The multitude of ways in which religious and theological commitments intersect with public policy in the United States has given rise to a copious and varied scholarly literature. Each of the books referenced in this review addresses that intersection from a different perspective, with varying degrees of success.

The two books that purport to examine the role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in social-service provision approach that inquiry with different goals informed by distinct disciplinary perspectives. Jason Hackworth is a Canadian geographer interested in the “synergies and tensions between economic and religious conservatives in the United States” (p. vii). Cynthia Jackson-Elmoore, Richard C. Hula, and Laura A. Reese are political scientists whose scholarship here focuses upon nonprofit participation in Michigan housing programs. Hackworth advances an overarching hypothesis, a framework into which he sometimes strains to fit his observations. Jackson-Elmoore, Hula, and Reese, on the other hand, provide readers with an avalanche of data—observations, charts, and tables—in search of an articulable thesis.

In Faith Based, Hackworth is intent upon demonstrating the existence of a partnership between American neoliberalism and the Religious Right. It is an intriguing hypothesis and he makes some trenchant observations; however, he ultimately stretches his theory well beyond its explanatory power in what is ultimately an assault on a “straw man” of his own creation—a conspiracy to eliminate government welfare programs entirely. As Hackworth sets out his purpose (p. 28):

Having applied this theoretical lens, Hackworth proceeds to mine the literature for evidence supporting it. On occasion, this leads him to employ excessively value-laden terminology. Calling those who work for the Acton Institute “ideologues” and characterizing all mainstream evangelicals as religious neoliberals (p. 63) does not contribute to analytical clarity; rather, it suggests that he may be engaged in a less than objective analysis of his subject matter. Hackworth also seizes on the government's admittedly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina as evidence that the “ideal of charity-centered welfare” has triumphed (p. 115). He evidently believes that a failure of this magnitude can only be attributed to malignant intent. Most Americans, on the other hand, tend to view Katrina as an unfortunate example of our nation's capacity for administrative incompetence.

A lack of familiarity with America's constitutional constraints occasionally leads Hackworth to draw unwarranted conclusions about rules governing FBO practices. In Chapter 1, he engages in a prolonged discussion of the passage of Section 104 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reform Act (PRWORA), popularly known as “Charitable Choice,” and the jurisprudence governing outsourcing to religious organizations. He attributes the “establishment of rigorous criteria” to which faith organizations are subject to the Supreme Court's interpretation of that legislation (p. 18), rather than properly situating those criteria within a long line of First Amendment religion cases. As a result, he sees the passage of Charitable Choice laws as a response to doctrine devised by the Court and thus subject to legislative override.

Despite these weaknesses (and several others that Faith Based has in common with Reinventing Civil Society), Hackworth contributes significantly to the understanding of the theological underpinnings of economic policy preferences and illuminates several common underlying assumptions shared by the Religious Right and neoliberals. Political scientists all too often ignore the religious roots of ostensibly secular policy preferences and Hackworth makes a real contribution by illuminating the transmutation of Calvinism and other early Protestant doctrines into today's political and economic ideological rigidities. He highlights the origins of long-standing attitudes about the deserving and undeserving poor and traces the influence of that theologically rooted distinction through PRWORA and welfare reform and up to the Tea Party movement.

Ultimately, however, Faith Based shares a fundamental flaw with Reinventing Civil Society: Neither book defines its terms. Any study purporting to analyze the effectiveness or political activity of faith-based organizations owes the reader, at the very least, a precise definition of the way in which the researcher is defining that category. Neither book does so; indeed, neither makes any effort to distinguish between or among the organizations being lumped together under the descriptor “faith based.” (For its part, Reinventing Civil Society uses “faith based” and “nonprofit” interchangeably in many places, blurring the boundaries between those categories and thereby diminishing the analytical usefulness of much of the authors' data, at least as it relates to religious organizations.)

Perhaps more surprisingly, neither book addresses the influence of race in its respective policy arenas. It is difficult to examine any American social policy, let alone welfare and housing, without addressing the significant effects of racial stereotyping and polarization, yet here we have two scholarly treatises in which the racial dimensions of policy disputation are entirely ignored. For example, Jackson-Elmoore, Hula, and Reese reference attitudes about public housing as follows (p. 99):

There is no mention of the widespread public perception that public housing, at least in urban areas, is largely occupied by African Americans, or of the popular perception that black teenagers and/or drug users are responsible for “crime and social disorganization,” despite the significant impact of those impressions on public attitudes and policy debates. Nor does either book reference the widely held belief that George W. Bush's much-touted “Faith Based Initiative” was intended in part as an outreach to African American pastors in hopes of making political inroads into a constituency that has been largely inhospitable to Republicans.

In several respects, Reinventing Civil Society is a frustrating book. Had the authors not exaggerated its focus and scope with a too-ambitious title and inflated the description of their research agenda (the cover claims that the book “reviews and evaluates what is known about the public service activities of FBOs”), they might have produced a useful resource about nonprofit participation in Michigan housing programs; indeed, the book is a serviceable investigation of the relationships of the social service providers making up that state's housing social-safety net. Rather than choosing and achieving that more modest goal, however, the authors draw broad, unwarranted generalizations from data and descriptive research that simply do not support such generalizations. Some of this is probably simply careless language; for example, they write that “FBOs have more volunteers and receive more of their funding from banks, corporations, individual donations and religious bodies; secular nonprofits get more public funding” (p. 311). This observation may accurately describe Michigan housing organizations (although in the absence of clear definitional distinctions, it is hard to tell), but it is certainly not true of all or even most FBOs and secular nonprofits.

Like Faith Based, this book suffers from inadequate familiarity with the broader subject matter. Not only does the book fail to define its terms or make relevant distinctions, but it also offers no context. For a book proposing to examine the role of nonprofit organizations in social service delivery, readers have a right to expect a familiarity with at least some of the widely available outsourcing literature. For a book purporting to examine the performance of faith-based organizations, readers have a right to expect reference to the burgeoning literature describing and analyzing such performance. The work is replete with statements like “In sum, there is a dearth of academic literature on the nature, extent and effects of faith-based service provision, and what limited research exists tends to be fragmented and case study in nature” (p. 5).

The problem with such statements is that they are simply untrue. There is a broad and growing literature examining the nature, activities, and efficacy of FBOs—a literature the existence of which the authors seem utterly unaware. Thomas Jeavons' research might have provided them with a useful typology of faith organizations; Brint Milward and others have written extensively on the “hollowing out” of the capacities of both nonprofit organizations and government agencies that can result from outsourcing. Political scientists like Theda Skocpol, legal scholars like Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle, and a wide array of social scientists, from Robert Wineburg to David Ryden to Arthur Farnsley to Mary Jo Bane and Lawrence Lynn, and literally dozens of others, have contributed substantially to the scholarship in this area. If the authors of Reinventing Civil Society encountered this very substantial body of research, they provide no evidence in this book.

Passage of Section 104 of PRWORA, similar “Charitable Choice” provisions in a variety of other federal and state programs, and President Bush's Faith Based Initiative are seen by Hackworth and by Jackson-Elmoore, Hula, and Reese as evidence of an inexorable growth in Christianity's political and social influence in the United States. Susan B. Hansen's thesis in Religion and Reaction is that such growth is not inexorable and that, instead, there is substantial evidence of its decline. Her argument is reminiscent of the old political adage to the effect that every successful movement harbors the seeds of its own decline, or of Sir Isaac Newton's theory that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In The End of the Republican Era (1996), Theodore Lowi made a similar argument. Lowi attributed the emergence of the Christian Right to the Supreme Court's series of decisions nationalizing the Bill of Rights, decisions that generated an equally nationalized backlash (p. 129):

Lowi's argument highlighted the causes and effects of religious organization and mobilization. Hansen makes a similar point. But while Lowi described the mobilization of people with settled ideological identities, Hansen traces the recent growth and considerable diversity of those she refers to as “seculars” and describes the barriers to mobilizing them.

Hansen begins where good scholars do, by defining her terms. She notes that “[c]ategorizing people according to religious beliefs (or lack thereof) is a nontrivial problem for social scientists, especially in a country as religiously diverse as the United States” (p. 5) and she recognizes and discusses both the variability within denominations and the influence of race on the political orientation of believers, all of whom may be nominally Christian. She traces the trajectory of secular thought and the periodic resurgence of religiosity through American history, references the academic theories advanced to explain those alternating phenomena, and offers considerable empirical evidence for her argument that secularism is once again on the ascendance.

Although Hansen's historical perspective and data about the growth of secularism are valuable, the book's more important contribution is its analysis of the problems of organizing and mobilizing a group of people who are distinguished most of all by their independence of thought and belief. As she notes (p. 149):

As she explains, the Christian Right has many built-in advantages when it comes to organization. Whether the various groups that share the “secular” label can ever match the mobilization of the Right remains an open question. Hansen has rendered a service by providing a clear description of that question and the context within which it will be addressed. In the process, she has made a valuable contribution to the literature.

Despite their dissimilarities, the books considered here underline three important lessons that academics must all periodically relearn, beginning with a recognition of the wisdom of the old adage that where we stand depends upon where we sit. All scholars bring a “lens,” or worldview, to efforts at analysis; our first task is to be fully aware of them, to examine our premises, and be willing to alter them when the data requires such alteration. Our second task is to define our terms with clarity and precision and our third is to situate our research both within the relevant literature, broadly defined, and historically. Despite their merits, both Faith Based and Reinventing Civil Society would have benefited had their authors revisited those elementary principles.