Does social work oppress evangelical Christians? A "new class" analysis of society and social work.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," wrote Martin Luther King (1992, p. 85). When injustice is tolerated against a specific group, ultimately everyone's access to justice is at risk. Indeed, since its foundation social work has recognized the deleterious effects of social injustice and incorporates as one of its six guiding ethical principles the need to understand and ameliorate oppression (NASW, 2000).

Recognition of injustice, however, is a perplexing issue. How does discrimination against a particular group enter one's consciousness? It is clear that the actual existence of oppression is a minimal criterion at best. For a century and a half, segregated restaurants, hotels, schools, and buses existed without being acknowledged as a problem. Similarly, the internment of coastal-dwelling Asian Americans during World War II was not widely perceived as discriminatory when it occurred, but only long after the internment was an accepted fact.

As Edelman (1990) noted, ideologically oriented class issues keep oppressions concealed. Indeed, the most deeply obscured instances of discrimination stem from ideological premises that are so widespread in people's everyday language that they are not recognized as ideological at all but are accepted as the way the world is constituted. For example, to generations of educated white people socialized to see black people as a less-evolved form of life, segregation reflected the reality of the cosmos, not a matrix of oppression.

Accordingly, social work has attempted to uncover oppression by deconstructing the prevailing dominant ideology using a modified Marxist analysis. As Hamilton and Sharma (1997) observed, a clash between ideologies or worldviews, along with a power differential, sets the stage for oppressive conditions. Because the class or group holding power inclines toward oppressing those without access to power, serving its own ideological interests, deconstructing the dominant class tends to reveal the populations who face oppression.

The profession has done a commendable job applying this framework in the areas of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and so forth, but one area has been overlooked--religion. Although the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW, 2000) stipulates that "social workers should obtain education about and seek to understand the nature of social diversity and oppression with respect to ... religion" (p. 9, 1.05c) few, if any, articles have explored the oppression of religious populations.

Definitions

This article's discussion of religious oppression uses a number of terms. The most specific, Evangelicals, refers to a transdenominational, ecumenical Protestant movement that emphasizes the following three points: (1) salvation only through existential, personal trust in Christ's finished atoning work, (2) a spiritually transformed life marked by moral conduct and personal devotion such as scripture reading and missions, and (3) the Bible as authoritative and reliable (Marsden, 1987). Because of their status as the nation's largest spiritual tradition--approximately 25 percent of the population--Evangelicals often are used as a proxy for a family of discrete religious groups that are frequently referred to as religious conservatives (Green, Guth, Smidt, & Kellstedt, 1996).

Religious conservatives, or orthodox believers, are defined as individuals who derive their value system from an external transcendent source, often manifested in a particular sacred text (Hunter, 1991). In North America these individuals are primarily theists, defined as people who believe in a personal God of transcendent existence and power, who seek to ground their lives in the Bible (Gallup & Castelli, 1989). In keeping with the accepted practice of using self-designations for the population being described, this article uses the term "people of faith" interchangeably with religious conservatives/historically orthodox believers. This term is used by Evangelicals (Reed, 1996; Wolfe, 1998) to refer to themselves and other orthodox believers. It is this community of historically orthodox believers, and Evangelicals in particular because of their status as the nation's largest religious minority group, that a new dominant class seeks to oppress.

Emergence of the "New Class"

Traditional Marxism posits the existence of two classes--the middle class and the working class. The emergence of a third class--the "new class," or knowledge class--has been adopted by a number of sociologists to explain changes that have occurred in Western societies since World War II (Berger, 1986; Bruce-Briggs, 1979; Ehrenreich, 1990; Frow, 1993; Gouldner, 1979; McAdams, 1987; Schmalzbauer, 1993; Szelenyi & Martin, 1991). As observers have noted, what was once a large middle class has split into two ideologically demarcated entities. It is between these two relatively privileged groups that Western culture's predominant societal conflict occurs. As Berger (1986) put it, "contemporary western societies are characterized by a protracted conflict between two classes, the old middle class (occupied in the production and distribution of material goods and services) and a "new class" (occupied in the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge)" (p. 67).

The rise of the "new class" is traced to the sustained economic growth Western societies have experienced since World War II in conjunction with rapid technological advancement. The information, government, and financial sectors that increasingly underlie Western economies have led to a substantial increase in the knowledge occupations. Whereas employment in manufacturing has been trending down, both relatively and absolutely since the turn of the 20th century, the number of knowledge-producing occupations tripled from 1900 to 1959 and then doubled from 1960 to 1980, at which juncture it accounted for approximately 34 percent of the U.S. gross national product (GNP) (Frow, 1993; Hunter, 1991). Because many social workers depend on social welfare spending for their economic livelihood, it is interesting to note that government spending for social welfare is 22 percent of the GNP in 1995.

The "new class" has been demarcated in various fashions (Schmalzbauer, 1993). The broadest definition of the class includes all professionals. Conversely, more narrow interpretations define the group as those who work in the "cultural production" occupations (for example, academia, media) and professions whose self-interest is served by the expansion of government (for example, social work).

Regardless of how the "new class" is defined, empirical tests with national survey data have found a distinct ideology associated with political liberalism, the rejection of traditional moral values, and functional secularism (Ladd, 1979; McAdams, 1987; Schmalzbauer, 1993). The surveys demonstrate that the "new class" differs substantially from the middle class and "working class" as well as other groups and differs radically from numerous cultural groups and workers (who were the traditional means of production) on religious affiliation, moral and sexual issues, national priorities, foreign and defense policy, personal values, and party affiliation (Ladd, 1979; McAdams, 1987). For example, Schmalzbauer (1993), using 17 years of General Social Survey data, surmised that the ideological framework held by the "new class" is distinct from and frequently at odds with groups such as the working class and Evangelicals.

The "new class" wields political and cultural power disproportionate to its relatively small size. This power flows from its ability to control the labels and manipulate the symbols by which the broader population understands themselves and their purposes in life (Lipset, 1979). Indeed, as feminists have noted (Luepnitz, 1988), the ability to apply labels is one of the most fundamental expressions of power.

As Briggs (1979) noted, because of professional and educational status, the "new class" is "favored in income, status, freedom, power, and other presumed benefits of life" (p. 9). Although distinct from the "old money" socioeconomic group, the "new class" generally occupies the upper-middle socioeconomic strata (Gouldner, 1979; Szelenyi & Martin, 1991). However, given their ability to define and direct the parameters of public discourse, the members of the "new class" enjoy a measure of prestige and power that surpasses even that of the upper level of the traditional bourgeois class.

Yet, despite the "new class"'s power and prestige, its members actively engage in reshaping society. Because they hold the keys to cultural discourse, it is inevitable that the members of the "new class" would influence public perceptions, even if they attempted to maintain objectivity (Sermabeikian, 1994). However, as is the case in any class struggle, the "new class" seeks to influence and persuade, to advance its own ideological interests at the expense of other constructions of reality in an effort to achieve cultural hegemony.

Gouldner (1979), an advocate of the "new class," who is widely praised for his conceptualization of the this new cultural group (Szelenyi & Martin, 1991), delineated the ground rules for engaging the old middle class and opposing interests as follows: "Short of going to the barricades, the "new class" may harass the old, sabotage it, critique it, expose and muckrake it, express moral, technical, and cultural superiority to it, and hold it up to contempt and ridicule" (p. 17). As Gouldner noted, in the struggle between the "new class", the middle class, and the working class, any tactic will be used to ensure that the "new class"' interests prevail. …