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Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers attempting to recruit Spanish speakers throughout a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights, this paper explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. I argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, activists who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.

This chapter offers a speculative essay regarding how religion may foster intellectual humility in public life, drawing on case studies from faith-based community organizing in the United States. and liberation theology in Latin America. Despite a plethora of religious teaching about the virtue of humility across a variety of traditions, I do not think there is anything inherent in religious belief – in any tradition – that predisposes believers toward authentic humility in their personal or public lives. I argue instead that religious conviction – when embodied in particular kinds of religious practice – does help drive us toward the balance of confidence and intellectual humility required for vigorous engagement in democratic public life. My argument draws on the concept of focal practices and insights from philosophy, theology, and social theory as I consider religious practices, religious conversion, and the nature of human passions as they relate to democratic life.

Intellectual humility and religious conviction are often posed as antagonistic binaries; the former associated with science, reason, inclusive universality, and liberal secularism, the latter with superstition, dogma, exclusive particularity, and rigid traditionalism. Despite popular images of white American evangelicals as the embodied antithesis of intellectual humility, responsiveness to facts, and openness to the other, this article demonstrates how evangelicals can and do practice intellectual humility in public life while simultaneously holding fast to particularistic religious convictions. Drawing on textual analysis and multi-site ethnographic data, it demonstrates how observed evangelical practices of transposable and segmented reflexivity map onto pluralist, domain-specific conceptualizations of intellectual humility in the philosophical and psychological literature. It further argues that the effective practice of intellectual humility in the interests of ethical democracy does not require religious actors to abandon particularistic religious reasons for universal secular ones. Rather, particularistic religious convictions can motivate effective practices of intellectual humility and thereby support democratic pluralism, inclusivity, and solidarity across difference. More broadly, it aims to challenge, or at least complicate, the widespread notion that increasing strength of religious conviction always moves in lockstep with increasing dogmatism, tribalism, and intellectual unreasonableness.

Social movement scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the process of “bridge building” in social movements – that is, the process by which activists attempt to resolve conflicts stemming from different collective identities. However, most scholars assume that social movements primarily attempt to resolve tensions among activists themselves, and thus that bridge building is a means to other ends rather than a primary goal of social movement activism. In this chapter, I challenge these assumptions through a case study of a “bridging organization” known as Bridge Builders, which sought as its primary goal to “bridge the gap between the LGBT and Christian communities” at a Christian university in Nashville, Tennessee. I highlight the mechanisms by which Bridge Builders attempted to facilitate bridge building at the university, and I argue that Bridge Builders succeeded in bridging (a) disparate institutional identities at their university, (b) “structural holes” between LGBT- and religious-identified groups at their university, and (c) oppositional personal identities among organizational members. As I discuss in the conclusion, the case of Bridge Builders has implications for literatures on bridge building in social movements, cultural and biographical consequences of social movements, and social movement strategy.

A growing interdisciplinary literature explores how people can simultaneously hold strong convictions and remain open to the possibility of learning from others with whom they disagree. This tension impacts not only knowledge development but also public discourse within a diverse and disagreeing democracy. This volume of Political Power and Social Theory considers the specific question of how religious convictions inform how people engage in democratic life, particularly across deep political divides. In this introduction, I begin by discussing how a narrow vision of religious citizens as dogmatic believers has led observers to frame religion as a concerning source of democratic distortion – encouraging too much arrogance and not enough humility. Yet this dogmatic believer narrative captures only one aspect of American religion. Juxtaposing a snapshot of dogmatic believers alongside two other snapshots of religious groups engaging in political life raises complex questions about the relationship between religious conviction, humility, and democracy in a time of deep political polarization. I argue that answering these questions requires a sociological approach that is attuned to power, context, culture, institutions, and history. At the same time, I show how attention to the tension between conviction and humility has the potential to enrich the sociological study of religion and democracy, and particularly ethnographic research across the moral/political divide.

Senegal’s history since the nineteenth century has favored collective ownership and work, whether state-run cooperatives or community-based organizations (CBOs). This chapter first examines the history of resistance to cooperatives imposed by the French colonial administration and Senegal’s independent state until 1980. The primary separate community organizations were, and are, within daaras: communities based on Islamic spiritual principles. The chapter then explores today’s CBOs, many of which are faith-based, that resist neoliberal approaches to development, again, through community-based principles. CBOs have grown within the space that state control once occupied, and have as much do with indigenous structures and faith-based principles as they do with globally recognized models of development. These foundational philosophies shape the ways people organize themselves, choose their shared goals, and elect their leaders. To discuss contemporary trends in community organization, the chapter uses ethnographic examples from two present-day communities, one a faith-based daara and the other a five-village CBO. This history and contemporary examples show that locally grown organizations resist easy definitions of colonial, state, or neoliberal development, and take control over the ways they organize their communities.

This chapter, based on a keynote presentation at the Moana: Water of Life conference at the University of Lincoln, UK, in August 2019, explores how individual people of faith, and faith actors, engage with the confluence of member states, UN entities, and civil society that make up the UN system, in order to address climate change and water, informally and formally. Interviews with faith-based organizations, UN entities, and UN ambassadors revealed lessons learned on the successes, challenges, and obstacles in engaging with the UN on climate action. Drawing from this research, the author revealed some “lessons learned” in order to respond to a key question: How can faith-based participants engage with the United Nations (UN) on climate action in smart, strategic ways in an era of climate emergency? The research aims to equip the readers with a sense of the urgency of climate action and an appreciation of their own agency and action and practical tools for using their faith in climate action with the UN.

This chapter illustrates local responses to disaster and highlights the potential role of three community-based society organizations (CBSOs) – women’s groups, youth groups, and religious groups – as risk communicators in Bandung, Indonesia. A framework is modeled for CBSOs’ risk communication process in bridging the gap between the local government and the community. A set of indicators in social, economic, and institutional resilience activities (SIERA), with a scope of 45 disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities covering three different disaster periods was developed to characterize the process of the delivery of risk information by these CBSOs through their activities at subdistrict and ward levels. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey method using the SIERA approach. Each CBSO leader in a ward was surveyed about their perceptions of these 45 ongoing SIERA activities and their risk information source and dissemination process. Statistical analysis was applied to determine the relationship between variables such as periods of disaster and types of SIERA activities and its attributing factors (location, population, and dynamic of organizations in their locale) in finding variations of risk communication activity that may function for communities. Five risk communication processes of the CBSOs are identified; when their perceptions and ongoing activities are compared, activities such as dissemination of disaster risk information, conveying early warnings to their peers, and involvement of the local government have been carried out by these CBSOs. This indicates that CBSOs’ activities already have a certain degree of risk communication embedded in the communities. The results confirm that these CBSOs, through their social networks, can become active agents of change and bridge the communication gap between government and community. Thus, CBSOs’ risk communication provides the opportunity to contribute to the overall resilience-building and disaster risk reduction as part of people-centered actions and local responses to disasters.

The understanding of the term “civil society” has been given in many references. One reference is given by the London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society (2011), and its working definition is rather illustrative. Civil society, according to them, refers to the arena of collective action around shared interests, purposes, and values. The civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors, and institutional forms, and varies in the degree of formality, autonomy, and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), professional associations, and community groups, such as women, youth, and faith-based or religious organizations. Those groups are seen as the nearest to the grassroots level and therefore could best accommodate their aspirations and needs. These groups are referred hereafter as Civil Society Organizations (CSOs).