Drawing on the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) archives, my project traces how early clinical pastoral educators turned to psychiatric patients to generate new theological knowledge. Throughout the twentieth century, liberal Protestants established a network of clinical training sites where seminarians gained experience working with people in crisis. In the archives, I was surprised to find that early pedagogical materials overwhelmingly focused on how ministers might extract theological meaning from their interactions with minoritized psychiatric patients (African Americans, Jews, women, homosexuals). I also noticed clinical theologians employed the same methods used to form ministers today—case studies to foster students’ self-reflection. My project examines the first decades of this theo-scientific movement. Bringing critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability to bear on this history, my research challenges narrations of liberal Christians’ embrace of therapeutic methods as motivated by the increasing authority of secular science—a story that obscures the role that anxieties surrounding human difference played in efforts to modernize American Protestantism. Though my methods are archival, I am concerned with contemporary ministry practices. My project grapples with the racial-sexual histories that shape methods of pastoral care and chaplaincy today.