Sanctified Mobilization: How Political Activists Manage Institutional Boundaries in Faith-Based Organizing for Immigrant Rights

Abstract

Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers attempting to recruit Spanish speakers throughout a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights, this paper explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. I argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, activists who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.

Citation

Coddou, M. (2017), "Sanctified Mobilization: How Political Activists Manage Institutional Boundaries in Faith-Based Organizing for Immigrant Rights", On the Cross Road of Polity, Political Elites and Mobilization (Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 24), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 25-65. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520160000024003