'Big Boston': The Impact of Community Organizing on Christian and Jewish Congregations in Boston
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Recent scholarly work has shed light on various contributions made by community based community organizing (CBCO) to civic life in the United States. Through national organizations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), local CBCO affiliates engage members in a variety of relationship- and leadership-building practices to effectively address and solve common community, regional, and statewide problems. This dissertation examines one IAF affiliate, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO). GBIO was founded in 1996 to organize across Boston's religious, racial, ethnic, class, and neighborhood lines for the public good. Versus earlier studies, the lens is here reversed; the object of this study is to understand how congregations qua religious institutions are impacted by and interpret democratic practice.
Based on participant observation, in-depth ethnographic conversations, and an examination of written documents, this study examines Jewish and Christian congregations as they engage in the campaign to bring progressive healthcare reform to Massachusetts. Its interests are interdisciplinary, drawing on disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Its grounding discipline is Religious Studies, with a focus on lived religion, understood as an approach that locates religious creativity within culture. It engages current sociological scholarship in its sub-fields of religion, culture, and social movements. Finally, it examines political science scholarship interested in civic engagement and social capital in an increasingly diverse society.
This research finds that when religious practice engages CBCO democratic practice, the result can be productive of pluralism without being reductive of difference. Congregations, drawing on situated religious traditions, can foster pluralism, understood as self-conscious, active, and intentional engagement with diversity. Further, this case study demonstrates that congregations engaged in civic activity have religious resources to mediate conflict that might be intractable in the political sphere.
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McClenahan, Ann B.
