The Rise of Biblical Counseling - Pacific Standard

It was hard to prove malpractice where there was no clear practice; biblical counseling fell into a gray area between religious teaching and therapy.

Although this article is from 2014, it highlights the dangers of this so-called "biblical counseling".  This is the same type of "treatment" Josh Duggar is getting.  It is also the same type of "treatment" and training I received back in college.  I don't know how many times the mantra, “The problem isn’t the problem; the problem is the heart, ” was repeated.  Not only was it a part of my counseling, but it was oft repeated within my courses of study.

Biblical counseling had overcome its first great challenge. Now it was freer to expand without worry—and so it did. Today, it is a major force among conservative American Protestants. It is so popular, and so widespread, that in 2005 the Southern Baptist Convention’s theological seminaries—the pastoral schools of the largest Protestant denomination in the country—announced a “wholesale change of emphasis” in favor of biblical counseling over an earlier “pastoral care” model that had drawn in part on the behavioral sciences.

But biblical counseling also faces serious difficulties, ones as great as those faced by Grace Community Church over 30 years ago. It has been confronted with mounting external criticisms and widening internal divisions, and the result, among its practitioners, is a looming crisis of principle. How Christians address this crisis will shape the mental health choices of millions of Americans.

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Indirectly, the influence of biblical counseling is wider still, and echoes of it can be heard across conservative culture. In 2012, when Adam Lanza slaughtered a school full of children in Connecticut, Fox News host and onetime GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor himself, slipped into biblical counseling territory when he laid blame for the killings in part on a society in which we “stop saying things are sinful and we call them disorders.” And when Southern Baptist research organization LifeWay Research conducted a survey of evangelical Christians in 2013, 48 percent of self-identified evangelical, born-again, or fundamentalist Christians said they believe that conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can be treated with prayer alone.

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“Mental illness is real in the sense that people and families suffer,” Grady explained to the crowd, and the response of biblical counselors shouldn’t be “‘Just take two scriptures and call me in the morning.’”

There were appreciative chuckles.

“But,” he continued, “if you spend time talking to people with labels [of mental illness], you see that their lives are full of the problems of living.”

These problems of living don’t originate in brain chemistry, Grady said, but in men’s hearts. He repeated a biblical counseling mantra: “The problem isn’t the problem; the problem is the heart.”

The Rise of Biblical Counseling - Pacific Standard