The Integration of Psychology & Christianity: A Domain-Based Approach

Abstract

THE INTEGRATION OF PSYCHOLOGY & CHRISTIANITY: A Domain-Based Approach by William L. Hathaway and Mark A. Yarhouse. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2021. 199 pages. ISBN: 9780830841837. *Reading The Integration of Psychology and Christianity brought to mind the lively discussions about integration that I had with my fellow undergraduates at Gordon College some twenty years ago. We were hampered in reaching any agreement by the fact that our assigned text, Psychology and Christianity: Four Views,1 presented four authors who each defined integration in their own idiosyncratic way, which then resulted in us students talking past each other. *If only we'd had this book! Hathaway and Yarhouse resolve these confusions by offering a "domain-based approach." Rather than advocating for a particular integration approach, as has been common in integration scholarship, Hathaway and Yarhouse outline the multiplicity of ways in which the Christian psychologist might choose to integrate faith and psychology. This approach is one I found immediately useful, given my position as chair of psychology at a small Christian liberal arts college where I frequently mentor junior colleagues with less experience in Christian higher education as they learn to integrate faith into their teaching. Hathaway and Yarhouse's categories include the following: worldview integration, theoretical integration, applied integration, role integration, and personal integration. These categories not only offer a shared vocabulary for integration conversations, but they can serve as an inventory of one's comfort level in different types of integration (one may be quite comfortable doing personal integration while finding theoretical integration challenging, for example). Overall, the book is excellent as a catalyst for personal reflection and growth for the Christian psychologist, whether they be researcher, professor, or clinician. *A particular strength of the book is its emphasis on clinical and applied psychological work. The most original contributions are the chapters on applied integration and role integration. The former adapts a secular model for a Christian population or develops Christian interventions from Christian thought and practice while the later describes living out the role expectations of a particular vocation (e.g., counselor) in a way that is consistent with Christian identity. These chapters have many examples from Yarhouse and Hathaway's own experience in navigating these areas. Their clear articulation of the professional duties of the Christian who joins the counseling guild, for example, was extremely useful. I found myself grateful to have their take on role integration to offer to my aspiring therapist students, who often find themselves torn between personal conviction and professional obligations. Yarhouse and Hathaway offer a well-argued Christian perspective that emphasizes the priority of those professional obligations. *A few criticisms. I mentioned that this book reminded me of my integration discussions in the early 2000s. While the integration resources are helpfully updated and the whole book is very well resourced, I found that the core approach to integration had remained largely unchanged. That is to say, this is very much a book written by two fairly conservative white American evangelical men. While the authors are moderates in evangelical terms, Yarhouse's scholarship (in sexual and gender identity) brings him into American culture-wars territory. It is not surprising, then, that they would see the challenges of Christian psychologists to be primarily in dealing with an often-antagonistic secular psychology. To be clear, far from advocating a hostile approach to secular psychology in return, they model a subtle Christian attempt to influence psychology policies to be more compatible with Christian values--and indeed their personal examples of successfully doing this are laudably sensible. *However, the revelations of evangelical complicity during the Trump years and the current rise of American Christian nationalism have left me questioning whether the largely apolitical nature of my Christian training in psychology was sufficiently transformational. I find myself yearning for a post-Trump integration analysis, an approach that grapples with the harms of evangelicals' quest for power. Or to put it another way, I question the idea, as sometimes implied by the authors, that the primary challenge Christians working in psychology face is the problem of too little cultural power. *The book's most obvious limitations in this vein are in the worldview integration chapter. Here we find the conservative nonprofit Heterodox Academy and its idea of "viewpoint diversity" uncritically embraced. The suggestion is that the conservative/Christian worldview should be considered a type of diversity akin to racial or gender diversity, given its minority status in liberal-dominated psychology. Given the very real challenges presented by racism and sexism, this framing seems at best tone deaf and at worst an encouragement to evangelicals to approach psychology with a persecution mindset. Also missing from this picture is the fact that the discipline often aligns itself with powerful interests and is therefore much less concerned with political beliefs per se than with power (to give just one example, the 2015 Hoffman Report documented how, during the Bush era, the American Psychological Association colluded with the US Department of Defence to change the APA ethics code to allow psychologists to participate in "enhanced interrogations" of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay). Perhaps Christian integration efforts might involve an Imago Dei-informed attempt to challenge this status quo. My own graduate training in critical/feminist psychology prompted me to reflect on the harms that even well-meaning psychologists might perpetrate if they allow themselves to be used to enable the capitalist control of people. From Amazon warehouses to counseling practices, our neoliberal world offers many ways in which unwary Christian psychologists can contribute to the dehumanization of people. Counselors teach their clients to understand their mental struggles as caused by individual failings while ignoring the influence of systemic factors; this should be at least as much an ethical concern for Christian psychologists as the more typical hot-button trio of abortion, LGBTQ+, and euthanasia (Hathaway and Yarhouse tend to highlight these three in their examples). *Tellingly, in this book, the topic of social justice is relegated to the personal integration chapter as something that psychologists might choose to embrace as part of their individualistic spiritual development. Missing is the idea that justice or advocacy for the powerless might inform psychological theory from the get-go or even form a core part of the Christian worldview. In fact, the term "worldview" itself can be read as a sign of the static, inward-looking nature of the framing chosen here. Much as James Sire's books on the topic are classics, the fact remains that the term worldview is a distinctively evangelical Christian idea, out of touch with secular psychology. Further, the take on postmodernism that the worldview approach encourages verges on caricature. Although the authors of this book acknowledge some of these weaknesses, their choices in this chapter betray a lack of conversation with postmodern theorists in psychology, whose focus is not generally moral relativism but a critique of dominant power structures. Citing such scholars, many of whom make relevant critiques of psychology's philosophical blind spots, would have strengthened the worldview chapter. *One particularly clarifying move this book makes is to put integration typologies on a continuum with three major categories: assimilation, productive tension, and expanded horizons. The ideal integration work, they argue (riffing on Gadamer), results in an expanded horizon, where the insights of both sides are modified by fusion with the other. This idea is one that they might have taken further. Hathaway and Yarhouse are careful to articulate the privileged nature of scripture in such an encounter of horizons, but this seems to underestimate the cultural knowledge and assumptions that we import into scriptural interpretation. Surely the encounter of horizons is not pure divine revelation meeting pure psychological knowledge, but rather, the encounter is mediated by biased and finite human beings. The authors define worldview integration as "an attempt to reposition psychology within a cognitive frame that is coherently embedded within Christian thought and premised on Christian assumptions." I wish they had been more reflective about whose Christian thought and Christian assumptions they were presenting as normative. Given that this book is published by IVP Academic, this will likely not be a problem for their target audience, who probably share their assumptions. But I would expect a book that champions the expanded horizon as the telos of integration to be more influenced by a diversity of Christian voices and a diversity of psychological approaches. *Perhaps this is more a complaint about psychology integration work as a whole, rather than this book in particular. Overall, I am very appreciative of this contribution, and simply hope that the foundation laid here can be used by readers to build integration efforts that are more self-reflective and outward-looking integration efforts than the book itself models. Hathaway and Yarhouse's main contributions in this book are (1) a comprehensive and sophisticated review of past integration work, (2) the helpful clarifying domain categories, and (3) innovations in the areas of applied integration and role integration, areas that previous integration work has neglected. For those hoping to get up to speed on integration work in psychology or hoping to gro