Defining Religious and Faith-Based Organizations: and Defining Them as Voluntary Organizations

Religious and faith-based organizations form a sizeable proportion of organizations in the UK and other European countries, and possibly an even larger proportion in the USA; they make a distinctive contribution to civil society; and they are now particularly important for the part they will play in enabling people of different faiths and of different ethnic groups to relate to one another and to society as a whole. It is therefore vital that such organizations should be studied and understood – and, if we are to study organizations in the category ‘religious and faith-based organizations’, it is important to know which organizations are in that category and which are not. A subsequent question which I shall tackle is that of the relationship between

definitions of ‘voluntary organization’, ‘religious organization’ and ‘faithbased organization’. It is important to do this because the ways in which we define and study religious and faith-based organizations will depend largely on how we answer the question: Do religious and faith-based organizations belong to the voluntary sector?