The role of religion and spirituality in mental health is almost always controversial; most evaluations dismiss or avoid it.  This may be in part due to the fact that much of mental health functioning comes from or through federal, state or local government organizations and the prevailing norm in the United States is that religion be separate from government. In practical terms, this means that practitioners should be objective, not allowing their own religious or spiritual values interfere with their client’s beliefs.  It is our position that this type of relationship is neither possible nor effective.  We believe that spirituality to one’s personal experience relationship with what one believes to be the source and meaning of life.  We believe this experience to be subjective, unique or “sacred.” We therefore agree that no one should be forcibly indoctrinated into a specific way of believing.  However, our intent is to capture and include in or our evaluation work, a sense of “spirituality.”

Why is spirituality or a sense of connection to “the source of life” important in evaluation work?  We begin with the simple assumption that spirituality or a sense of relationship with “that which gives us life” is at the core of culture.  In his book the Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade (2009) professes that when anatomically modern humans left Africa some 75 to 100,000 years ago, they had already developed and took with them the beginnings of a “primordial religion” that facilitated communion with the world of the ancestors.  Using modern imaging techniques, Rozin et. al. (2008) also assert that our sense of “right and wrong” has a biological basis in our brain. He notes that years of conditioning has left us for a “need” for some kind of religion or spirituality.  We contend that whether through evolution or conditioning, people need a connection with something beyond themselves, the “sacred.” We believe that including this sacred aspect of life is critical to any understanding the effectiveness of any intervention.