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 religious diversity, dialogue, faith and belief,
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.
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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
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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
