Why Psychology Turned Against Religion—and Who Challenged It

David

Hi, I’m David, and today we’re exploring how one psychologist helped change the conversation about therapy, healing, and faith. More than 45 years ago, Dr. Allen Bergin challenged the widely held belief that religion and spirituality had no place in serious psychology. Instead, he argued that faith could be a source of meaning, resilience, and healing. Dr. Scott Richards calls the movement Bergin helped inspire the Dissent from Freud movement—the growing global effort to bring spiritual perspectives into mainstream psychology and psychotherapy. Today, we’ll look at Bergin’s courage, his lasting contributions, and why his ideas may matter now more than ever.

David

Why does this matter? Because clients do not walk into therapy as blank slates. They arrive carrying marriages and families, grief and guilt, hope and prayer, scripture and moral commitments—the full weight and richness of their lives. And when a profession is shaped by values that feel foreign to the religious worlds many clients come from, therapy can become subtly dismissive without ever intending to be. That was the tension Allen Bergin—who passed away on February 15, 2024—had the courage to name out loud.

David

Now, Bergin was not some outsider tossing rocks from the sidelines. He was already a highly respected psychotherapy researcher. He had taught at places like Columbia, edited major professional work, and had the kind of reputation that made people pay attention. That’s part of why his 1980 article, Psychotherapy and Religious Values, landed like a thunderclap instead of disappearing as a quirky side note. He had standing. So when he said the field had a deep anti-religious bias, colleagues couldn’t just shrug and dismiss him that easily.""

David

In that article, Bergin argued that the historical alienation between psychology and religion had distorted psychotherapy. He said religion was at the fringe of clinical psychology when it should be at the center, because value questions run through the whole field. He challenged the dominance of what he called clinical pragmatism and humanistic idealism, not because he thought they had no value, but because they were not enough. In his view, they showed a relative indifference to God and to the possibility that spiritual factors influence behavior.

David

And he didn’t stop at critique. He proposed a theistic framework—one that took seriously humility before God, love, self-transcendence, service, sacrifice, forgiveness, commitment to marriage and family life, repentance, responsibility, and the pursuit of knowledge by faith as well as reason. He even offered testable hypotheses. Lower addiction. Lower divorce. More support in religious communities. Healing through forgiveness. Better outcomes when people live with commitment and moral conviction "".

David

That was provocative enough. But then came the reaction. Albert Ellis and Gary Walls published critical responses in the same journal, and Bergin wrote a rejoinder. So this wasn’t a polite little academic footnote. It became a real professional controversy. And I think that tells us something important: Bergin had exposed not just a theoretical disagreement, but a moral and professional nerve. He was asking whether psychotherapy was truly prepared to help all of the human family—or only the parts of humanity it already understood.

David

What makes this story even more interesting is that Bergin’s influence did not stay at the level of one famous article. It turned into mentorship, collaboration, and eventually a whole body of work. One of the key figures in that next chapter was Scott Richards.

David

When Richards was a young student at BYU, in the fall of 1979, Allen Bergin came into his Religious Perspectives in Psychology class and discussed a paper he had just had accepted for publication, his landmark 1980 article we've been discussing. Richards got a prepublication copy, read it with enthusiasm, and then volunteered to work for Bergin. I love that detail. It feels very human—one scholar throws open a door, and a younger scholar sees a whole future on the other side of it.

David

And the partnership clicked for a reason. They shared the conviction that religion was not simply neurosis, not merely superstition, and not automatically bad for mental health. They also cared about evidence. Bergin’s article had ended with testable hypotheses, and over the years he and Richards followed through with empirical work—studies on religion and mental health, a meta-analysis and narrative review in 1983, and several studies involving religious students at BYU and the University of Minnesota. The basic move was crucial: if spirituality matters, then study it carefully. Measure it. Don’t just argue about it from across ideological barricades.

David

Bergin mentored Richards as they worked on their studies. Richards also had his own encounter with bias while doing doctoral work at Minnesota. He examined measures of moral reasoning and argued that some of the theory and tests penalized conservatively religious people. His analysis showed that almost one-third of the questions used to assess moral reasoning were biased. So the collaboration with Bergin involved a careful examination of how bias against religion was impacting the field. It was a shared willingness to ask, “Where are our psychological theories and methods unfair?”

David

Then came the books that made spiritually integrated psychotherapy practical. In 1997, Richards and Bergin published A Spiritual Strategy for Counseling and Psychotherapy with the American Psychological Association. That matters. This was not hidden away in a niche press. It articulated an explicitly theistic spiritual perspective for mainstream psychology and psychotherapy and proposed a new orientation for therapy and even for understanding human nature. A few years later they co-edited Handbook of Psychotherapy and Religious Diversity, a guide to helping clinicians work sensitively and ethically with clients from multiple religious traditions, Western and Eastern.

David

That’s the turning point for me. The conversation moved from “Should religion even be in the room?” to “How do we do this competently?” Bergin and Richards helped build that bridge—from controversy to practice, from protest to clinical skill.

David

So what does Allen Bergin’s legacy look like now? I think the simplest answer is: it spread. It spread into research, into training, into professional standards, and into neighboring fields that once might have kept spirituality at a cautious distance.

David

Richards wrote in 2016 that Bergin’s work ignited a worldwide, multi-faith, interdisciplinary movement. That language is strong, but it fits the record. Richards' and Bergin’s writings legitimized the study of religion and spirituality in psychological research and practice. They also helped open doors in medicine, psychiatry, marriage and family therapy, social work, positive psychology, multicultural psychology, and philosophy. Their work even strengthened the place of clergy, chaplains, and other pastoral professionals in mainstream medical and mental health care. ""

David

You can also see the influence in training and professional formation. The Bridges Institute for Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies, directed by Richards, continues to build bridges between science, technology, spirituality, and psychotherapy; offering training resources; helping clinicians develop competency—really sits downstream from the kind of movement Bergin helped begin. The question is no longer whether spirituality exists as a client reality. The question is whether professionals are competent enough to address it well.

David

And that matters deeply for clients of faith. Richards and Bergin argued that therapists have an ethical obligation to be more open about values and more respectful of theistically religious clients. I think that still lands. Spiritually sensitive care is not about preaching. It’s not about therapists becoming clergy. Richards and Bergin were careful about boundaries. The therapist’s function remains separate from that of an ecclesiastical leader. But clients should not have to leave their deepest convictions at the door in order to receive good care.

David

At the same time, this movement still feels unfinished. Richards noted in his recent Handbook of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies, which was published by APA in 2023, that there are now spiritually integrated psychotherapies, that outcome research supports them, and that efforts are underway to bring them more fully into the healthcare mainstream through worldwide collaboration. That sounds like progress—because it is. But it also implies there is more work to do. More research. Better training. Greater sensitivity to religious and spiritual diversity. And maybe, if I can put it this way, more humility inside the helping professions about the limits of purely secular assumptions.

David

Bergin’s legacy is not just that he won an argument back in 1980. It’s that he helped change the conversation enough that many clinicians now ask different questions: What gives this person hope? What do they believe about suffering, forgiveness, family, God, and moral responsibility? How can therapy respect those commitments rather than flatten them? That’s the real lesson in Bergin’s and Richards' work. They helped prove that spirituality does not weaken psychotherapy when it is handled with care. It can deepen it. It can make it more humane, more respectful, and more complete. That’s a legacy worth remembering—and carrying forward. If you want more information about spiritually integrated psychotherapies, I encourage you to visit the Bridges Institute's website at bridgesinstitutesip.com. Thanks for listening.