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“How can you be a Christian and work in that field?” It was that question, asked by a dear friend, about my work at a community mental health center, which prompted me to study and try to understand Christian attitudes toward psychology. Why do some Christians accept psychology while others call it a dangerous, idolatrous, and ungodly rival religion? Can science tell us anything useful about the human condition? How does psychology and my worldview fit; or do they fit at all? My search for answers led to my dissertation on Christian homeschoolers’ attitudes toward psychology.

The realization that my first daughter Katie would soon graduate our homeschool and head for college prompted me to write Homeschool Psych: Preparing Christian Homeschool Students for Psychology 101. I did not want Katie’s first exposure to psychology to be in a college psychology class. I knew that although there are many Christians who work in psychology research, teaching, and counseling, psychology departments are home to some of the more anti-Christian intellectuals on college campuses. I knew that psychology professors have high levels of agnosticism and atheism and that they would attack Katie’s Christian worldview as unscientific, irrational, prudish, exploitive, controlling, inhibitive, oppressive, and naïve. It was true when I took Psychology 101 thirty years ago, and it is even more true today. I wanted Katie to be prepared and now I want to help you prepare your kids. Are they ready?

You have probably heard the statistics about Christian students walking away from their faith after the first year in college. If those statistics are true, and if they have anything to do with the teaching in college, I believe that it is less about evolutionary biology or in-your-face humanism and more about the subtle worldview challenges embedded in psychological theories. So why not reject psychology completely? I believe that it is a mistake to reject psychology by equating the entire discipline with the whacked-out worldview assumptions of its modern “fathers.” The human mind is the greatest of God’s creations and it is right and proper for Christian students to study it, if they are prepared. It is good that our students want to understand and help people who are hurting, if they approach it from a Christian perspective.