditions — is arguably more concerned with being right than it is with actually being helpful or effective.”
Having a greater concern about being right than being helpful fuels the problems women are experiencing from their conservative pastors.
“In my field, any therapist who cares more about being right than they do about being helpful or effective is likely to be a poor therapist, and I’d be disinclined to refer any prospective client to them,” Moe said.
“When pastors care more about being right than about being helpful, women have to care more about submitting than about healing.”
Likewise, when pastors care more about being right than about being helpful, women have to care more about submitting than about healing, which causes even more harm. According to Moe, when a pastor speaks with God’s authority with this mindset, “You conveniently still get to consider yourself right, good and successful in declaring that truth or honoring God even if the women you’re trying to ‘help’ aren’t finding you helpful and may be even be finding you harmful. And as a patriarchal or conservative evangelical pastor, if a woman doubts what you ‘authoritatively’ or ‘biblically’ have to say or doesn’t find it helpful, of course, you can pretty easily just tell yourself (and however explicitly or implicitly tell her or others) the problem is her. It’s a remarkably convenient system for victim blaming.”
Reinforcing trauma
While many conservative evangelicals dismiss any use of therapy as undermining the authority of the Bible, Kleinschmidt and TGC are open to the practice under certain conditions. She says when a woman goes to her conservative pastor, he can “assess the need for widening the circle of care.” She says conservative evangelical pastors might assess that the woman could benefit from small groups, financial or physical care, or “engaging with ministry partners such as counselors and psychiatrists” with whom the pastor can “coordinate care.”
But despite being open to therapeutic care, the conservative male pastor maintains all the control in Kleinschmidt’s plan. He’s the one assessing what the woman needs. He’s the one choosing the therapist. And if one is chosen, he gets to coordinate with them, whatever that means.
Moe suggests this signifies a lack of awareness and understanding about the dynamics of trauma, abuse, boundaries and systems, which contributes to the problems conservative evangelical women are facing.
“Pastors and churches authoritatively telling people what to do — to say nothing of often doing so with a presumption of spiritual or moral superiority and tacit leveraging of people’s fear and shame to motivate their compliance — has also led to incalculable amounts of emotional and relational suffering for countless people throughout history, … especially for women and children,” he said.
According to TGC and Kleinschmidt, women must heal through submission to God’s male authorities over them, where the men get to assess and control the entire healing process. It’s no wonder conservative evangelical women are turning more to therapists than to their pastors.
Healing from sacralized patriarchy
So what do therapists provide that these patriarchal pastors don’t?
“Good therapists generally aren’t telling clients what to do, or what they should do, instead recognizing that clients’ decisions and agency are their own and that it’s the client — not the therapist — who will have to live with those choices and the consequences thereof,” Moe said.
“Good therapists generally aren’t telling clients what to do, or what they should do.”
Women who want to remain in the church should consider churches that support such books as Andrew Bauman’s recently published Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Communities and Janyne McConnaughey’s Trauma in the Pews: The Impact on Faith and Spiritual Practices.
Moe reminds women: “It’s for good reason that one of the most influential figures in contemporary psychotherapy, Irving Yalom, in his wonderful 2002 book The Gift of Therapy, wisely titled one of his chapters, ‘Never (Almost Never) Make Decisions for a Patient.’ He recognized that, with the exception of certain safety-sensitive situations, it’s really not our job as therapists to dictate our clients’ choices or tell them how to live their lives.
“Well-boundaried therapists know this and know it’s generally more respectful, responsible and client-empowering for us to help our clients think through their options and to provide them with tools, opportunities for careful processing, and research-informed feedback that can help them more wisely navigate their own decisions.”
Unlike some pastors who want to create dependency on their counsel, good therapists seek to work themselves out of a job, Moe said. That happens by “empowering them in ways that ultimately reduces their dependence on us.”
In contrast to Kleinschmidt’s concerns about “therapeutic culture,” Moe says many women “report experiencing God’s compassionate and healing presence through therapy and their therapist.”
“Many women have simply found their therapists and therapy to be more present to and helpful for meeting these fundamental attachment needs and for empowering them to get these needs met in healthy relationships and environments that don’t significantly cause, enable or reinforce things like trauma, abuse, interpersonal boundary deficits and neglectful, exploitative, or oppressive systemic dynamics,” he said.
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.