The discourse on religious extremism and jihadism has stimulated deep interest in religion as a factor in social problems. So have other religion-related issues such as honour-related violence, migration and integration, and female circumcision. Given that social workers are often mentioned as pivotal actors when it comes to preventing and working long-term with extremism, radicalisation, and related issues, religion has acquired increased visibility in social work. This has reinvigorated discourse on religion within social work practice, policy and research.

This dissertation attempts to grapple with and theorise about the implications of this new visibility of religion in social work. Its starting point is an analysis of the tacit assumptions about religion revealed in interviews with practitioners in the field of preventing violent extremism and promoting democracy. Genealogical analysis then contextualises these tacit, secular assumptions in a historical, philosophical and theological setting, so denaturalising them. This work clears the way for developing a new and innovative path that holds promise for more productive work in relation to religious social problems.

The main argument in this dissertation is that a secularist concept of religion falls short when doing social work with religious citizens. This is because a secularist concept of religion regards religion either as a set of doctrines or teachings or as purely subjective and emotional. Practitioners who take the former position often try to disprove specific doctrines, as if doctrines produce religious extremists. Practitioners who adopt the latter position try to change the inner inclinations of the subjects from, say, an extremist disposition to a democratic one, or from radical Islam to ‘mainstream’ Islam. Both approaches are inadequate because by depriving religion of its bodily and institutional setting, religion is reduced solely to its intellectual or emotional elements, while overlooking its practical, social, institutional and embodied aspects.

The alternative conceptualisation of religion proposed in this dissertation is rooted in phenomenology. If religion is conceived of as a horizon of meaning that precedes and supersedes individual choice and preference, while simultaneously being construed as contextual and open to reinterpretation, encounters between social workers and religious clients can be guided by openness, interest and curiosity, even reconciliation. Change could, then, be achieved from within the clients’ lifeworld, rather than through confrontation and the advocating of drastic alternatives to their present lifeworld. Such an approach to social work with religious clients is likely to be more successful than one rooted in a much narrower understandings of religion.

This paper addresses the expansion of risk practices through a case study of a government led project in Sweden purposed to develop a method to include social events in mandatory risk practices. Social heterogeneity was to be transformed into straightforward causality in order to turn the social into a manageable object. In this regard, the project was quite successful. By inviting social scientists into the process, otherwise often marginalized within risk practice, causality and quantifiable risk factors could be established and the model became a rigorous and legitimate scientific model. Although experts were granted significant autonomy and became experts far beyond their own area of expertise, the success of the model lies rather in allowing experts authority within confined boundaries. Grand narratives and critical perspectives are disregarded as too abstract and if social scientists are to infuse aspects of social critique they must adapt to these circumstances: they must become instrumentalists.