by G.T. Hunt8909 Grant StreetBethesda, Maryland 20817
Psychological testing can be scientifically valid and a useful tool in personnel management. But it is like what Catholics call a near occasion of sin. It may not be always wrong, but it can lead to trouble.
Several pencil-and-paper tests have come to be widely required of seminarians over the last few decades: the Theological School Inventory, the Inventory of Religious Activities and Interests, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, among others. Usually the written tests are followed by a diagnostic interview with a psychological professional.
These procedures are the subject of a large body of professional literature assessing their validity and cautioning against their mechanical application. If the cautions were properly heeded, the procedures might be of some value. But in practice several problems come up.
First is the expense, several hundred dollars per evaluation. This is usually paid by the candidate. The Baltimore-Washington Conference of the UMC has told at least one candidate (though apparently not all) that this expense must be repeated every five years. Considering the effort the psychologists put into making the tests ethnically neutral, it is ironic that the churches should add the cost of testing to the economic bias already inherent in demanding that clergy pay for their own graduate-level education.
Second is the communications gap between the psychologists, professionally trained to view the tests with healthy skepticism, and the members of the selection boards. The specificity and apparent precision of the psychometric scales cannot fail to exert an undue influence on the boards.
The most informative study we have found on how psychological testing plays out in practice is a report on 84 men and 3 women who came before the Southern California-Arizona Board of Ordained Ministry as UMC elders candidates, 1973-1977. Laura F. Majovski and H. Newton Malony, "Predicting Ministerial Effectiveness," in Clergy Assessment and Career Development, John E. Hinkle and H. Newton Malony eds. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990). The psychological examiners recommended 90% of the candidates as suitable for ordination. But only 74% of these were accepted by the Board. Of the candidates the psychologists recommended for deferral or rejection, about one-third were accepted. So the psychologists' opinions were influential but not controlling, or at least showed some correlation with the Board's opinions. But the striking thing is that the Board rejected many more than the psychologists did. This may well be the general pattern with United Methodist boards.
The third and most harmful effect is the suggestion of misbehavior or pathology added to an otherwise arbitrary personnel decision by the invocation of psychological argot and the involvement of psychologists. Boards are too prone to tell candidates they need counseling, and rejected candidates often feel that their most intimate thoughts and conflicts have been used for the most public of humiliations. We do not know how often a good minister is rejected because a modicum of saintliness or enthusiasm has shown up in the psychological exams as an abnormality. But we do know that lay people who hear of a candidate's rejection often suspect that something embarrassing must have turned up on the psychological exam. Indeed, many candidates entertain such self-destructive speculations themselves.
The remedy is not to condemn psychological consultations, which can be useful in any career decision. The remedy is to get rid of the false ideal of a stereotyped clergy, a cadre of people who conform to our own preconceived model. And also to get rid of the notion of the clergy as a moral, spiritual, and social elite, maintained in its prestige by rejecting and humiliating those who do not perfectly fit.
(John Fraunces, "Should Psychologists Choose Seminarians?" shows that conservative Catholics share many of these concerns.)
October 2001
Gaillard T. Hunt8909 Grant StreetBethesda, Maryland