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Social workers who are Christians and work with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) clients may struggle with their own faith perspectives and how best to respond to their clients. Historically, there have always been examples of social workers who experience incongruence and even dissonance with their own competing values, with the values of the profession, and with the values of society or the culture. In those cases, the challenge and the opportunity is to maintain client self-determination, commitment to justice, and personal integrity. This paper explores the social work experience of value incongruence and dissonance, particularly for social workers whose religious values may seem to be incongruent with an affirmative approach to homosexuality. Included is a discussion of social work education in religiously-affiliated universities to address challenges in a polarized world, the integration of faith and social work practice, and principles and tips for working with value incongruence.
Keywords: values, profession, social work, dissonance, religion, homosexuality, reparative therapy
A HELPER OF PEOPLE." THOSE ARE THE SIMPLE WORDS OFTEN ETSED by social workers to describe their call and their profession. Practice texts often include phrases such as "helping skills" and "helping process." The focus on process and skill that is grounded in research and evidence distinguishes social work from informal helping and establishes the profession of helping to achieve change. This intentional, evidence-informed change is drawn from theory and professional practice.
Garland (2015) identified social work as a "little known and often misunderstood profession" (p. 1). Some of that misunderstanding is nested in social work as a "calling" for those social workers who are Christian. Their practice is often informed both by professional values and by the values of their faith. The focus of this article is how Christians in social work can manage value differences between themselves and their clients regarding sexual orientation.
Christians who are social workers can experience value dissonance, i.e., the challenge of possible differences between personal and professional values. In work with persons who identify as LGBT, the social worker may experience a variety of situations of value dissonance: (1) when the social worker experiences conflicting personal values which she must prioritize; (2) when the social worker's values are in conflict with the values of the profession and/or society;...