Faithful democracy: synthesising religious and political practice in the Sydney Alliance

Abstract

This article examines the role religious institutions, communities, and individuals might play in democratising 21st-century cities. Based on participatory action research with the Sydney Alliance, a broad-based community organisation in Sydney, Australia, I examine how a civil society coalition attempts to draw religious communities into the political life of the city, the way religious culture and space shapes the political culture of the coalition, and the challenges faced by the coalition in working across religious and nonreligious difference. I argue that political coalitions like the Sydney Alliance that work across diverse worldviews are pulled in two different directions: the effort to democratise and make space for worldview plurality appears to lead to political moderation, despite apparent commitment to progressive social change. Whilst the effort to diversify democratic participation and syncretise the best aspects of religious and secular political cultures has promise, ultimately the contributions of religious organisations to democratisation in Sydney through the coalition is ambivalent.

Keywords:

• religion
• urban politics
• community organising
• democratisation

Introduction

On an unusually warm Sunday afternoon in May 2018, I pulled a suitcase up a wide driveway bordered by trees and gardens towards an old Benedictine convent in Sydney’s North-Western suburbs. I was walking towards six days residential training in the art of community organising: six days away from home, in an unfamiliar part of the city, living with strangers, and being taught political organising by a team lead by a Catholic sister. Sitting on chairs pulled into a large circle in a downstairs meeting room a short while later, I was introduced to my fellow trainees—all of us instructed to say our name, including any formal title we may have, and the organisation we were from. Sitting around the circle in that convent were union organisers, Ministers of religion, NGO workers, employees of major social service organisations, mission workers from various Sydney churches, community centre board members, an initiate in a Catholic religious order, and myself—there under the auspices of the National Tertiary Education Union.

The training brought together this rather unusual mix of people, in a convent, no less, to learn a particular set of political practices and skills aimed at both improving the efficacy and political clout of our own organisations, and at enhancing the capacity of the urban political coalition which organised the training. That organisation—the Sydney Alliance, and the political practices it uses in its day-to-day organising—is the focus of this article. Through examining this one ‘broad-based’ community organisation in Sydney, Australia, I will investigate the role religious institutions, communities, and individuals might play in democratising 21st-century cities. I examine the way the Sydney Alliance draws religious communities into the political life of the city, and the relationship between specific forms of citizen action to religious faith, identity, and practice.

The article begins with a general discussion of the existing literature and theoretical debates around religion, democracy, and the city before examining the particular ways in which the Sydney Alliance mobilises religious infrastructure and space for political action. I then discuss one of the core practices of the Sydney Alliance in light of its significance for democratising Sydney—the relational meeting. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the relationship between religious faith and practice, and the political practices of the Sydney Alliance. In its efforts to build a democratic community in a religiously and politically plural coalition, the Sydney Alliance—and the model of community organising more generally—focuses on practices rather than beliefs or ideology. Because of community organising’s explicitly non-ideological framework (Alinsky 1971, 10–12), adherents of many different religious and political persuasions ideally find common ground in political action, without having to compromise on their core beliefs. Although the Sydney Alliance by-and-large avoids overt displays of religious ritual, the culture of the organisation and its use of particular political practices facilitates the synthesis of religious and political practice for the religious participants in the organisation. However, despite its best efforts, the organisation is more successful with Christian than other religious groups, and cannot always effectively manage conflict between the diverse partner organisations in the coalition.

Religion, democracy, and the city

The relationship between ‘religion’ and democracy has long been, and remains to this day, contested. The claims of 20th-century scholars in the social sciences that increasing modernisation and democratisation is necessarily accompanied by decreasing religiosity—the secularisation thesis (for example, see Berger 1967)—has been variously critiqued, revised, dismissed, and revived since the turn of the new millennium. Whilst the ‘separation of Church and state’ is often taken for granted in liberal democracies of the global north, and influential liberal political philosophies argue religion should play no part in public deliberation (Nussbaum 2011; Rawls 1997), a strict partitioning of religion into the private sphere is neither necessary for democratisation, nor reflective of the history of democracy (Keane 2009). Such partitioning in religiously plural societies may in fact distribute the burdens of public deliberation unequally, favouring the non-religious citizen above the religious (Habermas 2006).

Debates about the place of religious reason in public debate in a democracy, however, are prone to two problematic assumptions. The first: that all groups within a given democracy have equal access to, and ability to participate in, public discourse (Wood 2002, 127–128); the second, that religion can be defined and understood primarily through the lens of belief. The first assumption reduces democracy to public deliberation and in doing so, excludes from democratic participation marginalised groups whose voices are not recognised or heard in public discourse, or who do not have the particular political skills required to participate in public discourse. Richard Wood (2002, 127–129) argues that there are in fact two, complementary modes of doing democracy—democracy as deliberation, and democracy as conflict. Where the first mode consists of groups within a given society engaging in public debate regarding the ‘goods’ of their society, the second mode consists of groups excluded from this process of public deliberation fighting to have their voices heard and given equal consideration. As we shall see, the Sydney Alliance engages with both these modes of ‘doing democracy’.

The second assumption, that religion can be defined by and primarily consists of belief privileges a particular Christian (Protestant) form of religion (Smith et al. 2013). Since the late-20th century, sociologists of religion have increasingly turned to ‘lived’ or ‘everyday’ religion (Ammerman 2006; McGuire 2008) to better account for the immense diversity of ‘religion’. Each religious tradition, and the sects within any tradition, have their own unique structure and these structures interact with local cultures, social contexts, and individual behaviours—resulting in vastly different forms within any given ‘religion’. This article makes a similar move in its efforts to grapple with multiple forms of democratisation—moving away from analysing the cognitive dimension of public reason and discourse to examine the things citizens, broadly conceived, do. The doing of democracy and the doing of religion, and how these two things intersect within the Sydney Alliance, is thus the focus of this article.

As noted above, participating in democracy—certainly in deliberative democracy—requires the development of particular skills. Despite the place of religion in deliberative democracy remaining contentious, scholars from the United States have argued it is religious communities and institutions who are best-placed to facilitate development of the ‘civic skills’ (Weithman 2002) or ‘social capital’ (Putnam and Campbell 2010) necessary for participation in democratic life. This research tends to examine how participation in the regular activities of a religious community gives religious citizens transferable skills: religious communities are viewed instrumentally as a ‘training ground’ for democratic life.

The community organising model utilised by the Sydney Alliance originated in the United States from a political organiser in the 1930s named Saul Alinsky and was further developed in the mid-20th century by his successors including (amongst others) Edward Chambers and Dick Harmon. They are responsible for developing the tools of ‘relational action’ which structures much of contemporary community organising (Chambers 2018, 35–37). There is a substantial body of literature written about Alinsky, and the various models of community organising to spring from his original formulation. Of this literature, only a relatively small volume examines the role of religion in community organising and political mobilisation. This work analyses and evaluates the political practices of faith-based community organisations, occasionally making links between particular theological positions and commitments to political action (Braunstein 2017; Stout 2010; Warren 2001; Wood 2002), or examining the way religious beliefs and cultures shape the ethos and culture of faith-based political coalitions (Wood 2002), or develop a ‘theology’ of community organising (Bretherton 2012; 2014).

Most of these studies examine the various theological motivations for political action of participants in community organising, and argue that the role of a community organisation like the Sydney Alliance is to provide ‘a unifying structure for focusing efforts at political dialogue and action’ (Wood 2002, 70). Mark Warren (2001) argues this is what differentiates contemporary faith-based community organising from earlier organising efforts of the 20th century. Where earlier iterations of the model were driven by ‘self-interest’—motivating participation by encouraging individuals to identify their own self-interest with the goals of the organisation—contemporary faith-based coalitions sought to complement self-interest with shared values grounded in (predominantly) Jewish and Christian theology that would sustain long-term participation (Warren 2001, 58). That religion can motivate political action is not a particularly novel claim. What is significant is that (some) religious congregations choose political action over, for example, charity or social service as an enactment of their religious faith. Where charity and social service are more common forms of engagement for religious congregations, they are also ‘easier, less risky, and ultimately less effective than a commitment to creating systemic changes’ (Braunstein 2017, 51)—precisely the kind of work organisations like the Sydney Alliance seek to undertake.

All of these studies, it should be noted, focus on the mobilisation of religion in urban politics, as broad-based community organising typically occurs in an urban context. In the 1970s, Manuel Castells’ classic study of urban social movements argued that the structure of the modern city, connected as it is to global flows of capital and governed by complex political bureaucracies that divest much decision making from the local level, means urban movements for social change ultimately stand little chance of winning significant political concessions or changing the structure of the city itself (Castells 1978). Although written in the 1970s, Castells’ characterisation of the modern city remains largely true today, especially for a ‘global’ city such as Sydney. But scholars in the United States have expressed a ‘cautious optimism’ about the potential of broad-based community organising to effect social and political change—particularly in terms of democratising political decision making at the local and, sometimes, state level (Wood 2002).

Meanwhile, the modern city has been theorised, both within urban studies and the sociology of religion, as a ‘secular space, resulting in a “conceptual void” between “the City” and “religion”’ (Berking, Schwenk, and Streets 2018, 1–2). Despite this theoretical lacuna, urbanisation, modernisation, and globalisation have made cities into the space of ‘religious super-diversity’ (Becci, Burchardt, and Giorda 2016). Diverse migrant groups quickly establish religious institutions and sites of worship as they settle in cities, often repurposing previously secular spaces. But cities are also a lab for ‘religious innovation’: new religious movements and spiritual communities like transcendental meditation groups or scientology flourish within contemporary cities (Becci, Burchardt, and Giorda 2016, 74–75). Work on the idea of the ‘postsecular’ city, meanwhile, has noted that the diversity of religious groups within cities and spaces—like the Sydney Alliance—that bring diverse religious and nonreligious groups together are liminal spaces of ‘rapprochement’ where individuals may transcend their sectarian worldviews (Baker and Beaumont 2011).

Scholars of religion have also long highlighted the complex interactions between a religious community, and the context in which it operates. Robert Orsi argues that urban religion ‘does not refer simply to religious beliefs and practices that happen to take place in cities […] Urban religion is what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions […] with specific features of industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life’ (Orsi 1999, 43). At the local level, religious congregations and the neighbourhoods they inhabit are in ‘constant dynamic interaction, shaping and being shaped by each other’ (Day 2014, 9). The framing of a ‘dynamic interaction’ between religious communities and the city and neighbourhoods they inhabit is central to the argument of this article, which conceptualises a two-way street between ‘the religious’ and ‘the political’ in the Sydney Alliance.

Methodology

The urban political coalition examined in this article, the Sydney Alliance, is an example of a broad-based community organisation of the kind that gave hope to Wood (2002) for the future of urban politics. With origins in Chicago in the 1930s, broad-based community organising seeks to engage marginalised groups in political processes and decision making at the local level, ultimately with the aim of recreating communities for the ‘common good’ and to ‘replenish democracy’(Orr 2007, 10). The model works by recruiting pre-existing organisations and institutions within a neighbourhood or city with deep ties to their community: religious congregations and organisations, trade unions, and community groups. Broad-based organising spread throughout the United States during the 20th century and has been successfully exported internationally. This model of urban politics is, however, relatively new to Australia. The Sydney Alliance—the first explicit broad-based community organisation in Australia—was launched at the Sydney Town Hall in 2011 after four years of background organising with 18 religious organisations, 10 unions, and 17 community groups as founding partners (Holgate 2015). At the time of my fieldwork, there were 40 partner organisations including trade unions (n. 5), religious congregations and organisations (n. 20), and secular community groups (n. 15). Of the religious congregations and organisations, 14 are Christian (6 Catholic, 6 Uniting Church, 1 Baptist, and 1 Ecumenical), 3 are Islamic, and 2 are Jewish.

This article is grounded in a two-year ethnography with the one of the campaign teams in the Sydney Alliance—the People Seeking Asylum (PSA) team—conducted using participatory action research methods (McIntyre 2008). Between 2018 and 2021, I attended monthly team meetings and regular meetings of a sub-committee working on a specific campaign, had multiple ‘relational meetings’, attended the Sydney Alliance’s quarterly council meetings and their annual general meeting, attended a six-day residential training course, acted as a trainer at a two-day ‘foundations’ training, attended one ‘table talk’ run by the PSA team, and was part of a delegation organised by the team to my local member of Parliament. In addition to the participant observation undertaken during these activities, I conducted 16 one-to-one semi-structured interviews with staff organisers, members of the PSA team, organisational leaders, and the founder of the Sydney Alliance.

Religious communities, space, and political action

Religious communities have long played a crucial part in political mobilisations for social change: many European and US movements have either religious origins or were backed by religious groups (Young 2002). Perhaps the most well-known example is that of the American civil rights movement: Black churches in the South of the US ‘functioned as the institutional centre’ of the movement (Morris 1984, 4). The Churches were central to Black community life and could provide essential infrastructure, leadership, manpower, and money to the movement—as well as symbolic legitimacy (Morris 1984; see also McAdam 1982). In many respects it was the inequitable and racialised social structure that gave Black Churches their power: by forcing the Black population into concentrated geographical areas and restricting access to many of the social and political amenities available in White-only neighbourhoods, the Black Church was one of the few institutions largely autonomous from White political and economic control.

The value of religious communities to democratic movements is well-understood by community organisations like the Sydney Alliance. Recruiting religious congregations as partner organisations, in particular, is valuable because of the breadth and depth of the social networks within a congregation, the physical infrastructure that comes with them, and ‘their authority and legitimacy; their role in family life; their history as the primary domain of ritual, symbol, meanings, and values; and the Jewish and Christian prophetic traditions of social criticism’ (Swarts 2008, 28: 45). Whilst these studies focus on the effect of religious resources (both infrastructure and cultural/symbolic) on mobilisation, the material resources of religious groups also inevitably shape political practice and culture. McFarlane (2011), writing about the utility of assemblage theory for critical urbanism, argues that ‘critical praxis emerges through sociomaterial interaction rather than through a separation of the social and the material’ (22). As I outline below, it is not just the fact of religious and nonreligious people working together across difference that creates postsecular partnerships; it is also their use of both religious and nonreligious spaces.

Towards the end of 2018 I was tasked with organising an action for a large group in the Alliance. Asking around for a suitable venue, one of the trade union partners offered up their very functional branch meeting rooms. But when I enquired about tables and chairs, they discovered they didn’t have the requisite number. In the end, it was a Uniting Church congregation who were partnered with the Sydney Alliance that had both the space—a long crypt with worn wooden floorboards, stained glass windows to one side, a large quasi-commercial kitchen to the other—and enough chairs to hold the action. In contemporary Sydney, religious organisations (more so than secular community groups), have spaces designed with ‘congregation’ in mind—and the materials necessary for a large gathering of people.

Using the physical infrastructure of religious organisations for political work has an effect on the culture of the Sydney Alliance. McFarlane (2011, 215) writes that ‘agency […] is distributed across the social and the material [… and] different materials might matter within assemblages for how we conduct urban critique.’ In her work on urban religion, Day argues that ‘place matters’ in the production and reproduction of religion—referring to the effect particular neighbourhood features will have on the religious congregations within them (Day 2014, 8). There is a difference between democratic action conducted in the meeting rooms of a trade union and that conducted in the crypt of a church, for example. Although both spaces are designed to house large groups of people, the historical and cultural narratives that give meaning to these spaces—and to the gatherings that occur within them—differs between the two, and the material resources available to religious and union groups differ—which is evident in the spaces and gatherings held within them.

The meeting rooms at Trades Hall where the Sydney Alliance frequently holds meetings are entirely functional—identical stacking office chairs and white-topped tables, neutral coloured walls, whiteboards and projectors permanently in place—whilst the windows running along one wall look into an interior atrium whose walls are always hung with a rotating exhibition of trade union banners from their archives, and in which a café caters to a mix of be-suited and more casually dressed patrons (sometimes in polo shirts or t-shirts bearing the name of their union). The religious spaces are—usually—somewhat less functional, with projectors propped precariously on small tables and a variety of tables and chairs, collected over years and kept until they are no longer usable. But the communal spaces are invariably large, and there is always a kitchen with mismatched cutlery and crockery, a zip or kettle for making tea, and space to lay out and serve food.

The different materialities of the spaces religious and trade union organisations make available to the Sydney Alliance speak of significant cultural differences between the two groups: and the Sydney Alliance is a political coalition influenced—if not defined—by the partnership between these two cultures. A staff organiser noted the cultural difference between the religious and trade union groups, reflected in their respective spaces: ‘unions are really good at acting, and they're not very good at relating or reflecting. And churches are really good at relating, quite good at reflecting, and not very good at acting. And so actually together they can rub each other in a really productive and interesting way, because they encourage each other to do things that the other is not very good at’ (Participant 16). At its best, the Sydney Alliance is reflective of both the action-orientation of the trade unions and relational orientation of the religious groups; although it likewise has the potential to be both unrelational and ineffective in action.

Urban theorists such as Mike Davis (2006) have argued that in the neoliberal city, the spaces available as ‘public’ gathering places are increasingly governed by the market, like shopping malls, restaurants, and concert halls. Meanwhile, in many cities an increasingly militarised police force governs the streets and government buildings. In this context, grassroots movements for democratisation often attempt to seize space for free public assembly in a disruption to the established order (see the articles by Iveson and Tattersall in this issue for two such examples). However, in utilising the physical infrastructure of religious institutions, the Sydney Alliance taps into and makes use of spaces largely free from the control of the market or the state. And where occupations and democratic assembly are often theorised as a concentrated gathering of bodies (Butler 2015), the bread and butter action of the Sydney Alliance’s PSA team are ‘table talks’—gatherings of 50–100 people—held in churches and schools across Sydney’s suburbs. This diffusion of political action across the city—and the non-confrontational use of pre-existing congregational space—is not so much an alternate method of democratisation but is rather an expansion of the spatial and political repertoire of democratic action.

This diffusion of democratic action across Sydney also facilitates the involvement of people who live in the outer suburbs, and for whom travel into the city is a deterrent to taking political action. One of the participants in the PSA team reflected, ‘Lots of times I would hear about things that were happening in the city but I had no knowledge it was going to happen until too late. So I couldn’t go in and be there […] and if they [political actions] are in the city, that is not easy, necessarily, if you have short notice, to turn up at a city thing that might be in the middle of the week’ (Participant 13). Suburban sprawl is frequently theorised as antithetical to democratic participation—whether through the relationship of suburban living to consumerism and its ‘strong current of conformism’ (Roulier 2018, 127), or through the supposedly inherent conservatism encouraged by property ownership (Lund 2013). Yet this white, church-going, middle-aged woman from Sydney’s western suburbs was ‘more engaged now than I’ve ever been’ in the political life of the city, dedicating many hours of her time to action for the rights of people seeking asylum (Participant 13).

The campaign team for People Seeking Asylum was dominated by members of Christian organisation and was predominantly white. However, another campaign team focused on environmental justice—particularly extreme heat and energy justice in Sydney’s diverse Western Suburbs—had participants from multiple ethnic and minority religious groups. The embeddedness of religious groups in place is particularly salient to migrant groups: Kuppinger (2019, 9) argues that ‘houses of worship localize immigrant communities and create spatialities that link immigrants to each other, back to countries of origin, and to new urban environments.’ The religious congregations bring a deep embeddedness and sense of local mission—a spiritual connection and commitment to place—into the organising culture of the Sydney Alliance. In an urban coalition as diverse as the Sydney Alliance, operating within a sprawling city that is even more diverse still, commitment to place has the potential to become a source of solidarity that facilitates effective political action. Living in a particular city ‘becomes the basis for a shared identity and sense of loyalty that can sit alongside, interrupt, and contest (rather than replace) either national or universal commitments (whether religious, philosophical, or economic) and their oftentimes abstracting, de-spatialising, and depoliticising orientations’ (Bretherton 2014, 98).

However, Sydney is a diverse city and a congregation's ‘embeddedness’ in place is, to some extent, also an embeddedness in one religious tradition. A problem for the Sydney Alliance is its domination by Christian congregations and organisations. 14 of the 40 coalition partners during my fieldwork were Christian, whilst there were only 3 Islamic and 2 Jewish groups. Despite the organisers’ best efforts, there were no Hindu, Buddhist, or Indigenous organisations in the Alliance during my fieldwork. I have argued elsewhere that a probable cause of the difficulty recruiting many so-called minority religious groups is that the community organising model privileges a Christian model of congregational groups (Hancock 2019), as indeed does Australian political life more broadly. While the religious members of the Alliance disperse the organising of the coalition across Sydney’s suburbs—it is mostly through Christian churches, and the participation of diverse non-Christian religious groups remains low.

Doing democracy: rounds and the roll call

On a weekday afternoon in early July 2018, I walked into a café on the main street of my neighbourhood and joined seven other people clustered around a few tables pulled hastily together to accommodate us in the narrow space. We had a meeting booked with the local Member of Parliament to discuss his party’s policy on people seeking asylum and had gathered to rehearse our pitch. Although we had only 45 min before the meeting was scheduled to start, and nearly everyone had met before, we carefully went around the table and identified ourselves with our name and the organisation we represented. Gathered in the café were a minister from a local Baptist church, congregants from two different Catholic parishes within the electorate, a person who had sought asylum in Australia and was currently awaiting an outcome on their visa while living locally, an employee of a refugee service provider, a Sydney Alliance staff organiser, and myself—a resident of the electorate and a member of the National Tertiary Education Union.

This ‘round’ occurred at nearly every meeting I attended during 2018, and at each council meeting of the Sydney Alliance. The practice also happens at public ‘assemblies’—large gatherings of hundreds, even thousands, of people gathered to confront a decision maker (usually a politician) about a particular issue and hold them accountable. At larger assemblies, it is known as the ‘roll call’ and each partner organisation is called by name from the front, with their members standing en bloc in response to the call. The roll call, and rounds, are strategic political practices repeated in community organisations globally. The rationale for them is clear: it is the coalition of diverse organisations representing a broad cross-section of the neighbourhood or city, united for a common cause, that is the source of political power for a community organisation (Wood 2002; see also Braunstein 2017). Conducting a public roll call—like those that occur at assemblies—is a reminder to any politicians or decision makers in the room of that power.

The roll call is more than a show of strength: the practice is also a challenge to any notion of a secular public realm—whether this is done consciously or unconsciously by those who participate. With 19 of the 40 current partner organisations religious, a roll call typically involves either individuals identifying themselves as representing ‘the Muslim Women’s Association’ or a whole group of people standing to identify themselves, collectively, as being from the ‘Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney’ or ‘the Uniting Church Presbytery.’ In large assemblies, where the religious organisations are called to—literally—stand up and be counted, the practice of the roll call is a public symbol of religious intervention in Sydney’s democratic life. The model of political organising utilised by the Sydney Alliance, in its explicit and very public inclusion of religious organisations in political action,

simply does not recognise the terms and conditions of an ideologically secular modernity […] It is […] a plural and complex instantiation of a religious and secular space, not observing the rules and regimes of ‘public secularity’ and refusing to let religious groups marginalise themselves by adopting a narrative of exclusion and victimisation. (Bretherton 2014, 102)

Whilst the roll call is a symbolic assertion of religious agency in the public sphere, it also a reminder of the public and political dimension of faith for religious leaders. A staff organiser, speaking of the significance of mobilising hundreds of people from one religious community in Sydney for the Sydney Alliance’s founding assembly, said,

I think that the potential […] is for community organising […] to legitimise people who already care about social action and the common good, and remind them and remind the [religious leaders] this is core work. This is important. So, at a very basic level—I say basic but it was a lot of work—having 600 people at the founding assembly stand up on behalf of [the religious community] did that. Because sometimes those people, having this visible commitment and sign, that this is who we are as [a religious community] is powerful I think. (Participant 8)

Similarly, when individual ‘leaders’¹ at each meeting are asked to identify themselves as ‘Sarah from the Jewish Board of Deputies’ or ‘Martin from St Vincent de Paul Society’, they also bring their ‘religious selves’ into democratic life and political action. A Catholic priest involved in the Alliance reflected, ‘I never used to dress in clerical collar until after I joined the Alliance. I didn’t own one for 25 years, but I realized that there are times when I’m standing up representing the Church that I need to be able to be seen for it, too’ (Participant 15). This is a refreshing change for many of the activists, some of whom either feel uncomfortable—or have experienced some antagonism—on account of their religious identity in political spaces. One member of the PSA team commented, ‘in general society I have a problem being Jewish […] but not in the Sydney Alliance. I’m quite happy to say I’m Jewish and from the Jewish Board of Deputies […] You don’t have to pretend there, you just be yourself’ (Participant 5). Another member reflected on what it meant to be politically active and openly Christian in Australia, ‘It’s one thing being a Christian, which totally brings a whole set of misconceptions and presuppositions and people totally judge you’ (Participant 3).

Although the idea of a formal separation between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ is firmly established in Australian political culture—and religious interventions in political life are usually viewed with some suspicion, it is not reflective of how citizens with religious faith engage in politics: ‘If you asked these people to check their religious commitments and deepest concerns at the door, on their way into the public arena, they wouldn’t know how to do that. The separation of church and state does not go through the heart of the believer’ (Stout 2010, 197). Publicly stating a citizen’s religious affiliations and convictions, as the practice of the roll call does, isn’t so much opening up the public arena to religious actors as it is an honest accounting of religion’s presence in democratic life.

Doing democracy: relational meetings

Those who question the place of religion in the political sphere often name religious incivility or exclusivism as a threat to democracy and an open, plural society (Berger 2005, 15). The inclusion of religious organisations and individuals, as religious actors, in grassroots politics in Sydney is by no means uncontroversial nor without conflict. The coming-together of diverse citizens—religious and nonreligious, of varying political allegiances—is a kind of ‘postsecular rapproachement’ (Cloke 2010) that requires individuals to ‘put aside other frameworks of difference involving faith and secularism […] to address crucial social issues in the city’ (Cloke and Beaumont 2012, 28). The Sydney Alliance must actively work to hold together the diverse religious and non-religious partner organisations that make up the coalition—and they are not always successful. To manage conflict (religious or otherwise), they rely upon the ‘relational meeting’ and associated relational practices to build thick relationships between the diverse individuals, and organisations that make up the Alliance. In this section, I analyse the use of the relational meeting—and relational culture more broadly—by the Alliance to create a civil and inclusive culture and manage conflict within the group.

The one-to-one, or ‘relational meeting’ is one of the major political tools in the community organising toolkit. No casual meeting over coffee, relational meetings are ‘a product of systematic evaluation and reflection on organising’ (Bretherton 2014, 122) and leaders are carefully trained by the Sydney Alliance in how to hold them. The goal of the relational meeting is to build a ‘public’ relationship—one oriented towards taking political action together on matters of common concern. The meeting should help participants uncover shared values and convergences of self-interest across religious, nonreligious, and other diversities and differences that might form the basis for political action. The thousands of one-one relational meetings which happen between Sydney Alliance participants, and the many relational practices that underpin its day-to-day running, produce a ‘relational culture’ (Participant 2) which the Alliance sees as key to the management of conflict and religious diversity within the coalition.

When religious partner organisations or individuals act uncivilly, or in a manner that is exclusive of other members in the coalition, Sydney Alliance organisers try to manage the conflict through the network of relationships they have built between the organisations. For example, shortly before a large public assembly, a leader from one of the religious partner organisations in the Sydney Alliance made a public statement that was offensive to another partner organisation within the Alliance. To manage the conflict and ensure the continued participation of both organisations in the upcoming assembly, ‘there had to be a face-to-face conversation, mediated by a Sydney Alliance organiser. The trust had been built by that time, between the leaders, because they’d done the relational work’ (Participant 2). In this case, the intervention was successful: both organisations attended the assembly, and remain working together in the Sydney Alliance. However, the relational culture is not able to overcome all conflict caused by the religious and secular diversity in the Alliance. A Catholic representative told the following story,

I sat down next to a lady and we were chatting away quite happily, and I said, ‘Where are you from?’ She said, ‘I’m from [secular organisation].' I said, ‘Oh, you guys do great work […] It must be really challenging,’ and we talked about that for a while, and she said, ‘And where are you from?’ And I told her, and she turned her back and ignored me. She obviously had a problem with our organization. Well, the end of the day, we worked out that there are a few things we did hold in common and that we could discuss, but later on, the [secular organisation] left the Alliance because they didn’t believe that they could work with faith-based groups. (Participant 15)

Despite the efforts of participants in the Sydney Alliance, distrust and suspicion between religious and non-religious participants can emerge in response to events external to the Alliance. In the context of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17)—which implicated several religious organisations in covering up sexual abuse—high-profile court cases involving Catholic clergy, and a drawn-out debate prior to the introduction of same-sex marriage in 2017, the moral legitimacy of religious organisations in Australia and their capacity for incivility has been subject to public debate.

Further, some of the largest religious organisations in the Sydney Alliance are religious groups that are also contracted by State and Federal governments to provide health, welfare, and education services to the community—as is common in contemporary neoliberal cities in many Western nations (see Beaumont and Baker 2011). This complicates the ability of the Alliance to take radical action in some contexts and implicates some of its members in controversies regarding abusive and/or exclusionary practices within the provision of social services. It is also a challenge to ‘postsecular rapprochement’ between religious and trade union groups—as the unions represent workers in social service industries such as education, health, and aged care and may have active campaigns against religious employers.

At the same time, the diverse nature of the Sydney Alliance extends beyond religious diversity to political diversity—and more politically conservative members of partner organisations (who may or may not be religious) can be suspicious of the more progressive participants—particularly trade union partners. At the Sydney Alliance annual general meeting for 2018, a leader from a religious organisation stood up to voice concern that some members of their community had a negative view of trade unions, and may rule out working with them. A union representative immediately responded from the floor that there are similarly a lot of misconceptions in the unions about faith groups (Fieldnotes, 5th December 2018). The Alliance went on to organise a series of workshops led by the trade union partner organisations, where religious participants were invited to learn about the history of trade unions in Australia and the current issues they are fighting. These workshops formed one part of the ongoing work undertaken in the Sydney Alliance to maintain relationships between religious and non-religious partners in the coalition.

The relational practices of the Sydney Alliance are emblematic of an entirely different notion of what democratisation, and a well-functioning democracy, should look like. Rather than seeing the process of democratisation as a series of unconnected, short-term battles over particular issues, the Sydney Alliance—and the community organising model—sees democratisation as a long, slow build towards a rich and deep network of relationships between diverse civil society groups that have power, through the breadth and depth of those relationships, to be consulted, listened to, and respected in the process of political decision making.

The relational practices adopted by the Sydney Alliance are not, therefore, only about building rapport with other team members, or between leaders of different partner organisations. Learning how to conduct an effective relational meeting involves honing one’s skills in ‘listening and storytelling, [and] asking constructive questions’ which are also essential skills for (a) gathering ‘knowledge about the issues affecting [a] community’ and (b) communicating ‘this knowledge to decision makers’ (Braunstein 2017, 46). It is at once a practice in building community and a practice in producing knowledge—both important steps towards building the power of the organisation to take effective political action.

Although a relational meeting is typically one-to-one and runs for approximately 30–45 min, the Sydney Alliance also incorporates what I call relational practices into the daily running of their campaign teams. The first item on each PSA team meeting agenda, after doing a ‘round’, was always a relational question with at least five minutes allocated to discuss the question with another person at the meeting. Much like relational meetings, these practices are often (at least initially) uncomfortable for people used to issue-driven or task-oriented modes of political organising. A member of the PSA team with extensive experience in other forms of politics struggled to buy-in to the relational practices:

You know when you are really busy and you just want to do the work? […] When I’m in that frame of mind, I’m really busy, literally work work work out the door and now it’s Sydney Alliance, that’s when it feels like, urgh. Ok. […] So in those situations there have been a few times when it’s felt forced. (Participant 3)

Where many grassroots political groups engage in task-oriented and issue-driven practices, community organising’s focus on building relationships—and a ‘relational culture’ (Participant 2) is key to the relative longevity and cohesion of the coalition over an extended period of time and across multiple campaigns. An organiser in the Alliance reflected, ‘I think it’s true that people won’t stick together beyond an issue or beyond something short-term, especially across diversity. So I really value that we prioritise that [relational practices]. Because I get demotivated by really task-oriented action over an extended period of time’ (Participant 8).

Given cities are spaces of ‘religious super-diversity’ (Becci, Burchardt, and Giorda 2016), the relational practices of the Sydney Alliance aim at ‘reweaving’ the diverse social fabric of Sydney and, in the process, ‘revitalising’ its democracy (Warren 2001, 19). This is a kind of ‘prophetic’ politics, where ‘the struggle for change is already incarnate in the life and in the structure of the group’ (Melucci 1994, 125). The Sydney Alliance attempts, through its relational meetings and practices, to create a rich democratic culture across diversity at the city-scale.

Conclusion

In March 2020, the world of the Sydney Alliance was turned on its head. Anticipating strict public health orders limiting mobility in Sydney in response to the new threat of COVID-19, the Alliance shifted all its organising online. Using the VOIP platform Zoom to hold meetings and relying on email and telephone to manage the day-to-day organisation of the campaign teams, the ‘relational culture’ described in this article was severely tested. I have written elsewhere about the ways in which the Sydney Alliance attempted to recreate relationality online, and the both the opportunities and constraints the pandemic and its lockdowns presented to the Sydney Alliance. The forced adoption of Zoom lowered barriers to participation for many in the Alliance, and made coordinating work spread across the sprawling city significantly easier for the staff organisers; but it also ‘flattened the distinctive relational culture of the Sydney Alliance’ (Hancock 2022). When my fieldwork drew to a close in early-2021, the Alliance was operating under a hybrid organising model: some, cautious, in-person meetings of campaign teams and working groups; and some Zoom meetings.

The Alliance campaigns on issues of social justice relevant to urban life: equitable access to public transport, support for people seeking asylum, improved access to affordable housing, and environmental justice. Whilst these are all ‘progressive’ issues, ‘postsecular’ partnerships like the Sydney Alliance are moderated by the demands of negotiating diverse and, at times, competing worldviews (see Hancock 2019). Religious communities can be spaces within which powerful critiques of and movements against oppression arise (see, for example, Morris’ 1984 work on the Black Church’s role in the U.S. Civil Rights Movements). Yet religious communities are also internally diverse: progressive and conservative clusters may both thrive within the same religion; and the official doctrine of an organisation may not reflect the political worldview of adherents, but they may feel pressured to conform to those doctrines in public settings. ‘Postsecular’ partnerships like the Sydney Alliance and, indeed, any political coalition across diverse worldviews, are pulled in two different directions: the effort to democratise and make space for worldview plurality appears to lead to political moderation, despite apparent commitment to progressive social change.

Community organising has been heralded as a political model with the potential to ‘replenish’ (Orr 2007, 10) or ‘revitalise’ (Warren 2001, 19) democracy. To the extent that the Sydney Alliance has the potential to both coordinate the political action of people committed to social change—but who would otherwise be engaged in separate, smaller, and potentially less effective campaigns; and draw into political life those who may otherwise engage in charity or social service, rather than seeking solutions through structural change, it also has the potential to contribute to democratising Sydney.

Whilst the inclusion of religious voices in grassroots politics in Sydney seems to promise diversity, the Sydney Alliance is dominated by Christian organisations and participants (despite their efforts to mobilise diverse religious communities): largely, I argue, due to the dual privilege Christianity has in both Australian political life and the community organising model used by the Sydney Alliance (Hancock 2019). Their limited success in mobilising more diverse communities—religious and otherwise—and indeed continued use of an organising model that privileges congregational religious form most like Christianity—leaves unchallenged the white, Christian privilege sitting at the core of Australian political life.

However, it is also a mistake to assume that simple inclusion of religious groups leads to greater plurality, social cohesion, and democratisation. The religious people who participate in the Sydney Alliance do support the fight for justice, equality, and inclusion. But not all religious groups do. As Chapman and Lowndes (2008, 67) argue ‘Faith communities may be a force for social control as well as an arena for empowerment and representation. Indeed, religion may be a source of deep social conflict or a means of social retreat.’ The contribution of religious groups to democratisation in a city like Sydney is, thus, ambivalent.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants in the Democracy in the City Retreat—the other contributors to this Special Feature—for the enlivening discussions at the retreat that shaped this article and for feedback on an early version. I would also like to thank members of the Religion and Politics Writing Group in Australia and the anonymous reviewers, who all gave insightful and useful feedback to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary Hancock

Rosemary Hancock is a Senior Lecturer, Assistant Director of the Institute for Ethics and Society, and Co-convenor of the Institute’s Religion and Global Society Research Focus Area at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The Sydney Alliance calls every member of their partner organisations who participate in the work of the Alliance a ‘leader’.