Approaches to Understanding and Aligning With Religious Leaders: A Latent Profile Analysis of Religious Leaders' Worldviews

Religious people often seek help for mental health problems from their religious leaders. Yet, some religious leaders may not easily trust the mental health system. In this study, we employed latent profile analysis to explore differences in religious leader's worldviews and how they relate to attitudes toward psychological science (N = 401). We purposefully sampled from Catholic, Evangelical, and Mainline denominations. Results suggested three profiles of leaders: Theologically Conservative, Theologically Progressive, and Theologically Moderate. Sharp differences for these three groups resided in worldviews concerning same-sex marriage, gender roles in leadership, and human origins. We found that Theologically Conservative leaders in the sample were primarily open to drawing on psychology in counseling, but harbored concerns about the misalignment of faith and science. In contrast, the other two groups (Theologically Progressive and Theologically Moderate leaders) seemed much more amenable to drawing on psychology in a number of ministries and were less concerned about misalignment regarding ideology. From these findings, we draw on principles of implementation science to recommend strategies of promoting greater cooperation between religious leaders and psychologists.