Faith-Based Organizations and International Development: An Overview
Faith-Based Organizations and International Development: An Overview
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基于信仰的组织与国际发展：概述
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发表时间：
2008
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通讯作者：
G. Clarke
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作者：
G. Clarke
发展研究传统上忽视了宗教和信仰的作用及其在整个发展中世界穷人生活中的作用。像其他社会科学一样，它深受“世俗化理论”的影响，这种理论认为（在威尔逊的经典表述中），随着社会的现代化，“宗教机构、行动和意识失去了它们的社会意义”（威尔逊1992:49）这种影响在两个关键方面表现得很明显：在“世俗还原论”中——忽视宗教变量，而倾向于其他社会学属性，如阶级、种族和性别——以及在“唯物决定论”中——在解释个人或机构行为时忽视非物质的，尤其是宗教的动机在这方面，学者和决策者认为贫穷是物质匮乏的问题，消除贫穷是一项技术任务；他们系统性地忽视了信仰作为分析视角的作用，穷人通过信仰体验贫困并将其合理化，而富人则通过信仰同情他们的挣扎并提供实际支持。捐助者并非完全不受诸如帮助穷人的宗教冲动等变量的影响。然而，在实践中，他们只与少数以信仰为基础的组织接触，主要是与主流基督教会（天主教和新教）有联系的专门发展组织，而忽视其他宗教传统的话语和组织。
Development studies has traditionally neglected the role of religion and faith and its role in the lives of the poor throughout the developing world. Like other social sciences, it was heavily influenced by ‘secularization theory’, the belief (in Wilson’s classic formulation) that ‘religious institutions, actions and consciousness lose their social significance’ over time as societies modernize (Wilson 1992: 49).1 This influence was evident in two key respects: in ‘secular reductionism’ — the neglect of religious variables in favour of other sociological attributes such as class, ethnicity and gender — and in ‘materialistic determinism’ — the neglect of nonmaterial, especially religious, motivations in explaining individual or institutional behaviour.2 In this vein, academics and policymakers perceived poverty as a matter of material deprivation and its elimination a technical undertaking; they systematically ignored the role of faith as an analytical lens through which the poor experienced and rationalized poverty and through which the well-off empathized with their struggles and provided practical support. Donors were not completely immune to variables such as the religious impulse to help the poor. In practice, however, they engaged with a narrow range of faith-based organizations, mainly specialized development organizations associated with the mainstream Christian Churches (Catholic and Protestant), ignoring discourses and organizations from other religious traditions.