Book Review: Reinventing Civil Society: The Emerging Role of Faith-Based Organizations

Reinventing Civil Society: The Emerging Role of Faith-Based Organizations is a data-rich volume that examines the system of housing-related services in Michigan, drawing on three surveys of nonprofit housing organizations (undertaken in 2003, 2007, and 2007-2008) and qualitative interviews with key informants. The authors’ primary conceptual question is whether nonprofit involvement in the delivery of housing (or broader human) services also leads to involvement in political activity or whether these activities operate independently of one another. This is an important issue and the authors have some interesting findings. They find significant connections between the characteristics of nonprofits, their service roles, and the types of networks in which they participate and their involvement in public policy (influencing policy) or political activities (impacting the composition of governing bodies).

The volume also provides a particularly valuable overview of the full complement of housing services, including major federal legislation and activities carried out by state and local authorities, as exemplified by the state of Michigan. There are also useful descriptions of the extent and nature of nonprofit involvement in housing-related activities, such as housing support services, home ownership housing and services, building or renovation, or multifamily and special needs housing.

Other commendable features include valiant efforts to construct indexes (using factor analysis) of various organizational components or activities, including dimensions of organizational capacity: structural, programmatic, networking, and political. The ones employed here focus mainly on structural dimensions, such as human resources and seeking funding, with no attention to strategic planning, accountability/transparency, or use of information technology.

There are also many helpful graphics and almost all data are presented in tables although, in some cases, these contribute little to the general discussion, and most tables and figures lack information about the number of respondents on which the data are based. Also, the format for many tables comparing Faith Based Organizations (FBO) and secular organizations makes it difficult to easily compare the two groups: proportions or means (rather than percentages) are presented in a single column interweaving FBO and secular groups for specific items.

The focus on FBOs is somewhat less developed than the reader might expect, based on the title. There is a fairly extensive literature on the role of FBOs in the delivery of human services (which under some definitions include housing activities, for example, National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities) and the authors draw on much of that literature. However, there is no cogent discussion of why housing services are particularly important for examining the role of FBOs or why and how housing services may differ from more traditional social services in this respect.

Nor is it clear how extensive FBO services are. The authors appear to use the organization’s own definition of how frequently it engages in a range of social services or the extent to which it provides a range of housing-related services to conclude that FBOs are more actively involved in housing services than secular organizations. However, greater frequency or extent of involvement does not necessarily mean greater volume. The analysis of actual housing production (Table 7.7, p. 165) shows only two significant (or borderline significant) differences between FBO and secular providers, and in both cases the latter produce more than the former. That is also the direction of all but 2 of the 20 side-by-side comparisons. This is consistent with research on congregations, which concludes that while these report a wide variety of activities, they devote limited efforts to most of them (Cadge & Wuthnow, 2006; Chaves & Wineburg, 2010).

Indeed, although the analysis is cast as an examination of the role of faith-based organizations, in the final analysis, there are relatively few substantive differences between FBOs and their secular counterparts. The differences that exist seem related to the concentration of strong faith-based activities in Detroit and the long-standing political activism of Black churches. Indeed, one of the most interesting findings is that there are major regional differences in the configuration of housing-related service networks. However, the concentration of FBOs in the Detroit region may explain why FBO housing providers appear to focus more directly on low-income groups than their secular counterparts who are disproportionately located elsewhere.

There are two major weaknesses with the analysis presented in this volume: the operational definition of “faith-based organization” and technical problems with the network analysis. While I applaud the authors for recognizing that the definition of FBO lies on a continuum, their criteria for defining FBOs as distinct from secular organizations are overly broad. Had the authors included only those responding organizations that identify themselves as congregations (independent or part of larger denominations), collaborations of congregations, or based on religious principles, I would have had no concerns. However, they also include organizations that only cooperate with religious organizations (neither collaboration nor cooperation is defined for respondents), but do not identify themselves as religious organizations in any other way.

Moreover, this “not religious, but cooperates with religious organizations” subgroup accounts for 43% of all organizations defined as faith based in the primary survey designed to examine the role of FBOs. As a result, while 35% of the 99 respondents to the survey are defined as FBOs, it seems more appropriate to conclude that only 15 (15%) are. Of course, using this narrower and more appropriate definition of FBO would have severely limited the statistical power of the analysis undertaken. Unfortunately, the authors do not acknowledge that the operational definition might be misleading, and do not present the composition of their FBO respondents until page 113.

In addition, the inclusion of “not religious, but cooperates with religious organizations” in the definition of “faith-based” has implications for the analysis of ties between FBOs and other organizations. Presumably, those that are defined as FBOs because they cooperate with religious organizations will most likely report collaborating with other organizations and list the religious organizations they cooperate with in networks. As a result, the extent to which FBOs are involved in networks is likely overstated.

There are other problems with the network analysis. For example, there is no acknowledgment that the network ties are unconfirmed: the reported numbers are based only on ties identified by respondents to the specific survey, not confirmed by those so identified. The networks are also based only on the responding organization’s two most important services, not the full complement of services. Nor are respondents provided with a definition of what collaboration might involve. Moreover, while the overall response rate of 26% is generally considered as reasonably acceptable for surveys of nonprofit organizations, the fact remains that 74% of potential respondents are missing and did not have the opportunity to list their collaborators. The combination of these factors means that the networks are necessarily incomplete and not very robust.

In the final analysis, it is not surprising that most organizations involved in delivering housing or social services participate in some form of network and that public funding brings them into the realm of influencing policies about services. What is new—and important—is the finding that for some types of services (but not housing services), involvement in these networks also seems to engage nonprofits in politics. However, the subtitle of the volume seems somewhat overstated and the research reported does not make it altogether clear that there really is an emerging role for FBOs.