Religion and Social Justice Mobilization: How Community-Level Factors Affect Congregation-Based Activism in Chicago

“Community context matters for explaining why certain congregations but not others mobilize for social justice. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Kraig Beyerlein University of Notre Dame Contact Me
Ricardo Martinez-Schuldt University of Notre Dame Contact Me

About this project grant for researchers

While they are the exception, certain U.S. religious communities take to the streets for racial equity, immigrant rights, and economic equality. Our project will identify what distinguishes congregations that mobilize for such causes from those that do not. Theoretically, we will focus on the important—yet generally neglected—role of community-level factors, such as racial/ethnic composition, police repression, and socioeconomic status. In addition, we will examine how community conditions intersect with congregations’ internal characteristics to explain variation in mobilization for social justice. Methodologically, we propose a novel study of congregations nested within 40 Chicago Community Areas (CCAs). Official lists are used to generate the initial mapping of congregations. Since they underreport congregations in ways detrimental to our study (for example, the disproportional exclusion of certain types in communities of color), we supplement them in two ways: (1) with Google Street View and SafeGraph’s foot traffic data; and (2) by driving the streets of our CCAs to identify congregations that the other sources missed. With access to the near—or entire—population of congregations in our CCAs, we will conduct surveys with key informants—usually the head clergyperson—of these congregations to obtain information about social justice mobilization and other variables.