Do you think Nathan’s and Basel’s religious commitments, although different, are affecting their decision making? How?

Question

Nathan Bierwirth, BSW, worked as an employment counselor for Pathfinders Social Services, a nonprofit agency serving the Minneapolis metropolitan area. Pathfinders provided employment services for people leaving welfare, persons with disabilities, the homeless, and immigrants, refugees, and asylees. Part of Nathan’s caseload consisted of newly arrived refugees enrolled in Minnesota’s time-limited Refugee Cash Assistance–Employment Services (RCA-ES) program. Individualized Employment Plans (EPs) helped refugees transition from welfare to employment and self-sufficiency. EPs required a minimum of 35 hours per week of RCA-ES–approved activities, including employment services and formal education (limited to 20 hours per week). Nathan’s client, Ayana Tuma, a refugee from Ethiopia, had no educational or work experience and knew no English. This prevented her from effectively participating in employment service classes, so she enrolled in a full-time English as a Second Language (ESL) program. When Hennepin County audited Pathfinders, clients like Ayana, who exceeded the 20 hour instruction limit, could be sanctioned and even terminated from the program. As the audit approached, Nathan wondered if he should report Ayana’s ESL hours accurately or falsify her Employment Plan.

Answer 1

Religious commitments inform and shape a person’s deepest and most cherished values and beliefs, often affecting and guiding, directly or indirectly, one’s ethical decision making. Certainly, Nathan’s Christian values and Basel’s Islamic values were affecting their decision making. Both Christianity and Islam explicitly forbid bearing false witness and admonish acting with honesty and integrity. However, both religions also place a special emphasis upon caring for the needs of society’s most vulnerable people—the weak, the poor, and the homeless; orphans and widows; the unemployed and infirm; foreigners and strangers; and other marginalized people. Granted, many Christians and Muslims do not live up to their ethical responsibilities to these groups, but from the case it appears that Nathan and Basel genuinely expressed a great deal of concern for refugees. Most likely, they were both struggling with this tension, a tension that resided within their respective faiths, to act honestly and shun lying on the one hand but to act compassionately for people in desperate straits on the
other, even if that meant ignoring or breaking rules.