“We Don’ Need No Steenken’ License!”

Unlicensed religious chaplains could work mental health roles in Texas public schools under a bill the Legislature passed.

Critics fear the bill is an attempt at evangelizing kids and will worsen mental health through disproven counseling approaches. https://t.co/Bbup8Pv6Vt

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) May 24, 2023

As an ordained minister with no license to practice therapy in any form, I am qualified to say this is an unmitigated disaster of an idea.

I don’t have to accept the legitimacy of the philosophy or theory of psychology/psychiatry to recognize people trained and licensed in the field are better equipped, in general, to deal with counseling and therapy than anyone labeling themselves as “pastor.” To say that title is not regulated is an understatement.

Literally anyone can claim a congregation, a church, or just to be a “preacher.” None of that qualifies you to engage in counseling. I know, for example, that in the Baptist tradition, you can be ordained just because a congregation decides to. You need no more qualification than that. Which doesn’t exactly mean you know anything about even “pastoral care.”

I put the words in quotes because it’s what I was taught in seminary; and my professors made it clear what we learned there was just enough to make us dangerous. We were told to move any serious matter to someone qualified; someone with a license, in other words. Our pastoral care was meant to comfort the afflicted; the mourning, the worried, the about to marry or die. In my first church, when I was still in seminary, I had a parishioner whom I was told had multiple personalities. (I never spoke to the therapist or got an official diagnosis.) One night I got a call from this person, who was in great distress. It wasn’t like the movies, where the personalities are dramatically distinctive. But it was clear I was talking to a person in extremis. All I could do, and kept telling myself through the conversation, was not screw it up, not make the situation worse. That’s all the qualifications I had then, or have now, almost 30 years later.

And I’m an ordained minister with a seminary degree. I’ve dealt with death, and the dying and the mourning, the anxious and the angry and the despairing. But I don’t consider myself fit even to be a counselor to, especially, children.

What about the volunteers telling school boards they are pastors just because they think God has said do? They may be sincere and godly people, but qualified as counselors? No; not at all.

I fear there is a school board in Texas that would allow such people on campus, especially in small towns where challenges to these volunteers on 1st Amendment grounds are the least likely. Then again, those schools probably aren’t hiring the highest caliber of school counselors to begin with. So this would just be insult on injury.

I can imagine the most notorious MAGA school boards almost advertising for volunteers as soon as the law allows, and lots of small or rural boards quietly approving such volunteers (if they don’t use them already, simply by not refusing their offers of help in the face of yet another school tragedy). Some of the counseling may be well-meaning, and some of it may be disastrous. The question is, why do we need to make things worse? Isn’t the purpose of the state to prevent that as much as it can?