Faith in Action: Understanding the Relationship between Faith and Practice for Evangelical Humanitarian Organisations

Abstract

The increased interest in and willingness to consider the role of religious actors, ideas and practices in the IR discipline is a promising development of contemporary scholarship. Within the study of humanitarianism in particular, attention to the range of ways in which religion infuses action and meaning in the global space has raised important questions about how best to go about answering the questions of when and how these religious factors matter. However, the slow pace at which the field is moving away from secular framings of humanitarianism means that religious actors are still largely under-conceptualised, and poorly understood. This disproportionately affects perceptions of religious actors that do not obviously resemble the mainstream aid community, such as evangelical Christian faith-based organisations (FBOs). Understanding the relationship between their religious identity and their humanitarian practices in a manner that does not reproduce such framings is an important research task to contribute to this field. This thesis seeks to advance conceptualisation of this relationship by providing such a theoretical framework. It also contributes original empirical evidence through case studies to which this framework is applied. It explores the relationship between identity and practice by asking what role theological commitments play in guiding the humanitarian practices of evangelical Christian FBOs. It does so by examining three evangelical humanitarian agencies - World Vision, Samaritan's Purse, and Compassion International - as they engaged with two humanitarian disasters in the Asia Pacific region: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, and the 2008 Cyclone Nargis in the Ayeyarwady delta region in Myanmar. It finds that their evangelical theological commitments play an important part in constructing an organisational identity and set of values for each agency, which then orients them towards certain styles of response. However, this understanding of the role of faith is incomplete without also considering the constitutive role of context in both giving the boundaries in which those beliefs can be expressed, and supplying important pressures, constraints, and demands that shape that expression. Their theological commitments created a framework of action for these evangelical FBOs that interacted constitutively with a prism of environmental factors in order to produce humanitarian practices that both reflected and diverged from the broader mainstream response, depending on circumstances. These findings highlight the importance of approaching religious organisations as complex and agentive actors, who adopt, reject or adapt to the pressures of the dynamic environments in which they work. It is an insight necessary not just for dealing with evangelical FBOs working in the humanitarian space, but in understanding religious actors across various sites of global politics. Show more