| Those new to these posts may want to read Part I and Part II of "What is Organizing?" Since there seems to be interest, I'm planning on continuing this series--there is lots more to talk about--although I'll try to limit myself to one a week, given my other commitments.
Why churches?
Across the nation, especially in the impoverished areas of our central cities, old forms of "community" have broken down. The ethnic and neighborhood organizations of the early part of the 20th Century have largely disintegrated as a result of concentrated poverty, the invasion of the justice system, generalized fear, and more. The organizations that remain mostly provide services, usually directed by members of the upper-middle-class with few real connections to the inner city.
While a range of scholars have shown that Putnam's well-known arguments that American no longer belong to community organizations in Bowling Alone were overblown, the vibrant forms of "community" that critics often point to, like 12-step groups and volunteer organizations, are quite different from earlier ones. Perhaps most importantly, they tend not to develop long-term bonds of mutual support and trust or a durable sense of belonging.
The one major exception is churches. Churches provide an already existing group of people held together by a set of common beliefs and a shared commitment to each other and to a transcendent set of values.
Today, if you don't use churches to organize, you are often forced to organize people one by one. But, as organizers for ACORN, the only national group that tries to do this, will tell you, this approach is incredibly time intensive. It requires you to knock on thousands of doors. In communities without much "community" you have to create a sense of "us" that does not exist before you arrive. And you have to constantly work to maintain this sense of shared responsibility. A fallow period without much action can easily result in the dispersal of those you have worked so hard to bring together.
Churches exist before they engage in social action, and they keep existing even when there is no social action going on. Churches have recognized leaders already, and there are people there who aren't leaders but who have the potential to be and who are recognized already as "members." They represent an ongoing pool of people who can be trained and mobilized.
Right-wing religious organizations often seem to march in lockstep in response to a shared set of religious dogmas. In contrast, because progressive groups are usually made up of a diverse group of Christian (and frequently non-Christian) denominations, there is no place for religious dogma. Instead, these organizations argue that throughout our different traditions run a common set of social values.
The aim in progressive groups is not to push religion. The aim is to push social change in response to religious commitments. In fact, while every meeting in a congregation-based community organizing group generally begins and ends with a prayer, each prayer usually comes from a different perspective. For example, in the congregational group I work with that I'll call CHANGE, a recent organization-wide public meeting began with a prayer by a Lutheran minister and ended with a reading (partly in Hebrew) from the Torah by a rabbi. (Some of these congregation-based organizations also include non-religious groups like unions, although CHANGE does not.)
Race and Class Segregation in Churches
Churches in America are extremely segregated by race and class. Church segregation is less a result of geographical boundaries than of the character of individual churches, however. For our purposes, it is helpful to focus on two groups of churches: mostly middle-class, mid-sized mainline congregations and (especially among African Americans) usually smaller, mostly working-class Pentecostal/Holiness or "charismatic" (often storefront) churches. Much more could be said about "mega-churches," often charismatic churches that attract much more well-to-do clientele, but that's for some other time.
In general, progressive congregational organizing groups are made up almost entirely of "mainline" churches.
Why?
First, from a religious standpoint mainline churches are more likely to see broad, mundane social concerns as a part of their responsibility as (mostly) Christian people. In America, it is in these churches that different forms of a "liberation theology" or "social gospel" focused on issues like educational reform makes the most coherent sense. (In fact, a study showed that the class and education level of the pastor and of the congregation is directly related to the likelihood that a congregation will participate in traditional social justice activities.)
In the Pentecostal/Holiness tradition, the focus seems to be more on engaging directly with the holy spirit in one's life. These churches are "in the world but not of it." It is important to emphasize, as McRoberts and Sanders do, that the sanctified tradition is in many ways just as interested in social justice and in the creation of an egalitarian society as are mainline churches. But they seem more likely to focus on engaging individuals in religious transformation and on direct services more directly related to religious actualization as opposed to concrete action for systematic social change. It is also usually the case that these churches have fewer resources to expend on non-church functions. (As with everything in society, these are tendencies, not absolute rules.)
Second, the dominance of a middle-class discourse is, to some extent, a self-perpetuating phenomenon. People who "belong" in the congregational organizing group I work with, for example, speak a certain way and, despite important differences, often worship in a particular way. While progressive whites may sometimes be uncomfortable with more expressive mainline African American and other traditions, these are not as alien as the practices of sanctified churches. Even less privileged members of participating mainline congregations may feel uncomfortable in this setting. Working-class members of charismatic churches may show up, but they don't usually return. I'll talk about this more, later.
As you can see, these differences are much more complex than simple distinctions between "conservative" and "liberal" can capture.
The class segregation of congregational organizing groups is often difficult for outsiders to detect. In part this is because churches are increasingly unlikely to draw from identifiable geographic areas. Many black inner-city churches, for example, have mostly middle-class congregations that live nowhere near the actual church, just as there are white congregations (think of Catholics tied to historic churches) who worship in areas where the racial and class composition has shifted. Thus, the location of a church often says little or nothing about especially the class make-up of congregants.
Even participants can seem unaware of the extent to which these organizations sometimes represent a fairly narrow segment of the population. At an Education Committee meeting of CHANGE earlier this year, for example, an African American reverend suggested that we survey members of our congregations to get a sense of the kind of challenges parents face in the public schools. I had to tell him that we'd actually tried this a few years ago (with the same intention), and had discovered that almost none of the congregation members surveyed had children attending the most struggling schools in the city. Apparently, most members have enough cultural and social capital to negotiate the intricacies of the schooling bureaucracy to get their kids in better schools.
In my limited experience, then, congregational groups represent a range of segments of the middle-class, including relatively few of those who are actually suffering the most from the effects of poverty and geographical segregation. I know this is less true in other areas--in poor catholic parishes in Texas, for example (see Warren). Interestingly, these class issues are rarely noted, in my experience, in writings about congregational organizing.
Of course, this raises important questions about how much even congregational organizing groups based mostly in the inner city actually "represent" these communities.
There is more to be said about the problematic ways class and race intersect in congregation-based community organizing. In a later post I will examine how class issues can intersect with issues of race to produce destructive patterns of racial exclusion in congregational groups. I'd appreciate any corrections-especially on my limited knowledge of religious sociology.
UPDATE: I'll talk more about class, later. But I want to add, here, that being middle class in an inner-city African American church can (but doesn't always) mean something different than it means in more privileged white churches. So when "middle-class" whites and "middle-class" blacks get together, there may already be inequality across class in addition to race. See Mary Patillo's important work on the black middle class in the inner-city if you really want to understand this growing tension, especially as oppression in America makes it increasingly difficult for oppressed people of color to transfer their class status to their children. This complicates the issue I'm talking about here even more. |
