Quacks, charlatans, posers, pharisees, pretenders. Jesus Christ delivered some of his most scathing rebukes against the sort of spiritual leader whose every action supported the illusion of a self that is able to teach, guide, and heal others without being whole oneself. Helping professionals, whether religious or not, so often “help” without having had a visitation of the holy trinity of client-centered therapy: empathy, congruence, and unconditional, positive regard. Therapy without love is a load of crap. 
What does it take to become an expert? What qualifies a person to advise others? What makes a sage, or a healer? These are questions that have been on my mind as I’ve noticed increasing quackery and charlatanism around me among so-called healers, and witnessed, too, the development of effective healers who, by conventional standards, aren’t really qualified to help anyone. Nevertheless, it seems that almost everyone wants to be an expert at something, as if by externalizing one’s need for mastery, one can neatly sidestep one’s own obligation to it. People master others because they will not master themselves.
The number of people qualified to treat mental disorders has increased with the number of the disordered. We have therapists and churches on every street corner in America, most claiming to be able to help, to cure what ails ye; yet our culture has never been more ill. NIMH estimates that approximately 26.2% of Americans are suffering a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, a statistic supported by research reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2005. I think James Hillman and Michael Ventura hit the nail on the head when they wrote We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse.
When I think about how suffering people looking for help can be (and have been) abused by people trained or claiming to be healers, I’m appalled. Most of us have seen the damage corrupt authority can do, whether the person in authority is a parent, teacher, counselor, priest, or king. Jesus taught that it would be better to have a millstone tied around one’s neck and drowned than to cause someone of lesser power (dignity, standing) to become entrapped, offended, deceived, enticed away from what is real and true–most particularly, away from the love of God.
