Introduction

The principal focus of this book is to chart the significance of faith-based organisations (FBOs) and individuals in tackling various forms of social injustice and exclusion in the city. Underlying this trend is a double-edged question stemming from the changing context of interconnectivity between politics and religion. First, how do we explain the increasing capacity of governance within society to embrace, or at least to tolerate, the involvement of faith groups in issues of justice, welfare and care? This part of the question is addressed in Chapter Four. Second, what factors help to explain the increasing propensity for some faith groups to become involved in this way? This part of the core question is addressed in this chapter through the specific lens of Christian faith motivation and involvement in the UK.

Clearly, the multicultural nature of the contemporary postsecular city dictates that any full discussion of faith-into-action should take account of a range of different religions, and of the multifarious ways in which theology and doctrine are practised in different contexts. However, for the purposes of this chapter, we focus on investigating issues relating to the Christian faith in the UK context that we know best, realising that our account provides but a partial answer to the wider question of religious involvement. Our basic argument is that while it is relatively straightforward to discuss how political, social and economic contexts shape the ways in which FBOs operate, it is more difficult to understand the changing nature of Christian agency in response to these contexts. Underlying these responses there is a significant move from faith simply as personal belief to faith-as-practice, but this shift is informed by a number of different theological perspectives, of which we discuss three: evangelicalism, radical orthodoxy (RO) and postmodern theology. The radical faith praxis we address here, then, is not the ‘radicalisation’ that has been associated with, for example, Islamic extremism, but a sometimes unruly mix of often rather ordinary faith-motivated people who have become determined to act on social issues, and in so doing discover something significant about their faith identity.

It is important to emphasise that religious commitment to social action has a long and varied history, and that at key points in that history – for example, the emergence of 19th-century social reformers such as Shaftesbury and Wilberforce in the UK (Prochaska, 2006) – social politics and religion have been inescapably entwined.