Steven C. Hayes is an American clinical psychologist born on August 12, 1948, best known as the originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). A useful way of understanding Hayes’s account is that he did not regard psychopathology primarily as a failure of motivation, such as simply lacking the desire or will to change, but as a problem in the way human motivation becomes organised through language, avoidance, and rigid patterns of behaviour.

Drawing on B. F. Skinner’s functional behaviourism, Hayes and Robert D. Zettle (1982) emphasised rule-governed behaviour, while Hayes, Aaron J. Brownstein, Zettle, Israel Rosenfarb, and Z. Korn (1986) showed experimentally how verbally specified rules can make behaviour less sensitive to changing consequences. Hayes subsequently developed, with Dermot Barnes-Holmes and Bryan Roche, Relational Frame Theory (RFT), according to which language enables people to derive relations among events and thereby transform the psychological functions of thoughts, memories, fears, and anticipated consequences (Barnes-Holmes et al., 2001; Hayes et al., 2001). Within this framework, psychopathology is particularly associated with psychological inflexibility, especially experiential avoidance (attempts to control, suppress, escape, or eliminate unwanted thoughts and feelings) which can paradoxically narrow behaviour and prevent people from acting effectively in the presence of distress.

Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson (1999) therefore made acceptance, values, and committed action central to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), so that motivation is redirected from the short-term goal of feeling better toward sustained action in personally meaningful directions. This was supported by Hayes et al. (2004), whose preliminary research associated experiential avoidance with greater general psychopathology, depression, anxiety, fears, trauma-related difficulties, and lower quality of life, although such findings should be understood as evidence for an important psychological process rather than proof that experiential avoidance alone causes psychopathology. Hayes (2004, 2019) consequently conceived ACT as a process-based approach whose goal is psychological flexibility: being able to remain present with difficult private experiences while choosing and persistently pursuing behaviour in accordance with values.

From a Christian theological perspective, this approach can be viewed as partly consonant with Biblical teaching while requiring important qualification. ACT’s distinction between having painful thoughts and feelings and being governed by them resonates with Paul’s call to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2), its emphasis on accepting suffering without making emotional relief the supreme goal has parallels with James’s teaching that trials can produce perseverance (James 1:2–4), and its movement from avoidance toward meaningful action resembles the New Testament’s emphasis on persevering in faithful obedience: “let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1–2). Likewise, ACT’s values-and-commitment orientation can be placed in dialogue with Jesus’ command to love God and neighbour (Matthew 22:37–40) and Paul’s description of Christian life as a calling expressed through concrete action (Ephesians 2:10).

At the same time, Christianity would normally locate ultimate motivation not merely in an individual’s self-selected values, as ACT does, but in God’s character, revealed purposes, grace, and love, with Christ rather than the autonomous self as the centre of discipleship (Galatians 2:20; Philippians 2:13). Thus ACT may provide a psychologically useful account of how people become trapped by avoidance and how committed action can be cultivated, while Christian theology supplies a different account of humanity’s ultimate identity, moral telos, sin, redemption, hope, and the source of transformative grace. This distinction is particularly important because Hayes’s model is a psychological and pragmatic framework rather than a Christian theology, even though RFT itself has explicitly been applied to religion, spirituality, and transcendence.

Hayes’s work, particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and its underlying account of human language and cognition in Relational Frame Theory (RFT), offers a useful psychological framework for understanding personal life strategies as the cognitive and behavioural patterns through which people respond to perceived threats and opportunities. Rather than treating effective living primarily as the elimination of unpleasant thoughts or feelings, Hayes argues that psychological functioning is improved by developing psychological flexibility: the capacity to remain aware of present circumstances, accept difficult internal experiences, distance oneself from unhelpful thoughts (cognitive defusion), recognise a perspective on the self that is broader than any particular self-description, clarify personally meaningful values, and translate those values into committed action (Hayes et al., 2006, 2012; Hayes et al., 2013).

In terms of the life-strategy concept, this suggests that a mature strategy is not simply a plan for maximising pleasure or avoiding danger: it involves learning when threat-management is useful, when avoidance becomes counterproductive, and how to continue purposeful behaviour despite fear, uncertainty, loss, or uncomfortable thoughts. RFT further suggests that human beings construct such strategies partly through language, learned relational networks, and rules about what events mean and how one ought to behave (Hayes et al., 2001).

Hayes’s emphasis on values, acceptance, present awareness and committed action can be viewed as compatible in several respects with Biblical discipleship, while also requiring an important qualification: ACT generally treats values as directions that the individual clarifies and chooses, whereas Christianity locates ultimate values and human purpose in God and his revealed will. Thus, a Christian life strategy would understand psychological flexibility not merely as pursuing personally selected values but as becoming flexible enough to respond faithfully to God, neighbour and circumstance (e.g., Romans 12:2, renewal of the mind; Philippians 4:8, disciplined attention to what is good; Galatians 5:22–23, formation of Christlike character; Hebrews 12:1–2, persevering toward a divinely oriented goal).

Hayes’s acceptance of unavoidable suffering can also resonate with the Christian distinction between faithful endurance and futile attempts to control every circumstance (James 1:2–4; Romans 5:3–5), while his emphasis on committed action parallels the Biblical insistence that faith becomes embodied in practice (James 2:17). Nevertheless, Christian theology would normally ground identity more strongly in the imago Dei and, for Christian disciples, union with Christ (Genesis 1:27; Galatians 2:20) than in ACT’s psychological construct of “self-as-context.” Consequently, Hayes helps illuminate how people can develop flexible, resilient and value-directed patterns for navigating threats and opportunities, while Christian theology supplies a distinctive answer to the further question of which ultimate values and purposes should govern those strategies: not merely a personally meaningful life, but a life ordered toward loving God and neighbour (Matthew 22:37–40) and seeking first God’s kingdom (Matthew 6:33).