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Sarah Kaczynski discusses her challenges in managing bias towards clients with conservative religious beliefs, particularly Christian nationalism. She explores ethical engagement in counseling despite personal values conflicting with clients'. She references definitions of Christian nationalism, highlighting its political nature. She delves into ethical guidelines from the American Counseling Association and the Acerbic Task Force, emphasizing self-awareness, understanding, and interventions in counseling practice. Sarah recognizes the emotional aspect of her reactions and the importance of addressing them ethically to provide effective therapy. Hi, this is Sarah Kaczynski, and in this podcast, I am exploring a part of multicultural counseling practice that remains challenging for me. Specifically, I want to talk about how I can manage my own bias towards clients who align with not just generally conservative religious ideology, but like white Christian nationalism, or like what more commonly was called the religious right a decade or so ago. I've never recorded a podcast before, and I'm kind of nervous, and I'm wearing the merch from one of my favorite podcasts, favorite real life podcast, to try and help me be brave about this. It's funny, because I don't, I consider myself pretty opinionated, and I'm not too weird about expressing my opinions, but recording it and then putting it in a discussion board for graduate school feels a little more high stakes than usual. So I'm just going to do my best, and I want to add a little disclaimer, I don't, and I'm going to try not to do this, but I love to research things, and I love to deep dive things. So I'm going to try not to just info dump about sort of Christian nationalism and what it is and what it isn't, and all the fun things I'm going to be researching. But I also want to make sure that what I'm saying isn't about sort of like excusing or validating any kind of extremist beliefs or bigoted beliefs, but more so how can I ethically and responsibly engage in counseling with somebody who might be of those beliefs, or more generally speaking, when sort of my own personal values and emotions are tested. Let's dive into it. I have some quotes describing Christian nationalism, because it is a very specific ideology, and what's interesting is that first when I was researching this topic and trying to sort of frame the idea, I was thinking of it more as like, well, that's a religion too, and I would never be judgmental or try and impose my, you know, agnostic or atheist or whatever values on somebody who believed in something else, in some other religion, in some other spirituality, and I still wouldn't, because it's not the religious part of this, it's the political part of this, and so I think what I've come to is that I am going to find it challenging to fully emphasize or authentically connect, or I'm not quite sure how to phrase it, but with people who are super conservative, and so anyway, I'm going to find some of these good definitions that I have found for what Christian nationalism is. So this is from, what I read is, there's a book by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry from 2020 that's called Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States, and that's sort of like the, that's like the book that you would want to read, right? Like, that's the book that's out there on this topic as it stands right now. So Perry and Whitehead describe in their book, they, there's a couple good quotes that I found, but one of them is, this is Christian nationalism, Christianity co-opted in the service of ethno- national power and separation. That is page 143 from the book. So some further descriptions, Christian nationalism favors boundaries of all sorts, ideological ones that determine who counts as a real American, and physical ones such as Trump's proposed border wall with Mexico. That is from a book review of Whitehead and Perry, and that is by Katie Gaddini from the Social Research Institute at University College London. This is from, this is actually probably a good transition, this is from a study by Laura Upeniax called Do Beliefs in Christian Nationalism Predict Mental Health Problems? The Role of Religious Non-Involvement. Here's her description of Christian nationalism. Central to Christian nationalism beliefs is the fear of the other, including immigrants, racial minorities, and homosexuals, as well as great anxiety about what will happen to America in the future if Christian values are not privileged. That is page two of her article. And this is sort of where, it was actually reading this article that sort of got me to understand that this is not a spiritual, this isn't a question of spirituality for me. So here are, and this is again from Upeniax's article, here are some stats. And I'll be saying the sources right afterwards because she's cited them in text, all the different places where she's found this lovely collection of stats. So, stronger beliefs in Christian nationalism are linked to opposition to interracial families, Perry and Whitehead, 2015. The denial of police brutality toward African-Americans Whitehead and Davis, 2019. Relative political tolerance for racists, Davis and Perry, 2021. Negative attitudes about immigrants, Shurkat and Lehman, 2018, especially Muslims, Schroedl and Gaddy, 2015. Less support for gender equality and gay rights, Whitehead and Perry, 2015. And attitudes opposing economic regulations and welfare. So, it's not the religion. It's the way that it is being co-opted, right? It's the way that it's being used as an excuse to privilege one very specific type of person over all other people. So, I feel like I could just go on and on about what it is, and I shouldn't, because I said that I wouldn't. I think what I should probably move on to is what I think is the most important thing that we need to talk about. And I'm not going to What I should probably move on to is the sort of ethical guidelines according to the ACA, the American Counseling Association, 2014 Code of Ethics, according to the MSJCC, so RATS and Colleagues, 2016. Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies. Thank you, notes. And also ASERVIC, I think is how you say it, which is an organization, the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling. Okay, so obviously very relevant to spirituality and religion in the context of counseling would be that organization. And they do have a specific framework about spiritual and religious best practices. Okay, so starting with the ACA. Oops, that's not what I meant to do. Podcast where I think of myself. Here we go. So I think, you know, because the ACA Code of Ethics, especially now, it is just sort of very clear about culturally competent care, being ethical care, and how you're not competent if you are not practicing with cultural competence. So really, I mean, the whole Code of Ethics is applicable here. But I think the big one is standard A4B, personal values. Quote, counselors are aware of and avoid imposing their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees, and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values on the clients, especially when the counselor's values are inconsistent with the client's goals or are discriminatory in nature. That's from page five. The Acerbic Task Force Spiritual and Religious Best Practices, which is a document from 2025, so super recent. This is the most updated version of it, obviously. Describe their framework for, like, this is basically an update to their competencies. They describe their framework as the Waze paradigm, which is cool. So accessing the ongoing work of growth in these areas. Ways of being. Highlights best practices that call for counselor self-awareness of both one's own personal beliefs and one's reaction to, slash, engagement with beliefs of the people we work with. Ways of understanding. Highlights best practices that focus on comprehension of concepts pertaining to spirituality, religion, and varying beliefs with additional focus on the assessment and conceptualization of these concepts in the lives of people with whom we work. And ways of intervening, which highlights best practices that focus on communication and application of the ways of being and understanding into the treatment and clinical work of counseling. That's on page one. It's from the preamble of the document. So when I look at that and when I think about, okay, so which parts of this are still hard for me and which parts of this do I feel like, okay, I don't feel too challenged. The part is, it's funny because it's not a cognitive problem that I'm having. It is a completely affective reaction that I'm dealing with. And the best practices describe this as moral incongruence, which I really appreciated. So the mismatch is the problem. And it's not something that I can cognitively overcome because there isn't any sort of, I don't know, like knowledge or like logic or rationale that's going to get me to suddenly like, whoop, now I understand. Now I understand why you hate people, right? That's not, I don't think I'm going to get there first. I think emotional reactions need to happen first before I can even access that part of my brain that's going to be like, okay, and now I'm ready to try and understand you further. And I've come to this conclusion because I feel like I've tried to learn a lot about this and tried to sort of conceptualize it and intellectualize it. And I think I'm making myself angrier instead of the other way around. So I think it's not that I'm going to convince myself to sort of change my mind so much as where I need to start is finding a way to do something after the noticing of the ways that I viscerally react to this kind of stuff farther. The first step I need to take is observing what it feels like to react to it, looking at where exactly is it coming from? What is it really about, right? Is this about you going to church? No, this is about politics. This is about politics. Anyway, so noticing and being aware, step one, okay, I have that. The next step that I need to address would be like actually doing something about it instead of just letting myself rage out and only talking about this kind of thing with other people who agree with me because it's safe that way. What am I going to do with that reaction after I notice it? Because I do know that it has no place in the therapy room, right? It's unethical, as I just established. And also, you know, even recently in this class, we've very recently in this class talked about how finding congruence and openness and sort of unconditional positive regard as well as being willing to engage with spirituality espoused by the client, right, or religion espoused by the client, like being open to it, not treating it as taboo. All of this makes a lot of sense to me, but especially because in the Evans and Nelson article that we read, I think for last week from 2021, the value of adapting counseling to client spirituality and religion, evidence-based relationship factors, right? So we know that adapting our way of counseling to the client's spirituality or religion, if applicable, is good for the therapeutic relationship and thereby, you know, good for treatment outcomes, right? So why would I not want to do that? Well, probably because it's not really about the religion, right? It's about the politics. It's about the belief underneath it.