RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS1

John Boli David V. Brewington

In February of 2006, Abdul Rahman suddenly went global. The Barnabas Foundation, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, the Family Research Council, Christian Monitor, the , Christian Freedom, and Religious Tolerance.org, among many other organiza- tions, quickly made Abdul Rahman their cause célèbre. These religious nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), some global and others much less than global, sent petitions, issued press releases, wrote to Afghani politicians, and mobilized numerous governments on behalf of a poor Afghani who had converted to . Non-religious NGOs also spoke out, among them , Human Rights Watch, and Democracy Now, charging that Rahman’s rights to freedom of conscience and free practice of religion were being violated. In the end, Rahman was released to asylum in , but religious freedom made little headway in . In the Rahman case, religious organizations addressed classic religious issues—religion’s relationship with the state, and the ques- tion of religious tolerance—and engaged in directly political activity. Other religious groups covered by this chapter, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Harakat ul-Ansar in Kashmir, grab the world’s attention through amboyant or destructive political activities, and conservative Christian organizations in the , while viscerally disdain- ful of the system, lobby vigorously to sway the World Health Organization’s family and reproductive programs (Buss and Herman, 2003). But these kinds of issues and engagements are not typical of religious NGOs. Most of the time, their work is apolitical or only indirectly engages politics and they concentrate on essentially secular issues—poverty alleviation, support, peace, health,

1 We thank Laura Braden for research assistance, and the Union of International Associations for its on-going diligence in compiling information about nongovernmental organizations.

BEYER & BEAMAN_f12_203-231.indd 203 9/19/2007 5:44:02 PM 204 john boli and david v. brewington

education, mutual understanding, environmental protection, women’s equality, and so on. In the Luhmannian terms of Beyer’s (1994: 80) framework, religious NGOs engage more in religious performance than religious function, the latter referring to “pure” religious activities such as salvation, worship, and the cure of souls, the former signifying the “application” of religion to problems generated or left unsolved by other institutional sub-systems, such as the economic and political systems. In this respect, religious NGOs are not fundamentally unlike their secular NGO counterparts. In this chapter we provide an overview of a broad class of religious organizations—all those that qualify as nongovernmental organiza- tions (NGOs) in the Yearbook of International Organizations (2001–02, CD version). These are voluntary, not-for-pro t, self-organizing entities of suf cient public presence to come to the attention of the Union of International Associations, the publisher of the Yearbook. In fact, little public presence is required; the UIA captures an enormous range of organizations, from globally prominent bodies like B’nai B’rith Inter- national (annual budget: $25 million) and Dorcas Aid International ($12 million) to obscure regional and domestic organizations, such as the World Islamic Association for Mental Health (annual budget: $12,000) and the Institute for Planetary Synthesis (ca $40,000). International and domestic NGOs, often depicted as being crucial to the formation of global civil society, have become a major subject of research over the past decade. Human rights, the environment, develop- ment, women’s rights, international labor, indigenous peoples, health, and numerous other sectors have received much attention (Anheier et al., 2001–2004; Charnovitz, 1997; Florini, 2000; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Willetts, 1996), and comprehensive data has been compiled for a number of sectors (Boli and Thomas, 1999a; Frank et al., 1999; Chab- bott, 1999; Berkovitch, 1999a). Systematic study of religious NGOs is rare, however, despite the enormous literature on religion as such, both for long established faiths (the “world religions”) and for less con- ventional religious movements (Casanova, 1994; Barker, 1986; Wilson, 1999). Mei (2003) gives special attention to religious organizations in her study of humanitarian charity and relief NGOs, and Bush (2007) presents data on religiously oriented human rights organizations active in the late 1990s, but broader work on religious INGOs is lacking. Almost all international or internationally oriented religious NGOs (RINGOs hereafter) toil away largely unnoticed, yet they are numerous, energetic, and often signi cant actors in many global sectors.

BEYER & BEAMAN_f12_203-231.indd 204 9/19/2007 5:44:03 PM