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Religion should hold pride of place in any discussion of the state of social capital in America. Churches are by far the most prevalent form of voluntary association , and previous research has shown that religious involvement is linked with other forms of civic engagement (Hodgkinson, Gorski, Noga, & Knauft 1995; Greeley 1997b). Churches enhance civic engagement by teaching civic skills (Verba et al. 1995), serving as the focal point of a shared social network (Huckfeldt & Sprague 1995), and by providing the psychological motivation for participation (Harris 1999). Indeed, two seminal works employing the concept of social capital—Coleman and Hoffer’s (1987) Public and Private High Schools and Putnam’s (1993) Making Democracy Work1 —discuss religion at some length. But while religion has been integral to the development of social capital as a theory, until this volume there have been few systematic studies specifying how churches facilitate the creation, sustenance, and growth of social capital. This chapter focuses on one important aspect of religiously based social capital—the link between religion and volunteering. It carefully examines the religious roots of volunteering in the United States, across levels of religiosity, different religious traditions, and different types of voluntary activity. Our study is in the spirit of Putnam’s call for “social capital botany field work,” in an attempt to assist in developing “a Peterson’s Field Guide to the forms of social capital” (1998, vii). In particular, we hope to shed some light on a central theme of this Chapter 6 Religion and Volunteering in America David E. Campbell and Steven J. Yonish 87 volume, how religion shapes civic values. To foreshadow our findings, we find that religion both pushes people into the public sphere and, in some cases, pulls them out of generalized participation and into particularized religious activity. However, religious activity is not alone in this regard; participation in secular organizations has a similar effect, directing people away from religious activity. Like many concepts in social science, “social capital,” as we operationalize it, cannot be observed directly. In this sense, it is no different from other concepts regularly studied by social scientists like rationality, partisanship, or power. Social capital has the added complication, however, of having both an individual and a collective component. Drawing on the insights of Coleman, Putnam defines it as “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (1993a, 167). By definition, such features are collective in nature. This is not to say, though, that individuals cannot be said to have more or less social capital . They can. But, when employing data at the individual level, any social-capital -building interaction with others must be inferred, a point discussed at greater length by Nemeth and Luidens in the next chapter of this volume. Consequently, scholars measuring social capital often use participation in group settings, whether formal as in a fraternal club or informal as in a dinner party, as measures of connectedness to others, and thus proxies for social capital. One important proxy measure of social capital is involvement in one’s church, because it facilitates the creation of social networks, which in turn “foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust” (Putnam 1995a, 67). Thus, while there are many venues in which social capital is fostered—like informal personal relationships and voluntary associations , to name just two—this chapter will narrow its focus to that formed within places of worship. We are interested in how “general” the reciprocity facilitated within a religious community is—does it extend beyond a believer’s specific congregation? Social capital has been shown to have many effects, but this chapter will narrow its focus further to examine how the social capital formed during religious activity relates to volunteering—activities for which one does not receive financial remuneration. Many observers, from Tocqueville (1969) to Almond and Verba (1963) to Putnam (1995, 2000), have drawn a connection between the voluntarism of Americans and the health of American democracy. More specific to the theme of this volume, volunteering is, according to Putnam, “by some interpretations a central measure of social capital” (2000, 116). Similarly, one of the most-cited books in this volume is Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s book Voice and Equality, subtitled Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. We must note that there are differences in perspectives over voluntarism’s proper place in democratic society. Most notably, political conservatives and liberals disagree on the appropriate...

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