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.
