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Christian Fundamentalism
and Anti-Oppressive Social
Work Pedagogy
Sarah Todd
Diana Coholic
Downloaded By: [University of Washington] At: 02:05 14 April 2011
Sarah Todd, MSW, EdD, is Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, 1125 Colo-
nel By Drive, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6 (E-mail: sarah_todd@
carleton.ca).
Diana Coholic, MSW, PhD, RSW, is Assistant Professor, School of Social Work,
Laurentian University, Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6 (E-mail: sarah_
todd@carleton.ca).
The authors wish to acknowledge the helpful comments that James Wishart and
Karen Schwartz made on earlier drafts of this paper.
Journal of Teaching in Social Work, Vol. 27(3/4) 2007
Available online at http://jtsw.haworthpress.com
© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J067v27n03_02 5
6 JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN SOCIAL WORK
ingly, although one of these scholars advocated for the increased training
of Evangelical Christians in social work (Hodge, 2002), they all agreed
that “social workers must respectfully allow clients to make their own
choices” (Hodge, 2003, p. 431). Dinerman (2003, p. 251) wondered how
a Fundamentalist social worker who believes that she/he possesses the
truth can maintain the professional discipline to help a client reach their
own decisions and clarify their own values, especially if the client’s
goals and values challenge the Fundamentalist social worker’s beliefs.
We also question the possibilities for a separation of personal values
and practice, and can relate with Dinerman’s feeling that it might be
“harder” for a Fundamentalist social worker to separate their own be-
liefs from clients with different perspectives, experiences or identities.
One of the situations in which this question of separation between val-
ues and practice is of paramount concern is when the social worker with
fundamentalist beliefs is working with persons of diverse sexual orien-
tations and/or gender expressions.
The staging ground of social work practice is the social work class-
room. It is in this context that we have had to consider our response to
Fundamentalist students, particularly given our commitment to affirm
the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT)
students, social workers and clients. The National Association of Social
Workers (NASW), the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) and
their Canadian counterparts, the Canadian Association of Social Work
(CASW) and the Canadian Association of Schools of Social Work
(CASSW) have increasingly engaged with the movement to secure civil
rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) per-
sons and has worked to decrease homophobia and heterosexism. To
varying extents these institutions have regulated schools of social work
and social work practitioners to affirm the lives of people who are gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer while also advocating for social
Sarah Todd and Diana Coholic 7
justice. A recent article in Social Work highlighted the need for the pro-
fession to not only provide queer positive interventions but to address
the “heterosexist conditions that oppress gay and lesbian clients” (Van
Voorhis & Wagner, 2002, p. 353). This perspective on the obligation
of social work has many similarities with the British and Canadian anti-
oppressive approaches to practice and education (see, for instance,
Campbell, 2002; Dominelli, 2003). However, social work’s approach to
challenging heterosexism has been somewhat contradictory. In Amer-
ica the “CSWE exempts religious institutions from the nondiscrimi-
nation standard related to sexual orientation” and, as a result, some
schools of social work “are not required to provide affirmative knowl-
Downloaded By: [University of Washington] At: 02:05 14 April 2011
edge about gay and lesbian persons” (Hunter & Hickerson, 2003, p. 2).
This contradiction occurs within broader social tensions between reli-
gious freedom and equality for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans-
gendered persons, which has also been at the forefront of the same-sex
marriage debate in Canada.
In both Canada and the United States, the profession of social work
has tried to address this tension by setting its own limits. Along these
lines, many social workers have argued that there is little room for Fun-
damentalist beliefs within professional practice (Amato-von Hemert,
1994; Canda & Furman, 1999; Reed, 1998). However, given the scant
discussion of this complex issue within the literature, and the reality that
many of us have students with Fundamentalist beliefs and students with
diverse sexual identities and gender expressions in our courses, much
more exploration in this area must occur. Exploring the tensions between
Fundamentalism, sexual freedom, sex-gender expression and social work
pedagogy is necessary because classroom discussions inevitably enlist
students’ personal perspectives, which may include Fundamentalist be-
liefs and personal disclosures regarding diverse gender expression, sex-
ual orientation and sexual desires.
We have experienced Fundamentalism entering classroom discussions
even when the topic area is removed from the spiritual realm, for exam-
ple, in something as basic as constructing a personal social history. Nego-
tiating these tensions in social work classrooms is particularly important
given the current trends towards embracing holistic models of prac-
tice, and the growing literature on spirituality and social work in North
America (Canda & Smith, 2001; Coholic, 2003; Nash & Stewart, 2002;
Nathanson, 1995; Schwartz, 1999; Walsh, 1999). In addition there is a
sizeable body of literature arguing for sexual and gender diversity as cen-
tral to social work education and practice (Berkman & Zinberg, 1997;
Hunter & Hickerson, 2003; Krieglestein, 2003; Messinger, 2002; Van
8 JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN SOCIAL WORK
Voorhis & Wagner, 2002; van Wormer, Wells, & Boes, 2000). Also,
many have argued that we are experiencing a societal and academic shift
towards reevaluating the importance of spirituality and sexuality in life
(Ai, 2002; Clark, 1999; Eisenberg et al., 1998), which in turn influences
the expectations of social work clients, students, practitioners, and educa-
tors. Furthermore, some schools of social work offer courses in spiritual-
ity, gender and sexuality while other educators include discussions about
spirituality, gender and sexuality in a variety of classes (Derezotes, 1995;
Kamya, 2000; Okundaye, Gray, & Gray, 1999; Russel, 1998; Sheridan,
Wilmer, & Atcheson, 1994; Swan, 2002).
In this paper, we use the term “Fundamentalist” to describe those
Downloaded By: [University of Washington] At: 02:05 14 April 2011
ANTI-OPPRESSIVE PEDAGOGY
AND FUNDAMENTALISM
and moreover, may not want to be empowered in the way that is being
prescribed, is a problem area that has not been sufficiently addressed by
Freirians” (Blackburn, 2000, p. 12). Similarly, Kothari (2002) explored
such pedagogical approaches when they are used by people working in
the field of community development. She suggested that the use of the
language of participation actually reifies social norms. As the participa-
tory process is assumed to be emancipatory, the ways in which it might
replicate age old hierarchies and systems of oppression and/ or marginal-
ization are rarely accounted for, let alone discussed. In this way, the all-
inclusive is actually the mechanism through which we hide our own
investments and authority, leaving it difficult (if not impossible) for those
who feel marginalized to name their experience as marginalization.
Despite these critiques, anti-oppressive pedagogies are seen as prin-
cipally important in creating social work professionals who are self-re-
flective about how systems of privilege and penalty shape their lives
(Campbell, 2002 & 2003). Particularly, such approaches are seen as help-
ful for challenging students’ homophobia and heterosexism, racism,
sexism, etc. If instead of being told what to think, we engage students in
a process of reflection and questioning, they are more likely to integrate
anti-oppressive theory with their lives and practice.
At the same time, most anti-oppressive discussions about oppression
do not explore Christian marginalization as part of their analysis of si-
lencing and exclusion (see, for example, Chand et al., 2002; Dominelli,
2003). The distinction that anti-oppressive theorists make between the
marginalization of those with Fundamentalist beliefs from systemic op-
pression is helpful in our analysis. Mullaly’s (1997) description of op-
pression, though long, merits reproduction here:
pp. 138-139)
that all beliefs and values, in all contexts and situations, will be deemed
acceptable.
Educators have a responsibility to address statements, attitudes and
behaviors displayed by students that we understand to be hurtful and
harmful to others. For instance, when Fundamentalist beliefs are articu-
lated they often reinforce attitudes that reproduce patriarchy (that many
of us understand as harmful) and explicitly harm women and/or people
of diverse sexual and gendered identities. In other words, they perpet-
uate heterosexist beliefs that heterosexuality is superior to, or more nat-
ural than, homosexuality, and that heterosexual norms of the nuclear
family and firm gender roles are superior to alternative family struc-
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Negotiating Harm
It is clear from these examples that we are not sure that once harm
is caused in a classroom via the expressions of Fundamentalist beliefs,
that this harm can be managed in a way that creates an inclusive space,
that is, when harm is expressed its very expression is exclusionary. We
are concerned that homophobic and racist attitudes can also incite ha-
tred, polarize discussions and put the most vulnerable at the greatest risk
of feeling re-victimized. For instance, the student described above used
his male privilege to influence classroom discussions so that the other
students, who were all very much younger and female, were reluctant
to engage with the material in class and share their ideas. Perhaps more
seriously, religious institutions have perpetrated grave injustice and
oppression against various marginalized groups. For those impacted
by such harm, opening up the space to explore Fundamental (or even
Sarah Todd and Diana Coholic 17
that students are accountable to social work ethics and understand the
importance of affirming, not just tolerating diversity. It seems to us that
it is more useful to have such boundaries stated in the classroom and as-
signment design, rather than having an educator react to them with com-
ments and grades. In such a reactive process students cannot make their
identities and beliefs more complex, which often results in them feeling
increasingly marginalized. The second and final scenarios also raise
questions about what we can reasonably expect from classroom dis-
cussions. While such debates can be reduced to a question of facilitator
skill, we are not certain that harm can be controlled and regulated by
technique alone. What might be more helpful is to have educators role
model possibilities for working with persons who hold heterosexist be-
liefs. Creating the space for such dialogue, even if it takes place outside
of the classroom, is at least one step beyond the categorization and dis-
missal of persons who hold Fundamentalist beliefs.
The difficulty with the expression of Fundamentalism in social work
is that it is often antithetical to social work values. Indeed, there is em-
pirical evidence to support the view that people from Fundamentalist
backgrounds have a high degree of religious ethnocentrism, and hos-
tility towards gay men, lesbians, and various racial-ethnic minorities
(Altemeyer, 2003; Gorsuch, 1988). We struggle with providing room in
the classroom for the expression of Fundamentalist viewpoints because,
as was discussed previously, one’s experience of frustration or silence
within a social work classroom is not by definition about oppression. In
Canada, democracy has been constructed on a notion that one’s right to
freedom of speech is limited at the moment in which it harms another’s
right to freedom of choice and to a dignified existence (Abella, 2003).
What happens if we extend this limit to Fundamentalist voices that re-
produce affirmations of patriarchy and heterosexism in the classroom?
18 JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN SOCIAL WORK
A student in class said to me that she did not feel the climate of the
school allowed her to voice her pro-life beliefs, because the over-
Downloaded By: [University of Washington] At: 02:05 14 April 2011
CONCLUSION
NOTES
1. While this is a rather imprecise use of the term, we agree with Schick et al. (2004,
p. 3) that such a mobilization of Fundamentalism is helpful when trying to understand
movements which may be diverse but also resemble one another quite significantly.
2. Students were referred to an unpublished paper that was presented in 2003 at the
Valdosta State Women Studies Conference in Valdosta Georgia. The paper was deliv-
ered by Michael Stoltzfus and is titled Homosexuality and the Bible: Rethinking Tradi-
tional Interpretations (2003). Daniel Helminiak’s What the Bible Really Says About
Homosexuality (2000) was also used.
Downloaded By: [University of Washington] At: 02:05 14 April 2011
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