Spiritual Districts: The Origins and Dynamics of US Cities with Unusually High Concentrations of Parachurch Organizations

Abstract

Parachurch organizations are Christian, heavily evangelical Protestant, 501(c)(3) public charities focused on providing religious goods and services outside of any congregational or denominational sponsorship. The parachurch sector in the United States has been growing rapidly in recent decades, yet this growth has been highly uneven across communities. Many communities have very few parachurch organizations, while a few exhibit incredibly higher concentrations of them than would be expected based only upon their religious composition. Using IRS records, we isolate communities with the greatest concentrations of parachurch organizations, and then, drawing upon ideas developed in studies of industrial districts, we address this puzzle by exploring four of those communities, which we refer to as spiritual districts: Tulsa, Oklahoma; Nashville, Tennessee; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Washington, D.C. We utilize interviews with organizational leaders and archival records to attempt to account for the makeup of and dynamics of each of the four unique clusters of parachurch organizations, concluding with a discussion of how understanding spiritual districts can contribute to greater understanding of the phenomenon of industrial districts.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Mattachine Society’s Use of Loose Coupling as a Strategy for Covert Political Action

“…Second, I show how organizing in such a fashion is a process. While much of the organizational research resembles a snapshot of an organization at a given time, for example, how parachurches develop (Scheitle et al 2017) or how SPEs engage in structural financing (Dharan 2002), this article shows how loose coupling enables flexibility over time. This allows for a more complex understanding of the benefits that a loosely coupled system provides.…”

“…They are "religious organizations that are non-denominational in nature : : : [that] have arisen to combat what 'religious conservatives' see as government intrusion into the family and to advance their own 'Christian family' agenda" (Starks 2009: 2). That is, they engage in work under the guise of religion, but without a formal association to a given church or denomination (Scheitle et al 2017). This enables the parachurch to engage in "religious" work without having to abide by the same government regulations as formal, nonprofit churches.…”

“…Specifically, parachurches are created in response to the perceived threat of government intrusion into the family (Starks 2009). An additional external contingency is also the legal restriction on lobbying and political work (Scheitle et al 2017). SPEs, however, are created when corporations experience the threat of exposing financial engineering used to hide assorted bad news (Dharan 2002).…”

The Mobilization of Evangelical Protestants in the Nonprofit Sector: Parachurch Foundings Across U.S. Counties, 1998–2016

“…For example, Tulsa County, OK, has one of the highest concentrations of parachurch organizations in the United States. Our examination of the organizations in the county found that many of their founders were directly or indirectly connected to Oral Roberts University as alums, board members, or otherwise (Scheitle, Erica, John ).…”