Social Work and Religious Diversity:

Social Work and Religious Diversity:

Problems and Possibilitie PAUL F. KNITTER, ThD Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York After exploring reasons why social workers need to engage in a kind of dialogue with their clients’ religious beliefs and values, this article offers “virtues” that are required for such a dialogue. It then takes up problems that religious convictions can create both for the client and for the social worker. To deal with the problems, the article concludes with the resources that religion offers the social worker both for dealing with clients and for her or his personal life.KEYWORDS religiousdiversity,dialogue,faithandbelief, spirituality In the following reflections, I’m really out of my element. The public I usually address, orally or in writing, is that of the academy of religious scholars or that of the churches, religious types whose worldview I basically share and whose language I understand. In what follows, I’m trying to address social workers, of whose work I have a general understanding (especially since I’m married to one) but whose professional language and methodology are rather foreign.And yet, I am deeply convinced that the world of social work and the world of religions (especially in all of its diversity) are important for each other. For each to do its job, it has to know something about the other. That was part of the reason why the School of Social Work at Columbia University asked me to put together these reflections. I hope I have done so in a way that is both intelligible to social workers and respectful of the fact that they share many different views about the nature or the value or the danger of religion. I suspect that if we can get a conversation and collaboration going between schools of social work and schools of religion/theology there would be a lot to learn on both sides. In what follows, I’ll be concentrating, as requested, on what social workers might gain from engaging religious diversity. 1 / 3

Social Work and Religious Diversity257

SOCIAL WORKERS AND RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE

The area of religious studies that has occupied me during the 46 years of my teaching career has been that of interreligious dialogue—how to get the religions of the world to stop hiding from or fighting with one another and recognize they have a lot to learn from one another and that the world in general would be better off if they did.So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the main claim of this essay is that social workers, in order to do their job in a culture in which religion is growing in intensity and diversity, have to engage in some form of religious dialogue. I begin my case first with some political, and then some psychological, considerations.The Religions Are Political Players Both Locally and Globally Today there is a broad recognition of the role that religion plays on the political stage, on both the local-political and the geopolitical stages. This has always been the case. But it has become forcefully and painfully clear in the events of 9/11 and, especially, after 9/11.Both Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush appealed to religious values and motivations in response to the “evil” of imperialism or the “evil” of terrorism (Herbert, 2010). When you brand the other side as “evil,” that means that God is on your side since God is always on the side of the “good-doers” in opposition to the “evildoers.” On both sides of the geopolitical tensions, the two religions that are inspiring or guiding or justifying the political players, sometimes overtly something implicitly, are Islam and Christianity. The claim has even been made that after the years of cold war between capitalist and communist ideologies we now have a rather hot war between two civilizations that to a great extent are grounded in the messages of the Qu’ran and the Bible. This is the well known, and very

controversial, claim of Samuel Huntington (1996): we are today

facing a “clash of civilizations,” which is really a clash of religions.So on this issue of the presence and power of religion in the world of politics and international relations, I think we have to

say that the Muslim theologians are right: religion and politics

do mix, both actually and understandably. Yes, the United States holds to the principle of the separation of church and state and so forbids the government to side with religions in general in order to make sure it doesn’t side with any one of them in 2 / 3

Social Work and Religious Diversity258 particular. And many Muslims, especially those who are American or European citizens, would agree with this clear distinction between church and state, but they would add that this distinction doesn’t necessarily lead to an actual separation.Muslims recognize and declare straightforwardly that religion and politics, unavoidably and perhaps necessarily, do mix. They hold up the fact that people who are truly convinced of their religious values will want those values to be translated into social values—yes, even into laws. Religious faith, when it is alive and well, cannot be only a personal, privatized affair; it will spill out from churches and from mosques into societies.And crafty politicians will also know that if they want to advance their agendas among a people who publicly declare themselves to be religious, they’d better appeal to those religious convictions. Can you imagine the president of the United States ending a State of the Union address without an “and may God bless America”? The agenda of any president of this country, or any party, must be presented as having the blessing of God.Otherwise, there will not be enough votes to move it forward.That’s a fact of life in the United States. (It certainly isn’t in most European countries.) So even the United Nations, which for most of its existence has shied away from any formal dealing with the political hornets nest of religion, has recently recognized that it can no longer avoid dealing with the diversity and the complexity of the religious world. In October 2007 I had the privilege of being part of hearings sponsored by the General Assembly on “Interreligious and Intercultural Understanding and Cooperation for Peace.” The final report of these hearings opened with the

following statement: “If religions are not part of the solution,

they will continue to be part of the problem” (United Nations, 2007). The mess that religion has caused or contributed to is the kind of mess that only religion can solve.Or, to put a much more positive spin on the UN’s decision to take up the tangled matter of religion, the oft-quoted statement

of Swiss theologian Hans Küng (1991) applies: “There will be no

peace among nations without peace among religions. And there will be no peace among religions without greater dialogue between them” (p. xv). Committed to the making of peace as is the UN, it must also be committed to the making of dialogue.The same, I suggest, applies to social workers.Social Work Requires Working with Religion If politicians, political scientists, and diplomats are recognizing that their jobs require them to deal with religion and religious

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