A Different Face of Faith-based Politics: Social Capital and Community Organizing in the Public Arena

The role of religion in American politics and civil society has drawn significant scholarly focus, but most of the recent attention has fallen on the religious right’s political influence and, more recently, on new initiatives to broaden the channeling of social service funding through faithbased organizations. These are important issues, but they exclude another historically important face of religiously-grounded public engagement: religious pressure for deeper political and economic democracy. We examine a widespread contemporary aspect of such engagement, faith-based community organizing (FBCO), through which poor and middle-income religious congregations advance the interests of their members. We analyze data from the first national study of faith-based organizing and link that analysis to recent theoretical work on civil society and the public realm to argue that FBCO makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary democracy by forging “bridging social capital” and creating “bridging institutions” that link the civic, political, and state levels of the public sphere. A Different Face of Faith-Based Politics: Social Capital and Community Organizing in the Public Arena