Faith-Based Organizations and Social Welfare

This third volume in our series on faith-based organizations and social welfare seeks to understand the role and function of religious-based organizations in strengthening associational life, and in the process, legitimizing a role for faith in the public sphere.

Africa stands out, contrasted with other regions, for high inequalities; large youth populations; large numbers of people affected by deep, chronic poverty; highly precarious situations including protracted conflicts that have displaced millions; and countless creative strategies and programs to address the challenges.

It has often been said that “Africa is not a country” to re-emphasize the fact that it is a large and diverse continent. The task of providing a general overview of faith-based services and social welfare in Africa is, therefore, a daunting one, and we will seek from the outset to explore the complexity of faith responses to issues of poverty and inequality on this diverse continent.

Ghana is a predominantly Christian country although state authority and government institutions are secular by definition. Muslims constitute about 20 percent of the population. Mutual assistance constitutes a core element in traditional Ghanaian ideals of self-help and communitarianism. The NGO landscape in contemporary Ghana predominantly comprises Christian, non-denominational, and secular factions. In contrast, the existence, agenda, and activities of local and international Muslim NGOs, Faith-Based Organisations (FBOs), Community-Based Organisations (CBOs), and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have hitherto been regarded as a marginal phenomenon, if noted at all. This chapter will therefore discuss their expansion in the recent two decades, especially highlighting the crucial role of social media for the NGO-ization of the Muslim sphere in Ghana.

With the advent of democracy in South Africa during the early to mid-1990s, favorable conditions would emerge for this country’s faith-based organizations to present themselves as constructive partners of the new African National Congress (ANC)-led democratic state (the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections by a large majority in April 1994 and has remained the governing party ever since).

This study seeks to determine pressures that would be placed on the government if all religious organizations in Kenya stopped offering services. In doing so, it assesses the path of the religious actors–state relationship, intention and operations of religious actors in their public agency, consequences (intended or unintended) of religious actors’ political/public involvement in Kenya, and public perception of religious actors’ agency in Kenya. This study explores the interactions of faith-based organizations with community development since the precolonial times to date. It has also demonstrated how FBOs and the state co-exist. Salient FBO features that manifest at all the times include advocacy to speak for the downtrodden and the lowly, assisting communities in solving personal and social problems, educating communities, contributing to peaceful coexistence, better constitutional ordering, improvements in human rights and enhanced food security. In post-devolution Kenya, counties are doing a great job in investing in social welfare programs. Some of the counties have not learned to coexist well with FBOs and support them in their endeavors. It becomes incumbent that counties are well educated about FBO’s community mandate.

This chapter examines religion’s role in the development of Chile’s social welfare ethos and apparatus, and it points to the challenges that religious actors—especially the Catholic church—are now facing in light of abuse scandals and the rapid secularization of Chile’s population. After a brief overview of Chile in comparative perspective, it situates the overall history of church-state relations in Chile, concentrating on the second half of the twentieth century and the period during and following the military government of Augusto Pinochet. Next, it highlights the development of a range of social services designed and operated by the Catholic church and its associated religious orders and lay organizations. To give further detail to this role, it provides a profile of the remarkably extensive Hogar de Cristo network of services, which has touched the lives of nearly every Chilean with its direct services or through its volunteering and contribution programs. Finally, it details the remarkably rapid process of change in religious practice that has occurred in the early twenty-first century, driven by scandals of abusive behavior and leadership and by evolving attitudes on social issues.

The progressive movement of the Catholic Church that flourished after the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) continues to exert a strong influence on Latin American politics and society. Moreover, we can now observe this movement’s influence in new areas: no longer apparent only in a strictly ecclesiastical sphere, its influence can also be felt within the ambit of civil society. This article analyzes and explains the evolution of “the church of the poor” in Oaxaca, Mexico, from its sponsorship by the Catholic hierarchy, starting in the early 1960s, through its transformation into civil society organizations beginning in the 1990s.

This chapter explores the multi-layered relationship between religion, society, and the state in Chad by investigating the role of religion and religious actors in the current historical moment, characterized by social cleavages, persistent poverty and insecurity for a large part of the Chadian population, and negotiations over Chad's political future.

Religious organizations play a prominent though often unrecognized roles in the provision of social services in fragile states such as Nigeria. In so doing, they have become agents of governmentality, providing the Nigerian state with the cultural force it requires to legitimize and advance its claims to power. In the process, religious organizations have benefited and transformed themselves into much sought after mediators by all groups within and outside the Nigerian state. While recognizing the contributions of the political and developmental activities of religious actors in Nigeria, political actors, domestic and foreign, pay very close attention to their activities as they are conscious of the capacity of religion to constitute itself into an independent arena of political action capable of challenging the Nigerian state’s claim to political dominance within its geographical territory.   

This chapter seeks to analyze the path of the church–state relationship in Mozambique and the current religious make-up of the society.

Uruguay is an atypical country in relation to religion in Latin America as a whole. It had an early separation of church and state (1919) with a strong influence of the French model that privatized religion, displacing it from the public space.