Christian Counseling in Limbo

Late last month, Slate published an article by Jennifer Miller investigating Mercy Multiplied, a Christian recovery ministry accused of hurting some of the young women it sought to help. Tracing the stories of more than a dozen former residents, Miller depicted a program that preached one thing but practiced another.

In an email to CT, Mercy Multiplied, which operates facilities in Tennessee, California, Missouri, and Louisiana, said that “Counselors are not required to be licensed in the locations where we have homes. However, Mercy is not opposed to licensure and over the years counselors have been licensed or have pursued licensure while working for us.” In their Louisiana home, counselors are licensed by the state, and all counselors are required to posses “advanced spiritual maturity and working knowledge of the Bible.” According to Mercy, counselors do not practice medicine, or even therapy, but instead follow a set format meant to aid the young women in the program in their recovery.

The claims in the Slate article underscore the various definitions of “Christian counseling,” even among Christians: Does the term include practices like exorcism and healing prayer? Is it primarily medical treatment in a faith-friendly setting? Since a growing number of ministries are taking mental health more seriously, there are more medically sound options for Christians in need of treatment. Still, patients may not know what to expect from a given program.

Mercy Multiplied reportedly crossed boundaries by accepting mentally ill clients when they weren’t licensed to do so. Miller wrote that

…Mercy staff’s lack of formal clinical training puts mentally ill or traumatized clients at greater psychological risk, even pushing them deeper into depression and addiction. Some say that under the guidance of their counselors, several Mercy residents falsely accused their families of horrific abuse.

These women—who suffered depression, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, and abuse—said there was pressure to act and look healed when they weren’t fully recovered.

Upon request, Mercy Multiplied spokeswoman Christy Singleton told CT that the organization tries to be as upfront as possible about the nature of their program, and that their intake process requires a physician to sign off that residents are “medically stable” (which means they are not undergoing detox, suicidal ideation, or other conditions that require more attentive care). Singleton also said residents who aren’t happy with the program are free to leave at any time; around a quarter choose to do so. According to Mercy’s website, over 3,000 women have come through their programs since 1983.

She stated that Mercy never used controversial practices like reparative therapy or recovered memory therapy, in which patients are led through exercises to help them recall suppressed memories. “We don’t brainwash; we don’t coerce,” she said, though some Mercy patients may have experienced that at other programs. “There’s definitely a crazy branch of the Christian tree, and the rest of us have to answer because of the crazy branch.”

In an interview with Laura Turner, Miller, a journalist and professor at Columbia University, talks about what she saw when she visited a Mercy house, why these women came forward to talk with her, and how people can responsibly tell a story with “compassion for the human beings at the core.”

You have been working on this piece for three years. How did you get started?

The impetus for this piece actually came to me from a young woman named Lisa Kerr, who had a blog called “My Cult Life” detailing her experience with a harmful discipleship program. She reached out to me one day and said, “I’ve been contacted by some women who found my blog and they are all from this program called Mercy Ministries.” [It is now called Mercy Multiplied.] The women had found Kerr’s blog and reached out to her because her experience resonated with them. So I reached out to them, and one door kind of led to the next, and then I started wending my way into this world.

You point out in the story that Mercy founder Nancy Alcorn would sometimes preach things that Mercy didn’t officially believe—for instance, she talked to a group of Christians about demons and exorcism, but Mercy said they don’t practice exorcisms. What’s the difference between Alcorn’s statements and Mercy’s practices?

Christy Singleton had specifically said to me, “We do not believe that there are real demons. We believe that when we talk about demonic oppression we’re talking about the lies that women tell themselves.” She was very straightforward about saying that. Then I looked into some of the things that Nancy has said, such as in the video we posted with the story. [The video shows Alcorn saying that Mercy “deals with areas of demonic oppression… secular psychiatrists want to medicate things like that, but Jesus did not say to medicate a demon.”] That corroborates what a number of the women who I spoke with told me about the way in which the demonic is treated at Mercy.

There’s an interesting discrepancy or irony here, because on the one hand the Mercy program is extremely formulaic. There’s the seven-step program, and all women are going through this program basically no matter why they arrived at Mercy. But on the other hand, Christy told me some things girls said happened absolutely don’t happen—that women always get their medication when they ask for it, and they don’t believe in the demonic literally, and you would never mandate the laying of hands on someone, a woman would never be threatened with expulsion if she didn’t go along with these things. All of this made me wonder, what kind of oversight is actually happening?

Mercy seems to occupy a hole in the US mental health system. It makes me think of other organizations that have done and continue to do reparation therapy around homosexuality, that they operate in a similar space where they’re not regulated. They’re not taking federal or state funding, but they can do vast amounts of harm, even though there are plenty of people who say they’ve done good.

Reparation therapy is happening at Mercy. I know that that’s not what they put out there, but I talked to a young woman who was at their home in Louisiana who went to Mercy because she was suffering from depression. In their application materials, they ask about your sexual orientation, and she’s gay. She wrote that down. She was honest about it, and then she said that when she got there her counselors told her that the reason that she was depressed was because she was a lesbian. Opening herself up to that sexual orientation, they said, she had allowed sin to come into her life, and so she wasn’t going to be healed unless she became straight. They’re also very strict when women are seen as becoming too friendly with each other. They actively separate them and try to keep them apart.

In terms of the regulatory piece of this, part of what’s strange is that it seems like Mercy has gone out of their way to get licensed in some instances but not in others. So initially when I started reporting the story, their website said that they were licensed in all of the states where they operate. I started looking around and I could not find any record of them being licensed in either Louisiana or Missouri.

They’re licensed by Social Services in California. There is a whole class of homes that are called adult residential facilities. Every state has a different name for them. Essentially, these are homes for people who have some degree of disability such that they cannot fully care for themselves. But the homes are not medical facilities, so they cannot take people who are severely ill, either physically or mentally.

The way Mercy presents itself and the language it’s using to talk about the type of counseling it offers is not accurate. In fact, given the way that it’s talking about itself you would expect it to be licensed by the state Department of Mental Health or the state Department of Health, not the Department of Social Services. This causes a lot of confusion, and I think Christy said to me when I met with her, “The only counseling that we’re doing is Christian counseling, and everyone is well aware of that.” Except for everyone is not well aware of that.

Christian organizations like Mercy exist in this unregulated liminal space where they are acting as the go-between from church to governmental or medical intervention. So they’re not a church weekly support group meeting, and they’re not a mental health institution that’s licensed by the state Department of Health.

“Christian counseling” does not have one specific definition. It can mean anything from biblically based intervention all the way to the practice of weaving in a Christian-based spiritual component to secular mental health counseling. What Mercy’s doing is one form of many forms of “Christian counseling.” Mercy does not require its counselors to be licensed in the state where they operate. So if a counselor does something that you’re not okay with, you have no recourse against that person. You can’t appeal to a licensing board.

Women, especially in Christian communities, can hear over and over again that their role is to be led by someone in their life. Do you think Christian women were particularly vulnerable to the kinds of abuses you chronicled at Mercy more than they would be if they were a secular man? Are their choices really their own?

For a lot of the women who come into the program, [this structure] actually might be familiar to them, in a certain sense. What’s interesting about it is that the program seems to emphasize autonomy by talking about how important choices are; that choices bring change. Part of what makes it really tough for the women who kept stalling at the various steps is you have to make the choice to move ahead in your healing. And so if you are not making that choice, it’s basically on you. You are falling short. So on the one hand, it’s seemingly putting a lot of autonomy in the hands of the patient, because it’s their own choice.

But on the other hand, you’re constrained because there’s only one choice to make. According to the Mercy model, you either make it or you don’t, and if you don’t, essentially you have decided to fail. I think that in our culture there’s a lot evidence women have trouble speaking up. I know that part of the trouble that some of my sources ran into was when they did try to speak out against [Mercy], the counselor was always completely opposed to that. I think it’s quite possible that cultural element from within the facets of Christianity that women find themselves kind of trapped in that space.

Speaking of the language of choice, I remember the fifth step in the seven-step process the girls went through was, “You choose to forgive your abuser.” That was so interesting to me because if it’s a seven-step process and you don’t do step five then you can’t make it to the end. But choosing to forgive someone is a highly personal thing that can take a lot of time.

Yeah. I think that is exactly right. There are definitely some women who leave the program early because they get stuck at one of the steps. But it seems like more often than not there’s so much pressure on them to move through the program in a timely manner. And there is a lot of outright manipulation. When you apply to Mercy you’re put on a waiting list, and it can take many months for a bed to open. So many women, once they get into the home, are constantly reminded by staff that there are all these women on the waiting list who would give anything to be in their position right now. According to some of my sources, the staff would even go so far as to say things such as, “Women could die while they’re on the waiting list. You need to appreciate where you are and what you’re doing, and you need to work really hard to make this work for you.” That kind of manipulation is really abusive.

As a journalist and a person who’s written extensively about faith, how do you responsibly cover a story like this that’s so complicated?

These women are the reason that I wanted to tell this story. That said, they are not the only ones who have been involved in this program. This stuff is really, really complicated, and for some women, a program like this can be really helpful. For instance, Mercy has everybody do a series of exercises in which they say things like, “Jen is good in Christ. Jen is pure in Christ.” I ran that by the psychologist I interviewed from Harvard, and he said that is a Christian-oriented form of behavioral therapy that you might see amended in a secular context.

At the same time, it’s important to be really unapologetic about discussing the transgressions that happen when a program is overreaching. That’s really what this is about—Mercy is really overreaching in terms of what they claim to be able to do. And I think that they know, and this is part of the problem, that that’s very attractive to a lot of women who have no other outlet.

I think as a journalist with any type of story of this kind of complexity and seriousness, you’ve got to tell both sides while showing compassion for the human beings at the core.