3 - Reimagining the Secular

Summary

This chapter focuses on an assessment of how community organizing as a practice mediates the relationship between “faith” and democratic citizenship and how democratic politics can mediate the relationship between different religious traditions. Understanding these relationships is central to understanding broad-based community organizing (BBCO) itself, as religious institutions are a key component of both London Citizens and the Industrial Areas Foundation’s core membership. Moreover, an immersion in the details and dynamics of how BBCO engages religious communities is a vital precursor to and point of reference for the broader, more theoretical analysis of the relationship between faith, democratic citizenship, and the power of money discussed in Part II.

To comprehend how London Citizens worked with and drew from religious groups, its work needs locating within a broader historical context. The interaction noted in Chapter 2 between Jameson, a white Quaker social worker from Bristol, and Johnny Ray Youngblood, a black Baptist preacher in New York, can be situated within a long historical process of religious mobilization running to and fro between Britain and North America from the seventeenth century onward. These transatlantic and now global processes of interaction within Christianity (as well as Judaism and Islam) feed into the dynamics of community organizing as a performance of democratic citizenship. To understand something of the impact of global processes in shaping community organizing in London, it is important to begin with the history of how BBCO came to Great Britain.