Faith Beyond Social Capital

Abstract

In 2006 I was part of a research team on a project called Faith as Social Capital: Connecting or Dividing? (Furbey et al. 2006), using the idea of social capital to explore what faiths contribute in the public realm. This reflected the enormous popularity of the social capital idea, and echoed in religion research a book of essays in the United States entitled Religion as Social Capital edited by Corwen Smidt (2004). The 2006 study accepted the logic of social capital and went on to conclude that faith communities contribute substantial and distinctive bridging and linking social capital in at least six key ways: (1) through co-presence in urban areas; (2) by generating and providing connecting frameworks (infrastructure); (3) through the wider communities’ use of faith buildings; (4) as spaces that their associational networks open up between people; (5) by engagement in various forms of governance; (6) and through work across boundaries with others in the public domain, for example voluntary and community sector bodies and local authorities (Furbey et al. 2006).