I've talked about this before, and it will probably come up again. It's faith-based initiatives in social service, and it's really not something that only slightly leftie social workers ought to care about. It turns out that Illinois is second in the nation for receiving money under Bush's "charitable choice" program. (New York is first.) Of course, some states were going to lead the pack, and that just means we have clever people tracking the grant stream. I'm okay with that part, in general. Yet, it does mean that the consequences of this new program are very visible to me, and they aren't pretty.
Federal support of faith-based social services isn't new, and it isn't necessarily bad. What is new is the idea that we should fund faith itself as an instrument of therapy. The old model was that, say, Catholic Charities could get money to run a literacy program or immigrant services or... whatever. But they evangelize on their own nickel. In fact, service agencies were supposed to be monitored at least annually for holes in the wall between service and religious activities. Now the model is that we, the body politic, pay for faith to be a part of the treatment program.
And whose faith would that be? The relationship between charitable choice and Christian fundamentalism is quite clear. Clients have been sentenced to participation in programs that required them to renounce their Catholicism. I can't even imagine what's happening when Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan or agnostic clients present for services. And what about someone actually hostile to faith? If you're sentenced to a faith-based program, you either attend or go to jail.
Moreover, Mr. Bush claimed that religious based social service agencies are both more effective and more efficient at delivering services. Naturally, the evidence does not support that notion; there is no scholarly evidence. None. The stuff that's out there is really a bunch of press releases masquerading as scholarship. The lacunae, shall we say, don't even require careful reading to spot. What can be argued is that small not-for-profits are more efficient and possibly more effective at delivering services. They are more agile in the world where clients' needs change dramatically and quickly. "Small" and "religious" frequently overlap in the social services array, but that are not identical.
And just to make things more exciting, federal guidelines for licensing and credentialing are being relaxed -not for most of us, just for the faith-based groups. I am NO fan of licensure; it just plain doesn't do what most people think it does. To say that, though, does not mean that I'm not a fan of standards of education or practice. And those are being abandoned. So you could be a pastor in some store-front church in the inner city somewhere -never been to school to be either a pastor or a counselor- and naturally you're going to find yourself surrounded by people with terrifying and urgent needs. Let's say you're a good-hearted soul and want to help, so you jump in and start to do something. If you chose to serve soup to hungry people, eventually the health department will find you and make sure you aren't poisoning people because you were unaware of public health guidelines. But we'll let you mess around in people's emotional lives forever. We'll let you offer "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior" as a treatment plan. We'll even pay you to do it.
I still haven't proven why you should care -except that I think all people should care about these principles. Even if you aren't a social worker or a social work student.... some family member or acquaintance has hit a psychological wall, has run afoul of the criminal justice system, has needed unusual or especially intense educational or medical services. Would you want that person to be subjected to services given by an untrained evangelist? And if you don't want that and advocate that your family member receive better services -and we all do that-, then we're going to end up with an even more stratified service array, where the people who can pay more can have more and poor people are relegated to inferior services.
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