ABSTRACT

In 1995, Robert Putnam wrote an article entitled ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’ (Putnam 1995). This was an examination of changing American habits: away from corporate voluntary activity and towards individual interests. As Putnam saw it, this was gutting society of its mediating structures. Whilst Putnam’s research is on the USA (though some of his earlier research was on Italy), much the same applies to the UK, where those institutions between the state and the family (Sacks 1997) which hold society together in ways in which the state on its own cannot do are neither as numerous nor as large as before, leaving us with a lack of moral order, unstructured individual lives (Berger 1977), and markets and states without morality (Sacks 2002: 152). What Edmund Burke called the ‘little platoons’ (Burke 1993: 198), Alexis de Tocqueville ‘habits of association’ (de Tocqueville 1968) and Putnam ‘social capital’ (Putnam 1993; 1995; 2000) is a vital component of our society and has historically been vital to the health of democracy (Skocpol 2003); but modernization is causing its decline, and religious and faith-based organizations, which have long been important sources of social capital, therefore have an increasingly important role to play. It is by doing things together that trust is built up (Uslauer 1999: 144ff.; Farnell et al. 2003) and, whilst the state bears some responsibility for the building of trust and for creating an environment within which corporate voluntary activity can flourish (Cohen 1999: 223), and must remain responsible for the large-scale social safety nets which can only be provided on a national scale (Skocpol 1998: 40; 2003), only voluntary activity can build the social trust which the polity and the economy need (Putnam 1993: 164, 176), so the voluntary sector is going to have an increasingly important part to play in creating trust (Rochester 1998) and within that sector religious and faith-based organizations have a particular responsibility. In this chapter we study the relationship between religious organizations and

civil society. Most attention is on how congregations relate to the building of social capital, mainly because there is sufficient research literature on this issue. Faith-based organizations in the USA will receive a mention now and then, because there is some literature available on these (though even in the United States, where they are such an important subgroup of voluntary organizations, they are often neglected in studies of voluntary organizations: Knoke 1990).

There is remarkably little literature on faith-based organizations in the UK, which is a pity, because now that so much of the voluntary sector is government-influenced, if not actually government-controlled, religious organizations might come to have an even more important role in civil society. As Wuthnow recognizes, ‘religion is a somewhat protected zone in which issues can be debated in ways that may be critical of established government policies or may simply defy the logic of bureaucratic norms in either the political or economic sectors’ (Wuthnow 1994: 17, 199ff.). It is by being religious that religious organizations contribute to civil society, for the sacred contributes to the carving out of an autonomous public realm (that is, one not completely controlled by private or public organizations: and it can do this because its authority-structure extends beyond the boundaries of all institutions), and for the same reason the sacred’s prophetic aspect can promote justice in ways in which self-interested organizations cannot. It is certainly true that the sacred is not clearly defined, but this is a strength and not a weakness, for it means that congregations have to debate activities in the context of a diversity of values, and this debate is itself a contribution to civil society (ibid.: 55). There are three major ways in which congregations contribute to the stock of

social capital: by simply being congregations with links into communities; by encouraging volunteering; and by organizing social action.