Over the last twenty years, broad-based community organizing (BBCO) has made a name for itself. With the election of President Barack Obama and the telling of his organizing story in Dreams from my Father, the U.S. American public began to turn again to the life and work of that radical Saul Alinsky, who founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood in 1940. For years it seemed that no one was interested in writing about organizing except Alinksy and his proteges. Nowadays, things have changed: an interdisciplinary field has emerged that spans religious studies, theology, sociology, and politics. Even so, problems still plague the public conversation on organizing: the largest of which might be the arbitrary separation between religion and politics, based on an unfortunately rigid distinction between religion and secularism. This book's argument reconfigures the popular and presupposed distinctions between religion, politics, and secularism, which are often taken to be static terms, when in fact each concept stands for human social practices that exist in relational fields pervaded by power. This book makes an argument about the political role of sacred value in BBCO. I argue that people organize to protect and fight for what they hold most dear and that some practices, like the relational meeting and the listening campaign, attune Christian churches to the movements of the Spirit in ways that blur boundaries between religious and political practices. Due to the political role of sacred value in our social practical reasoning and in practices of recognition like the relational meeting and listening campaign, some organizing practices can be seen as religious practices. In my argument, religion and politics are social practices humans take up and enliven. Much of the emerging literature on BBCO too often adopts an unarticulated methodological individualism, where organizing is primarily viewed as an activity performed by one individual-the expert organizer. Part of my purpose in this chapter is to introduce the reader to how my larger argument engages with the emerging field on BBCO. I need to set up the chess board, introduce you to the pieces and familiar moves, so to speak. I mean to carry out this chapter in a way that reconfigures the board, however. It might be too much to say that I'm going to change the rules of the game, but I broadly lay out the argumentative moves that are to come in the following chapters and begin to make a case for why these moves are justified in light of the current state of the field"--
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