Congregations and civil society: A double-edged connection

Journal of Church and State

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 425-454

  Baggett, Jerome P ^a  

^a Jesuit School of Theology ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846784635     PISSN: 0021969X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jcs/44.3.425     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996)
2. Max Weber, "Deutscher Sociologentag," "German Sociology Today," Verhandlungen 1 (1911): 53
3. Arthur M. Schlesinger, "Biography of a Nation of Joiners," American Historical Review 50 (October 1944): 1-25
4. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)
5. Cited in Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 278
6. Everett Carll Ladd, The Ladd Report (New York: Free Press, 1999), 136
7. See Ralph M. Kramer, Voluntary Agencies in the Welfare State (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 19Sl), 72-76
8. Lester M. Salamon, America's Nonprofit Sector: A Primer (New York: The Foundation Center, 1999), 22
9. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1973)
10. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Decline of Radicalism (New York: Random House, 1963)
11. Quoted and elaborated upon by Sidney E. Mead in "A Nation with the Soul of a Church," Church History 36 (September 1967): 1-22
12. America's Religious Congregations: Measuring Their Contribution to Society (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 2000), 3
13. James E. Curtis, Edward G. Grabb, and Douglas E. Baer, "Voluntary Association Membership in Fifteen Countries: A Comparative Analysis," American Sociological Review 57 (April 1992): 139-52
14. See also Andrew Greeley, "The Other Civic America: Religion and Social Capital," The American Prospect 32 (May-June 1997): 68-73
15. Virginia A. Hodgkinson, et al., Giving and Volunteering in the United States 2001 (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 2001)
16. See also, Religion, the Independent Sector, and American Culture, eds. Conrad Cherry and Rowland A. Sherrill (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1992)
17. R. Stephen Warner, "Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States," American Journal of Sociology 98 (March 1993): 1044-93
18. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark make this argument for the American context quite brilliantly in their The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992)
19. For the classic statement of this old paradigm argument about pluralism being the bête noire for religious conviction, see Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967)
20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 295
21. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 27
22. E. J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Touchstone, 1992)
23. See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992)
24. and Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995)
25. See Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Anchor Books, 1993)
26. For a similar argument, see Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 1984)
27. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1985)
28. Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
29. Robert Wuthnow, God and Mammon in America (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 197
30. Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Murray S. Weitzman, and Arthru D. Kirsch, "From Commitment to Action: How Religious Involvement Affects Giving and Volunteering," in Faith and Philanthropy in America, eds. Robert Wuthnow and Virginia A. Hodgkinson (San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 93
31. AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, Giving USA: 1996 (New York: AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, 1996)
32. For a discussion of these figures, see John McCarthy and Jim Castelli, Religion-Sponsored Social Service Providers: The Not-So-Independent Sector (Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, 199S), 19-21
33. Ronald Thiemann, Samuel Herring, and Betsy Perabo, "Responsibilities and Risks for Faith-Based Organizations," in Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Welfare, eds. Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, and Ronald Thiemann (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 56
34. Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Murray S. Weitzman, Arthur D. Kirsch, Stephen M. Noga, and Heather A Gorski, From Belief to Commitment: The Community Service Activities and Finances of Religious Congregations in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1993)
35. Cited in Martin E. Marty and Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation about Religion's Role in Our Shared Life (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 9
36. See Mark Chaves, Mary Ellen Konieczny, Kraig Beyerlein, and Emily Barman, "The National Congregations Study: Background, Methods, and Selected Results," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38 (December 1999): 458-76
37. Carl S. Dudley and David A. Roozen, Faith Communities Today: A Report on Religion in the United States Today (Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 2001), 46
38. Tobi Jennifer Printz, "Faith-Based Service Providers in the Nation's Capital: Can They Do More?" (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1998), 3
39. McCarthy and Castelli, Religion-Sponsored Social Service Providers, 14
40. Mark Chaves, "Congregations' Social Service Activities" (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1999), 3
41. Jane J. Mansbridge, "On the Relation of Altruism and Self-Interest" in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Jane J. Mansbridge (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 133-43
42. According to Lester M. Salamon, less than 30 percent of all human service agencies in the United States serve clienteles comprised of a majority of poor people. See his Partners in Public Service: Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
43. Rebecca Blank, It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 308
44. Joseph P. Shapiro, "The Faith Factor: Can Churches Cure America's Social Ills?" U.S. News and World Report 121 (9 September 1996): 46-54
45. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 318
46. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1975)
47. James F. Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structures (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1987), 5
48. Gary Alan Fine, With the Boys: Little League Baseball and Preadolescent Culture (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
49. I am indebted to Penny Edgell Becker's very instructive appropriation of Fine's "idioculture" concept in her Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
50. See especially Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967)
51. as well as his Collected Papers, vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962)
52. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4
53. See Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986)
54. See Paul J. DiMaggio, "Constructing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S. Art Museums, 1920-1940," in The New lnstitutionalism in Organizational Analysis, eds. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 267-92
55. Becker, Congregations and Conflict, 206-36
56. For an earlier and equally instructive study of how "mission orientations" (a type of idioculture) affect congregants' community involvement, see David A. Roozen, William McKinney, and Jackson W. Carroll's study of congregations in Hartford, Connecticut, Varieties of Religious Presence: Mission in Public Life (Boston, Mass.: Pilgrim Press, 1984)
57. Organizing Religious Work Project, "Doing Good in American Communities: Congregations and Service Organizations Working Together" (Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 2001), 24
58. Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action," American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273-86
59. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart
60. See Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87-125
61. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 17
62. James Gee, "The Narrativization of Experience in the Oral Style," Journal of Education 167: 9-35
63. Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion, 161
64. See, for example, Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass (San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass, 1997)
65. Margaret Harris, "Quiet Care: Welfare Work and Religious Congregations," Journal of Social Policy (1995): 53-71
66. Michael R. Welch, David C. Leege, Kenneth D. Wald, and Lyman A. Kellstedt, "Are the Sheep Hearing the Shepherds? Cue Perceptions, Congregational Responses, and Political Communication Processes" in Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics, eds. David C. Leege and Lyman A. Kellstedt (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 235-54
67. R. Stephen Warner, "The Place of the Congregation in the Contemporary American Religious Configuration," in American Congregations, volume 2: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, eds. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 54-99
68. N. J. Demerath and Rhys H. Williams, A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992)
69. See Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney's chapter entitled "The New Voluntarism," in their American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 40-71
70. Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 1-18
71. George Gallup, Jr., The Unchurched American - 10 Years Later (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1988)
72. See the discussion of the "caucus church" in Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Svvidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 202-06
73. William V. D'Antonio, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Ruth A. Wallace, Laity, American and Catholic: Transforming the Church (Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed and Ward, 1996), 78
74. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1967)
75. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1991)
76. See also Ram A. Cnaan, Amy Kasternakis, and Robert J. Wineburg, "Religious People, Religious Congregations, and Volunteerism in Human Services: Is There a Link?" Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 22 (Spring 1993): 33-51
77. In addition to human and social capital, congregations also provide people with what Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital" but what, in this essay, I have framed analogously as the symbolic codes and rituals comprising civic idiocultures. See Pierre Borudieu, "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241-58
78. Sydney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 312
79. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), 108-42
80. James S. Coleman, "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95-S120
81. Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Murray S. Weitzman, Giving and Volunteering in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1994), 77-79
82. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans, and ed., Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 326
83. Survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Pew Research Center (February 1997), cited in Ladd, The Ladd Report, 116
84. Nancy Tatom Ammerman, et al., Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 366-67
85. Organizing Religious Work Project, "Doing Good in American Communities: Congregations and Service Organizations Working Together," 4
86. Verba, Schlozman and Brady, Voice and Equality, 373
87. See also Steven A. Peterson, "Church Participation and Political Participation: The Spillover Effect," American Politics Quarterly 20 (January 1992): 123-39
88. Hodgkinson and Weitzman, Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 10. Hodgkinson, Weitzman and their colleagues at the Independent Sector discovered that 21 percent of the 54 percent of the American population who were not asked to volunteer their time in 1993 actually volunteered anyway; meanwhile, among the 44 percent who were asked, a full 82 percent agreed and did volunteer
89. John A. Coleman, S.J., "Public Religion and Religion in Public," Wake Forest Law Review 36 (Summer 2001): 288
90. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 22-24
91. John Wilson and Thomas Janoski, "The Contribution of Religion to Volunteer Work," Sociology of Religion 56 (1995): 137-52
92. Robert Wuthnow, "Mobilizing Civic Engagement: The Changing Impact of Religious Involvement," in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, eds. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999), 331-63
93. Michael W. Foley and Bob Edwards, "Escape from Politics? Social Theory and the Social Capital Debate," American Behavioral Scientist 40 (Marcli/April 1997): 550-61
94. Kenneth D. Wald, Lyman A. Kellstedt, and David C. Leege, "Church Involvement and Political Behavior," in Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics, eds. David C. Leege and Lyman A. Kellstedt (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 121-38
95. Richard L. Wood, "Social Capital and Political Culture: God Meets Politics in the Inner City," American Behavioral Scientist 40 (March/April 1997): 595-605
96. Nathan Teske, Political Activists in America: The Identity Construction Model of Political Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59
97. Hilary Cunningham cited a similar proportion of social movement activists using religious language to express their motivations in her God and Caesar at the Rio Grande: Sanctuary and the Politics of Religion (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)
98. Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry A. Brady, "Civic Participation and the Equality Problem," in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, eds. Skocpol and Fiorina (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999), 427-59
99. Andrew Kohut, John C. Green, Scott Keeter, and Robert C. Toth, The Diminishing Divide: Religion's Changing Role in American Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), 60
100. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. Thomas P. Peardon (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952), 54
101. Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978), 6
102. George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People's Religion: American Faith in the 90's (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 253
103. Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America's Fragmented Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5
104. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper, [1887] 1963)
105. Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1-24
106. Claude S. Fischer, "Ambivalent Communities: How Americans Understand Their Localities," in America at Century's End, ed. Alan Wolfe (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991), 79-90
107. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962)
108. Wuthnow, Loose Connections, 66-68
109. Quoted in Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 117
110. For a discussion of patterns or "moral minimalism," see M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
111. Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New Quest for Community (New York: Free Press, 1994), 45
112. Michael C. Dawson, "A Black Counterpublic? Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics," Public Culture 7 (1994): 195-223
113. See C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990)
114. Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1992)
115. Fredrick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
116. See R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998)
117. Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2000)
118. Kimon Howland Sargeant, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 13
119. See also Charles Trueheart, "Welcome to the Next Church," Atlantic Monthly (August 1996): 37-58
120. The Connecticut Mutual Life Report on American Values: The Impact of Belief (New York: Research and Forecasts, 1981)
121. cited in Robert Wuthnow, Christianity in the Twenty-first Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34-35
122. See my book, Habitat for Humanity: Building Private Homes, Building Public Religion (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2001)
123. and, more generally, Wesley K. Willmer, J. David Schmidt and Martyn Smith, The Prospering Parachurch: Enlarging the Boundaries of God's Kingdom (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1999)
124. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)
125. Ram A. Cnaan, with Robert J. Wineburg and Stephanie C. Boddie, The Newer Deal: Social Work and Religion in Partnership (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), ch. 10 and 11
126. John B. Orr, Don E. Miller, W. C. Roof and J. G. Melton, Politics of the Spirit: Religion and Multiethnicity in Los Angeles (Los Angeles, Calif: University of Southern California Press, 1994)
127. John B. Orr, Los Angeles Religion: A Civic Profile (Los Angeles, Calif. University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture, 1998), 3
128. Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey, 352-53
129. Quoted in Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 58
130. Robert E. Park, "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment," in The City, eds. Robert E. Park and E. W. Burgess (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 40
131. Sargeant, Seeker Churches, 54
132. Warner, "The Place of the Congregation in the Contemporary American Religious Configuration," 73-82
133. Morris Janowitz, The Community Press in an Urban Setting, 2nd ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1967)
134. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 19S4), ch. 7
135. Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 122