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There is increased interest in faith-based social service provision in recent years, both in the United States and across Europe. While faith-based organizations provide welcome and needed services, there are several potential problems of social inclusion which involve gender, including decreased availability of social services when faith-based organizations are expected to compensate for cuts in government spending, potential for religious discrimination in employment, and potential for religious discrimination against recipients.

Prior sociological research has demonstrated that religious selves are gendered. Using the case of female inmates—some of the most disadvantaged Americans—this article shows that dominant messages constructing the religious self are not only gendered, but also deeply intertwined with race and class. Data from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork on religion inside a U.S. state women’s prison reveal that religious volunteers—predominately middle-class African American women—preached feminine submissiveness and finding a “man of God” to marry to embody religious ideals. However, these messages were largely out of sync with the realities of working class and poor incarcerated women, especially given their temporary isolation from the marriage market and the marital prospects in the socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods to which many would return. These findings suggest that scholars must pay attention to how race, class, and gender define dominant discourses around the religious self and consider the implications for stratification for those who fail to fulfill this dominant ideology.

The role of religious groups in changing inequality has usually been a bottom up approach. Whether it was serving meals to the needy or sheltering the homeless, the vast majority of religious groups have addressed problems of inequality, not by addressing the causes of hunger and homelessness, but rather by offering assistance to those already in need. Rarely have religious groups become engaged in explicitly political activities that challenge structures that create large scale inequality. In this article, I examine the first state level efforts by LA Voice, a congregation-based community group that has worked to ameliorate inequality through political organizing with churches in largely poor minority communities throughout Los Angeles. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from field research and interviews during their first campaign season in 2012, I examine how these religious groups organized around a controversial political issue—an important move away from their traditional community-based organizing—and how their understandings of faith informed this work. Specifically, LA Voice helped pass a state-level initiative that directly challenged systems of inequality; Proposition 30, which raised taxes on the wealthy to fund public education. This political work highlighted long known internal struggles between congregation members who fought these actions and those who recognized the need in their communities and enthusiastically took up this work. This article ends with a discussion of how these early efforts resulted in further engagement by other member congregations.