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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
A survey by Independent Sector (2000) estimated that, in 1997, there were more than 353,000 religious congregations, synagogues, mosques, temples, and other places of worship in the U.S., with a collective annual budget of more than $80 billion. Despite such a ubiquitous presence from Alaska to Florida and Hawaii to Maine, these thousands of faith-based organizations only recently have attracted significant attention from anthropologists. While ethnographers have had long and storied experiences in the cross-cultural study of religious symbolism, (1) they have done little fieldwork on faith-based organizations, especially those located in urban areas. (2)
This is peculiar, since so much of what is distinctive about American religious institutions and practices has developed in urban settings. From the church steeples of New England colonial towns to the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City to the megachurches of suburban Southern California, religious experiences and urban life have developed together across the American landscape (Finke and Stark 2005; Green 1996). As Robert Orsi has written:
Religious practice and imagination thus continually rework urban landscapes that are themselves forever in upheaval. Religious practices have served as media for creating and sustaining bonds among people scattered across the city and between people in the city and others beyond its borders, and for constituting a meaningful sense of space on intersecting neighborhoods, urban, national, and global levels (1999:54).
In twenty-first century America, faith-based organizations not only are important in shaping urban spatial systems, they also have become increasingly significant as "social capital" (3) institutions. Their significance has not been lost on the rich and powerful, including the President of the United States. In one of his first Executive Orders upon assuming the presidency, President Bush created considerable controversy when he declared:
Faith-based and other community organizations are indispensable in meeting the needs of poor Americans and distressed neighborhoods.... [By this Executive Order] there is established a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives ... that will have lead responsibility ... to establish policies, priorities, and objectives for the Federal Government's comprehensive effort to enlist, equip, empower, and expand the work of faith-based and other community organizations to the extent permitted by law (President George W. Bush, EXECUTIVE ORDER, January 29, 2001).
Building on the Clinton-era policies of "charitable choices" (cf. Bartkowski and Regis 2003), Bush's presidential declaration sparked a spirited debate among scholars, politicians, and religious leaders. Whatever their political leanings, all recognized the great potential of faith-based organizations for sustaining and transforming community life. At a time when governments from the federal level to the local level are abandoning the historic social contract of The New Deal, religious institutions have come to be considered as appropriate partners for a "Newer Deal" (cf. Cnaan 1999, 2002). Some commentators have gone even further, suggesting that the future of civil society in America will depend on the role of faith-based organizations in "saving America" (cf. Smidt 2003' Wuthnow 2004).
Faith-based organizations depend upon and generate social capital to the extent that they build relationships within their communities of interest and then expand these relationships to include other individuals, associations, and agencies. For instance, when local-level community organizers trained by the Industrial Areas Foundation...
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