Religious Characteristics of Government-Funded Faith-Related Social Service Organizations

Government funding of religious organizations to provide public social servic-es is becoming increasingly legitimate in American social welfare. A possible unintended consequence of government funding is the erosion of religiousness in these organizations. However, lack of clarity about the nature of religious characteristics limits accurate assessment of the threat of government funding to organizational religiousness. This paper uses findings from a comparative case study of two government-funded faith-related social service organizations in the Midwest as an initial test of the utility of Sider and Unruh’s (2004) recently proposed typology of religious characteristics of social service and educational organizations The two studied organizations maintained high commitments to their religious convictions even while securing the majority of their revenues from government sources. Based on this finding, this study posits a two-dimensional conceptualization of organizational religiousness that helps to explain how faith-based organizations with substantial govern-ment funding can successfully resist secularization. SOCIAL POLICY HAS FOCUSED INCREASINGLY SINCE THE MID 1990S ONthe potential of community and faith-based groups to supplement or replace government in addressing social problems (De Vita, 1999