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Picture this: A woman comes to therapy worn down by a difficult marriage, and when her therapist asks why she remains married, she answers that she made a promise before God. But this therapist sees it differently. To him, this woman is beholden to an irrational belief, and the solution is to build her capacity for self-advocacy. By the fourth session, she has stopped scheduling appointments. While perhaps nobody in that room was unkind, enough wires were crossed that the treatment couldn’t proceed.

Like the woman above, most religious patients don’t see faith-based counselors. Sometimes this is because they prefer someone outside of their community or because they’re seeking specialists on specific issues. But even when religious patients prefer therapies that aren’t focused on religion, they often still want a therapist who can discuss faith issues when they’re relevant (Kressel, 2026). Unfortunately, when these patients seek help, they often find providers who lack any competency with religious issues or even therapists who hold hostile or demeaning attitudes toward their beliefs.

Writing in Open Inquiry in Mental Health, psychologist Nina Silander argues that ruptures of this kind are increasingly common, predictable, and largely invisible to many psychotherapists. As Silander notes, a major cause of this trend is that mental health professionals are considerably less religious than the American public and therefore considerably less religious than the people whom they are supposed to treat. The size of that gap is easy to underestimate: Roughly three-quarters of Americans identify with a religious faith, while one survey found that only about a quarter of cognitive and behavioral therapists professed a certain belief in God (Kressel, 2026). Compounding the........

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