Evangelicals Do ‘Counseling’ They Learned From a Suicidal Gay Nazi
The sick story of “Biblical Counseling”
He was happy—as a child. He remembered seeing an orchard in bloom, and birds’ nesting, and feeling “indescribable joy and wonder…”
He felt, he’d write, a “very powerful, oneness with the natural world and human society as I knew it, which I can only describe as mystical.” Then when he was thirteen, his father died.
He dropped out of school for a semester. On his own he learned new words: ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’.
He tried finding a psychologist to treat him.
It seemed so appealing an idea that someone could fix your mind, but they seemed not to know how to do it. One psychologist slapped him on the shoulder and said he’d “outgrow it.”
He would train to be a psychologist, he resolved. He went to the University of Missouri. He became the well-known ‘behaviorist’, O. Hobart Mowrer.
He got married and had three children. But the depression was always there, and he decided that ‘psychology’ couldn’t cure him. What made him feel better was telling his wife he had sex with men.
