Abstract:
Faith-Based Community Organizations (FBCOs) are important and effective institutions working for progressive change in the United States. Many scholars have researched these groups’ outward successes and challenges while ignoring their impact on participants. But by transforming their participants, FBCOs transform their communities. In order to understand how members of FBCOs transform and are transformed, this thesis explores how one FBCO, POWER, functions like a religion: POWER unites people in common beliefs and practices which reflect and reinforce each other. POWER’s liberatory potential lies partially in the transformation of its members into dignity-affirming, radical, and powerful people. I begin with an anecdote at a POWER event. Then I explain my purpose and outline my methodology. This thesis relies on participant observation at POWER events, interviews with members of POWER, and close readings of POWER website materials. I then clarify my argument in the Thesis section. After providing background on POWER and organizing more generally, I demonstrate how POWER acts like a religion in a Durkheimian sense. I then analyze the idea of habitus, a particular way to understand the cultivation of virtue and dispositions, before providing examples of POWER’s beliefs and practices and how the reinforce each other. I focus on the values of human dignity, radical action, and power and the practices of one-on-ones, public narratives, direct action, and religious rituals. I conclude by making a normative claim about the potential of transformation through the organizing process and summarizing the major claims of the thesis. An appendix with my IRB Exemption Approval Form and a Works Cited follow.
