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This chapter introduces the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions, an original survey of all faith-based community organizing coalitions in the U.S.. This study, which achieved a 94% response rate, offers the first comprehensive data on this field; in combination with a more limited earlier study, it allows assessment of changes between 1999 and 2011. The movement has grown substantially on a foundation of mobilizing structures that have expanded and diversified. Three developments helped to catalyze this growth: a more ambitious political imagination that now informs the work of some sectors of the movement; new collaborative efforts at the local, state, and national levels that are forming emergent ‘federated structures’ which increase the field’s capacity to impact public life; and new financial resources and organizing talent that have entered the field. Together, these factors have contributed to the emergence of new organizational cultures, a heightened public presence, and new political sophistication across some sectors of faith-based community organizing. But the resulting new strategic capacity has spread unevenly across the movement; deeper innovation will be necessary if faith-based community organizing is to play a crucial role in shaping the future of American democracy.

The success of faith-based community organizing in Hispanic churches may be due partly to the fact that contemporary statements of this work were first pioneered in Hispanic barrios in San Antonio, Texas, largely by Hispanic organizers, clergy, and nuns like Father Virgilio Elizondo, MACC, and Ernesto Cortés. This chapter argues for the democratic promise of this kind of political organizing by Hispanics. First, it describes faith-based community organizing generally, including its origins and contemporary contours. Second, it notes current levels of Hispanic engagement in this work, both as participants and as professional staff. Third, it analyzes the movement's future democratic potential for Latinos. The chapter concludes by noting three kinds of challenges posed by this discussion: challenges to the literature on Hispanic civic engagement; challenges to the field of faith-based community organizing; and challenges to Hispanic youth and all those who work with them.

This chapter draws on data from the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions to analyze a fundamental dimension of diversity in the national field of faith-based community organizing: the racial/ethnic diversity of its member institutions. Member institutions are primarily religious congregations from a variety of religious traditions, but about a fifth of member institutions are public schools, labor unions, faith-based organizations, neighborhood associations, and other non-congregations. National data show that the field embodies racial/ethnic diversity far beyond that of U.S. congregations, counties, public schools, or society as a whole, and with white, black, Hispanic, and multiracial institutions being well represented. However, by some measures racial/ethnic diversity in the field actually fell between 1999 and 2011. The chapter argues that an important strategic strength of the field lies in the fact that it achieves high racial/ethnic diversity by incorporating both institutions that are predominantly ‘of color’ and predominantly white institutions. The chapter locates the origins of high racial/ethnic diversity in particular strategic and institutional dynamics within the field; discusses the reasons for its changing diversity profile; and highlights how its handling of racial/ethnic diversity contrasts with its handling of religious diversity.

Three demons bedevil contemporary American democracy in the domestic realm: economic inequality, the paralysis of federal policy-making, and racial injustice. American politics in the years ahead will be driven by the struggle over whether to address these demons, and how best to do so. In the background of that struggle lies a related tension: that between universalist and multiculturalist democratic ideals. The Introduction argues that faith-based community organizing represents a critical case for studying this tension between democratic ideals within a movement dedicated to fighting economic inequality, policy paralysis, and racial injustice – in part because this movement now has the scale and strategic ambition to actually make a difference in these fights. But doing so will require the wider spread and deeper critical appropriation of recent strategic innovations in the field. Faith-based community organizing also reveals religion’s capacity to help bridge universalist and multiculturalist visions of democratic life, and thus offers insight into another contemporary democratic dilemma: the role of religion in public life.

This chapter draws on data from the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions to analyze the individual-level diversity among two sets of key leaders within faith-based community organizing: professional staff and governing board members. The chapter focuses on racial and ethnic diversity, but also examines socioeconomic, gender, and age diversity. The high level of diversity within the field’s leadership makes this social movement unusual in American civil society, and its impressive racial/ethnic diversity in particular, combined with its historic emphasis on universalist democratic ideals, makes faith-based community organizing a suitable case for analyzing the dynamics between universalist and multicultural commitments in grassroots democratic movements. The chapter also argues that retaining professional staff embodying high levels of racial/ethnic diversity represents a critical challenge for the field, and examines the practices through which faith-based community organizing coalitions and networks have sought to retain diverse organizing staff. Those practices include paying professional salaries; engaging issues of racial equity internally and externally; building shared meaning within their organizational cultures; and offering professional development opportunities, including some focused on racial equity.

This chapter summarizes how faith-based community organizing challenges three key demons of contemporary American democracy: rising economic inequality, racial injustice, and the continuing paralysis of federal policy-making. It also summarizes this book’s analysis of the dynamics through which some sectors of faith-based community organizing have come to embrace an explicit focus on racial equity work, and of the tension between universalist and multiculturalist democratic ideals as they play out in that work. Religious culture and participants’ diverse spiritual commitments have been central in integrating commitments to equality, effective policy-making, and racial equity within a coherent organizational culture; spiritual and political reflexivity have been particularly crucial in sustaining organizational coherence through the resulting challenges of organizational transformation. The chapter also analyzes the role of those challenges – and of the creativity they demand in response – in generating strategic innovation, which underlies much of the field’s recent transformation. The chapter closes by reprising the theoretical stakes within the book’s analysis, arguing that a certain kind of moral and political universalism underlies the success of faith-based organizing. Faith-based community organizing thus offers important lessons for the historic struggle for ethical democracy in America.

This chapter presents the concept of prophetic redemption—expanding the boundaries of democratic inclusion to facilitate the social integration of those furthest on the margins—in relation to the formerly incarcerated. It frames the two cases in this book—the Community Renewal Society’s FORCE project and the LA Voice/Homeboy Industries–affiliated Homeboys Local Organizing Committee—as examples of prophetic redemption. It presents the book’s argument: that faith-based community organizing (for and among the formerly incarcerated) fosters pastoral and insurgent displays of prophetic redemption; that personal reform is an essential component of prophetic redemption; and that prophetic redemption produces returning citizenship. It sketches the historical origins and development of prophetic redemption in twentieth-century America in relation to new abolitionism, the Chicago School of sociology, the rise of the punitive state, the rise of Alinsky-style community organizing, and the racial and religious diversification of post-civil-rights community organizing efforts. It ends with a description of the book’s subjects (former gang members and the formerly incarcerated), a summary of how the author built relationships with his subjects, and an overview of the book’s goals and aims.

This brief introduction to the second half of A Shared Future discusses the concept of ‘ethical democracy’ and links it to the following chapters’ case study of organizational transformation in the PICO National Network. It also explains why the work of faith-based community organizing might matter in large scale societal terms in the years ahead.

This chapter builds upon a gap in the field of criminology by investigating how CRS and LA Voice, as umbrella faith-based community organizing groups, shaped the social integration of former gang members and the formerly incarcerated. CRS and LA Voice’s contrasting religious traditions shaped how they facilitated members’ participation in community organizing. LA Voice leaders drew from Catholic theologies and practices and a relationship-based model of community organizing to foster members’ civic participation. This approach is termed pastoral prophetic redemption. By contrast, CRS leaders drew from the historical Black Protestant church’s theologies and practices and an issue-based model of community organizing to foster members’ civic participation. This approach is termed insurgent prophetic redemption.

This unconventional conclusion considers the broad struggle for ethical democracy in the contemporary world. The chapter draws on the work of Jurgen Habermas to argue that constructing ethical democracy will require re-anchoring democratic life within society. Contemporary democratic dilemmas arise due to the gargantuan growth of the ‘Systems’ of Politics and the Economy. Absent adequate structures of accountability to hold these Systems in service to society, they dominate and ‘colonize’ society, pathologically distorting human communities via excessive pressures rooted in money and power. Existing social theory suggests that social movements and the legal system hold the key to reversing this distortion. But this assumption underestimates how social movements and the legal system are themselves colonized and distorted. The struggle for ethical democracy must draw not only on social movements and the law, but also on: i) moral/ethical anchoring in secular and religious traditions; and ii) alliances with individual reformists in the Systems whose worldviews and commitments have been shaped by such ethical anchoring. By ‘bootstrapping’ democracy to raise the capacity of human communities to hold the political and economic systems in service to society, we can gradually move toward something closer to ethical democracy.

Brad R. Fulton and Richard L. Wood’s chapter uses a national dataset of faith-based community organizing (FBCO) coalitions to provide an overview of an organizational field that is central to the progressive religious activist field as a whole. The chapter focuses on the high levels of religious diversity, racial/ethnic diversity, and socioeconomic diversity of the FBCO field, and argues that these groups draw on shared religious commitments to bridge their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic divides. Finally, they argue that in addition to the sheer scale of mobilization enabled by the FBCO infrastructure, this diversity constitutes faith-based organizing’s most significant source of power and most important credential for legitimacy in the public arena.

Kristin Geraty’s chapter focuses on a faith-based community organizing coalition that mobilizes congregations for progressive action around issues of fair housing, education, and workforce development, but in which many participants are registered Republicans and consider themselves theological conservatives. The chapter shows how the coalition struggles to construct a call to action that resonates with members, and to negotiate how their religious identity is communicated and interpreted in an affluent, suburban environment where the intersection of religion and politics is almost always conservative.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to Interfaith, a progressive faith-based community organizing coalition, and the Patriots, a conservative Tea Party group. It depicts members of both groups struggling to move forward in the wake of the Great Recession, and as a result choosing to become more active citizens capable of inserting their voices, values, and knowledge into the policy debates that impact their lives. It then situates the groups’ efforts in the historical contexts of changing conceptions of good citizenship and rising societal secularization, enabling readers to discern previously unrecognized convergences and divergences in how these groups engage in active citizenship. Finally, it describes the research methods that were used to study these groups and provides an overview of the key arguments and contributions of the book.

This chapter explores black religious leaders’ perspectives and histories regarding different types of civic organizations and how they matter for their contemporary mobilization efforts. In three Ohio cities where we interviewed leaders in 2012, black-centered civic organizations were, for the most part, anemic and did not have wide appeal as vehicles for action among black religious leaders. Faith-based community organizing offered an alternative, and there was significant involvement among the people we interviewed. However, there was not consistent investment or satisfaction with the results of organizing with these organizations.