Dr. Skylar Ray
PhD Graduate History
Bio
Skylar Ray is a historian specializing in the religious and cultural history of the United States, with an outside field in Latin American Christianity. Ray earned her MA (‘17) and PhD (‘23) in the Baylor University Department of History, where she served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow during the 2023-2024 academic year. In the Fall of 2024, Ray will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of History at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.
Dissertation
Healing Minds, Saving Souls: Evangelicals and Mental Health in the Age of the Therapeutic
Abstract
In 2013, Matthew Warren, son of Rick and Kay Warren—co-founders of Saddleback Church, one of America’s most well-known evangelical megachurches—died by suicide after a lifelong struggle with mental illness. In the wake of their son’s death, the Warrens became mental health advocates, launching Hope for Mental Health Ministries to provide churches with psychological resources for suffering congregants. But while these efforts prompted hope among some evangelicals, they provoked the ire of many others, who believed that Christian faith and modern psychology were incompatible. Indeed, in response to the Warrens’ efforts, nearby pastor John McArthur went so far as to host a conference that touted as its theme a refutation of mental health treatments such as psychotherapy and medication.1 What is more, McArthur’s position was by no means an outlier. Rather, it represented the views of nearly half of American evangelicals.2 This series of events raises an important historical question: how did evangelicals who share doctrinal commitments, a religious subculture, and a historic Christian tradition arrive at such disparate conclusions regarding the proper relationship between Christian faith, mental health, and modern psychology?
My dissertation answers this very question, historicizing and explaining these divergent perceptions of modern psychology and mental health among evangelicals in the United States. To do this, the dissertation relies on a body of sources ranging from institutional archival material to twentieth-century psychological literature to relevant histories of religion and American culture. The body of this dissertation consists of five chapters, which use the history of the Fuller Theological Seminary School of Psychology—the first evangelical doctoral program in psychology—as a lens through which to conduct the analysis. The chronological scope of the study spans from the advent of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century to the era of evangelical cultural prominence in the late twentieth.
As the dissertation shows, the roots of diverging evangelical views on mental health and modern psychology began long before twenty-first century debates in the contemporary Christian world. As the psychologist replaced the pastor as the authority on the mind and emotions in twentieth century American society, conservative white Protestants grappled with the challenges this new science posed to the older Christian tradition of “soul care.” While some evangelicals reconciled faith and psychology, others rejected psychology outright, claiming instead that the Bible alone was sufficient to guide Christians through even the most serious of mental maladies. This project argues that these differing responses reflected the interplay of scriptural and scientific authority, concerns over pastoral care, and beliefs about the relationship between the mind, body, and spirit.
What Faculty Say
Dr. Ray’s dissertation, “Healing Minds, Saving Souls: Evangelicals and Mental Health in the Age of the Therapeutic,” is original, significant, interdisciplinary, and—perhaps rare for dissertations—widely useful. Ray’s dissertation is the first book-length analysis of the relationship between American evangelicals and the field of modern psychology. This study is so important because, as Ray notes, “a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical and one in four American adults struggles with mental health conditions.” Ray’s discussion of the nuances of evangelical engagement with modern psychology—from rejection to selective use to wholehearted embrace—provides essential context for both professional counselors and lay believers seeking to alleviate the mental illness experienced by so many American Christians, as by so many Americans in general.