International Journal of Sociology and Social PolicyEmerald Article: Religion, the state and disaster relief in the United States and IndiaNels Paulson, Cecilia Menjívar

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Religion, the state anddisaster relief in the

United States and IndiaNels Paulson

Social Science Department, University of Wisconsin-Stout,Menomonie, Wisconsin, USA, and

Cecilia Menjı́varSchool of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University,

Tempe, Arizona, USA

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the place of religion in civil society and how thatrelates to the problem of social order.

Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory comparative case study was conducted of floodrelief in Mumbai with the relief following the Katrina disaster in the summer of 2005, using aqualitative content analysis of regional media documents.

Findings – Amore fluid and less clearly defined division between religion and government in theUSAwas found that created opportunities bywhich amuch larger response by religious institutions occurred.Religiously-based disaster relief in theUS case is conductedmore throughgroups andnetworks,while inthe Indian case, religious-based relief takes place more through values and norms. These conditions ledto more immediate social order following the floods in Mumbai but less intensive cooperationand coordination that was not tied to religious institutions. After Katrina in the US case, coordinationand cooperation were less immediate but of higher intensity and explicitly tied to religious institutions.

Research limitations/implications – This research offers new categories for understanding therole of religion in civil society by focusing on disaster relief in a comparative manner, proposing aframework based on qualitative and exploratory research for pursuing more deductive andexplanatory quantitative analyses in the future.

Originality/value – Finally, instead of assuming religion as either a source of conflict or a source ofsocial order, dependent on the nature of a given religious group, this paper shows the additionalcomplexity and variation in social order that is dependent on the relationship between religion andstate and the social context in a given time and place.

KeywordsUnited States of America, India, Floods, Society, Aid agencies, Religion, State, Disaster relief,Civil society, Social order

Paper type Research paper

1. IntroductionThis paper intends to further our understanding of the comparative place of religion incivil society. Specifically, what is the contribution of the government-religion nexus

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/0144-333X.htm

The authors are grateful to both David Altheide and Juliane Schober at Arizona State Universityfor early support in shaping this project. Thank you to Joseph E. Trainor, Daniel Marks, andPat Young at the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center for their tremendous help inthe literature review process. Finally, thank you also to the anonymous reviewers who greatlyimproved this paper with their thorough feedback.

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Received 16 August 2011Revised 2 October 2011

Accepted 4 October 2011

International Journal of Sociology andSocial Policy

Vol. 32 No. 3/4, 2012pp. 179-196

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0144-333X

DOI 10.1108/01443331211214758

to social order? Much scholarship, especially since 9/11, has addressed the role ofreligion in contributing to conflict ( Juergensmeyer, 2003 or Lincoln, 2003). We departfrom this scholarship to examine another piece of the puzzle and thus offer a morecomplex picture of the conditions by which religion can foster coordination andcooperation (the two concepts by which we operationalize social order here)[1]. To doso, we explore the relationship between government and religion in disaster relief afterflooding in New Orleans, USA, and Mumbai, India through media reports about theseefforts. These two sites, ostensibly dissimilar in many respects, offer fruitful empiricalground for understanding the complex relationships between religion and governmentthat exist cross-nationally in the world today. In both cases religion is a source of socialorder, however, the mechanisms for, immediacy and intensity of, coordination andcooperation varies. And media reports, in contrast to interviews with those involved,capture unobtrusively an important aspect of these efforts that would be missed ifthose involved are asked to reflect on their actions. We show that religion andgovernment have different relationships that produce both coordination andcooperation according to specificities in the context where they coalesce.

We focus on contemporary discussions, both politically and theoretically, over thenecessary relationship between religion and government in providing societies withvarious benefits during heightened stress and/or disorder (Benthall, 1993; Clerkin andGrønbjerg, 2007; Elliott and Hayward, 2009; Fox, 2008; Wuthnow, 2005). Andempirically we focus on disaster relief and response as a site to capture vividly therelationship between government, religion, and social order, as depicted in the media.The USA is generally presumed to be a secular democracy, a question that nonethelesshas been strongly debated (Finke and Stark, 2005; Hamburger, 2002). However, thedivision between religion (a cultural system that separates the sacred and profane) andthe secular state (government) in the US context becomes blurred when juxtaposed toother cases, a blurring that helps constitute the structure of social order. To investigatethe consequences of a blurring of the lines of demarcation between religion andgovernment, we turn to the case of India to more sharply delineate the dynamics of theUS case.

In the Mumbai disaster relief Indian religiosity facilitated internally-driven valuesand externally-driven norms to produce immediate social order. For instance, incontrast to the immediate activities in New Orleans, very little looting occurred inMumbai and people generally looked for opportunities to assist one another. Theexplanation is perhaps best supported by Goffman’s (1963) observations of publicbehavior. He suggests that people pursue their objectives depending on the “modes” ofseeking a specific goal. That is, those who follow a particular pattern do not necessarilyhave the same objective, but by following the same normative modes of behavior theyreach a certain level of social order (Goffman, 1963). In the Mumbai case, Indiansfollowed prescriptions for normative behavior within the elevated state of distresssurrounding the floods; this behavior was informed by internalized religious valuesand externally understood norms. In the absence of a strong central state, othermechanisms for social order were activated based on general Indian religioustraditions, which suggests a different relationship between religion and governmentunderlying such variant mechanisms as compared to the US case.

In the Katrina disaster in the USA, groups and networks were the primarymechanism by which social order was facilitated through religion. Granovetter (1973)

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suggests that a “preponderance of weak ties” contributes to greater levels of socialorder (Blau and Schwartz, 1984; Hechter and Horne, 2003). In the US case we saw chaosand disorder in New Orleans and elsewhere during the disaster, but shortly thereafter awell-organized network of religious groups emerged around the country, contributingto social order through relief efforts. Participating in civil society through religiousgroups in the US was how people relied on religion for establishing social order afterthe Katrina disaster.

In part because of the blurred, amalgamated meaning of religion and government inthe US case, individuals in this context tended to use religion in a more clearlyinstitutionalized manner to bring about cooperation and coordination. This produced adelayed response to social order through groups and networks, rather than theimmediate social order seen in the Indian case. This is not to say that Indian social orderwas superior to that found in the USA. Religious non-governmental organizations(NGOs) and networks in the US case responded with higher intensity of cooperation andcoordination than was the case in India. This paper argues that social order emergedthrough religion in both contexts, but the different relationships between religionand government helped yield different mechanisms for and elucidations of cooperationand coordination. The difference in the timing of when social order emerged in the twocases – immediate in the Indian case and more delayed in the US case – rests on thedissimilar relationship between religion and government in both cases.

2. Disaster reliefWhy investigate disaster relief when asking questions about religion and social order?First, we look at disasters because such contexts intensify social phenomena and revealunderlying sociological patterns (Kleinenberg, 2002). Second, within civil society,particularly under secular government structures, religious institutions often play amajor role in mobilizing financial and spiritual relief to those most radically affected bydisasters (Smith, M., 1978). Beyond the influence of religious institutions, religion worksas an identity construct that also contributes to mental and spiritual relief to the victimsof disasters. The extent to which religion-based relief efforts function as a part of stateaction varies from context to context. It is this variation that we seek to capture in thispaper insofar as different religious-political contexts shape the place of religion in civilsociety and lead to different modalities of social order.

Disaster research has been typically aimed at assessing the level of vulnerability of aregion or group prior to the occurrence of a natural hazard (Wisner et al., 2005). This istraditionally a pragmatic approach to understanding how to best prepare vulnerablepopulations for future hazards. A less studied area is post-disaster relief, studies ofwhich most often are directed toward governmental relief efforts (Schneider, 1992;Landis, 1999). Certainly, religion’s role in the alleviation of vulnerability is importantto study; however, the immediate salience and visibility of the role of religion inpost-disaster situations provides a unique opportunity to look at the place of religion indifferent societies. It provides an empirical site to examine the government-religionnexus away from a strict focus onwhether religious organizations help in disaster relief.

Previous research has evaluated voluntary non-governmental relief; however, thiswork has typically focused on efforts beyond religious organizations. Rodrı́quez et al.(2006) studied relief efforts related to hurricane Katrina in the US to evaluate theunique new relief effort arrangements within the broader social system that worked

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to respond to the challenges posed by this disaster. Further, in a statement made to theUS Accountability Office, charitable assistance in the non-governmental sector hasbeen noted to make it “easier for survivors of disasters to get the help they need”(Fagnoni, 2005, p. 1). However, neither study investigated the relationship betweenreligion and government in their evaluations of post-disaster response. We build onthis scholarship to focus on religious relief within civil society, adding a comparativecase to help us elucidate key links between religion-government and social order.

In the 1970s researchers found that congregations in the US evaluate their relief bybalancing the demands of disaster conditions and the capability of organizationalresources (Ross and Smith, 1974; Smith, M., 1978). These studies focused on morenuanced aspects of the role of religious groups than the larger religious-governmentalrelationship in relief efforts or cross-cultural comparisons. In a study focusing on Utah,Bolin and Bolton (1986, p. 219) found that:

Utah victims, Mormon or not, tended most often to use aid from the Mormon Church,sometimes to the exclusion of aid from federal, state, and private disaster organizations(such as the Red Cross).

However, this study only focused on the function of local religious groups. By includinga cross-national comparative analysis of the relationship between religion andgovernment we seek to further understand how these social institutions constructsocial order in post-disaster situations.

More recent research has articulated a broad picture of the place of religion inproviding relief services outside of government. McCarthy and Castelli (1997) found thatfaith-based organizations provide a wide range of services, and note that a shift toreligious social service sponsored by government is not feasible regardless of the capitalinvested, evenwhen it appears that the government makes a distinct effort to fund thesefaith-based organizations. Pipa (2006) offered a broader picture of religious relief afterhurricane Katrina, noting particularly the “lack of clarity” in coordination betweengovernment and faith-based groups and the “weak link” between the US’ FederalEmergency Management Agency (FEMA) and general non-profit relief efforts.However, this author did not evaluate the perceptions of religion in civil society capturedby either the media or lay individuals. Other recent research has focused on how faithworkers have produced multiple forms of non-governmental assistance to immigrants(Menjı́var, 2006). In these cases religion offers a spiritual directive to seek out those inneed and work outside governmental social service efforts and discourse, at times evenagainst them. However, the immediacy of disasters makes the religious response morevisible, especially in themedia, and a cross-national comparison enhances that visibility.We attempt to add to this body of work by focusing on religious organizations’ efforts indisaster relief as depicted in the media from a comparative perspective.

3. Case studiesHurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast of the US between August 25 and 29, 2005,hitting the city of New Orleans as a level four hurricane[2]. She became known as one ofthe most powerful hurricanes to hit US landfall in recordedmemory. Over 90,000 squaremiles of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were declared federal disaster areas,an area equivalent to the entire UK. Over one million people were displaced, a numbercomparable to the displacement during the great depression of the 1930s.

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The disaster and its consequences were enormous, but given the unique geography,topography, socio-economic and demographic make-up and residential segregation ofNew Orleans, not everyone suffered equally. This disaster disproportionately affectedpoor racialminority populations,mostlyAfricanAmericans, because the structures thatproduce vulnerability intensify and become revealed in disasters (Kleinenberg, 2002).The levees holding back water to Lake Pontchartrain broke and the city was left almostcompletely underwater. One quarter of the population of New Orleans was alreadyliving below the poverty line and thus approximately 100,000 people were not able toevacuate. They became stranded both in their homes and in public arenas, such as thecivic center and the Superdome sports center. While victims waited for food, water, andevacuation, therewere reports of rape,murder, looting, and an overall collapse of civility.It has been estimated that well over 1,300 people died, and damage estimates werearound $81.2 billion in 2005 US dollars. However, soon after the disaster vast reliefefforts were organized, particularly by civil society organizations, and coordination andcooperation were established with high intensity.

One month earlier, on July 26, 2005, the Maharashtra state in Indiaexperienced the eighth largest 24-hour rainfall in recorded history (over 37 inches),which continued through the beginning of August. The city of Mumbai was hitparticularly hard considering the extreme vulnerability of many poorly constructedneighborhoods. People had little to no prior warning as the public information systemdid not properly predict the storm or informed the media about the devastatingweather. Over 1,000 people were reported dead. Some of the major problems were thesewer system overflowing and dead animals floating through the city, both addingdisease to the already partially displaced population of 18 million in Mumbai, India’slargest city. Importantly, Mumbai and New Orleans have similar distributions ofvulnerability for certain populations along a flood plain, and in both cases the poorwere significantly more affected by the disasters. However, not one case of looting,rape, or murder was reported in Mumbai; social order (again, in terms of coordinationand cooperation) emerged immediately among citizens despite a lack of governmentsupport. Later disaster relief-both governmental and non-governmental-was minimal,at least compared to the US case. As such, both cases illustrate how social orderemerges in disaster relief, but the form and immediacy of that social order varies. Thispaper argues that the role of religion in civil society, highlighted in the dissimilarrelationship between religion and government in both contexts, helps explain thisvariance.

We are interested in the comparative angle that India offers in shedding light on theUS case, in part because of the immediate importance of the two disaster contexts, butalso because of the analytical payoff in comparing two different cases that yield similaroutcomes. This logic of comparison is informed by the work of Mill (1888) and Peters(1998). According to Mill (1888), there are two manners by which comparative analysisis best accomplished. One is by selecting cases that are similar in some key respectsthat lead to different outcomes, what is called the method of difference. The secondmanner is to select cases that are dissimilar in certain respects but produce a similaroutcome, deemed the method of agreement. A second methodological dichotomy isdiscussed by Peters (1998), where we choose between a most similar system of researchdesign and a most different system of research design. The former involves selectingcases that are very similar on many attributes, so that we may more easily distinguish

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the variables in which the cases diverge. The latter involves choosing the mostvigorously divergent cases, so that we may gain a more complete picture of a particularsocial pattern.

The logic of the analysis we present here follows the method of agreement in Mill’s(1888) logic and the most different research design according to Guy (1998). Weinvestigate the similar outcome of social order by looking at different socio-politicalsystems. While these two cases do take on slightly different forms of social order, theyare similar in that they both result in cooperation and coordination. In addition, withrelation to the breadth and substance of socio-political contexts in the world, the casesselected are quite different. India and the USA have two very different histories andcultural, economic, and political structures. India only recently became independentfrom colonization and has still not recovered fully from its historically dependenteconomic and political position, while the US is today a center of world power.In addition, while India is a democracy in a similar manner to the US (India is oftenreferred to as the largest democracy in the world), government and religion theremaintain a more clearly defined (and separated) relation than in the USA.

Most importantly, religion is embodied differently in India and the USA. First, whilereligiosity is high and NGOs do exist plentifully in India’s robust civil society, these arelargely not religious organizations. In the US there are more faith-based NGOs, andreligiosity takes on a more institutionalized meaning compared to India. This may bedue to religious traditions in India not carrying the same expectations as religioustraditions in the US for regular attendance at weekly gatherings and otherorganizational differences. Regardless, we argue that such variation does impact therelationship between religion and government. Some of these descriptive characteristicsare visible through statistics on Indian and US values according to the World ValuesSurvey, Wave IV (1999-2001)[3]. Table I shows the higher levels of involvement inreligious organizations in the US compared to India. In addition, Table I shows that evenwhen Indians do not belong to religious organizations, they still find comfort andstrength in religion. In fact, they do so at higher levels than US respondents[4].

We argue that religion provides a set of values and informs normative behavior inIndia, but not institutionalized in associational life as in the US, with importantconsequences for the government-religion nexus. We do not imply that religion is morecontrolled by government in the USA. In fact, government control over religion, and theofficial relationship between religion and government, is much stronger in India than inthe USA. This is demonstrated by statistics on the relationship between religion andgovernment according to “Religion and State Project, Round 1” data consolidated withinthe Association of Religion Data Archives (Fox and Sandler, 2002). When comparingcomposite scores of religious regulation and religious legislation in India and the USA,

Belong to religious org. Comfort and strengthNot belong Belong No Yes

USA 42.80% 57.20% 20.40% 79.60%India 82.30% 17.70% 15.40% 84.60%n 2,162 1,040 529 2,522

Source: World Values Survey IV (1999-2001)

Table I.Percentage ofrespondents in the USAand India for belonging toa religious organizationand finding comfort andstrength in religion

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the US rated a 0 out of 27 and India rated a 7 out of 27, with higher scores indicatinghigher levels of regulation and legislation[5].We argue that such data do not offer the fullpicture of how religion and government interacts in a given context. These data do notillustrate the different ways in which the relationship between religion and statemanifests itself, such as within a disaster relief context. The picture becomes morecomplex, but also clearer, under such conditions.

We therefore turn to examining discourse in the context of disaster relief as reportedin the media, so as to step away from the direct views of the actors involved.We follow aFoucauldian discourse analysis approach that is useful in understanding these complexconditions (Foucault, 1990 [1978]). For example, Abeysekara (2002, p. 29) argues that bytracking discourse one can determine the meaning of religion contingent on “particularnarratives, persons, practices, and institutions” that “come into central view atparticular times and places, marginalizing other competing discourses.” And Brass(1997, p. 21) notes, society is a “battlefield of competing beliefs, ideologies, faiths andworldviews, behind each one of which lays a set of power relations.” In this sense,religion is context-dependent, and by focusing on instances when power relations aremost visible, such as those surrounding disaster relief efforts, religion takes on its mostvisible meaning[6]. This meaning is dependent on discursive disjunctures andconjunctures that offer points of resistance by competing actors, especially in publicspaces of meaning production like themedia. For Foucault, this competition leads to oneconceptualization of religion in civil society hegemonically producing the meaning forthat moment (Abeysekara, 2002). As such, we look at the disaster relief in New Orleansand Mumbai to examine:

. variation in the place of religion in civil society; and

. how this leads to social order, albeit through different modalities, in both cases.

4. Data and methodsOur observations are largely based on media accounts, which provide spaces in whichreligion becomes “visible” in civil society[7]. This allows us to examine the frames usedto express the relationship between religion and the government. We use the definitionof civil society developed by David Herbert (2003) in which civil society constitutes boththe space made possible by democratizing effects as well as the space in whichdemocratizing processes operate somewhat separate from government or privateopinions (NGOs, religious or otherwise, help constitute those opinions). Thus, in thispaper, civil society may be generally understood as the socially and discursivelyconstructed space that comprises public knowledge, opinions, and actions in a way thatdifferentiates them from the state and private institutions.We focus onmedia depictionsbecause they represent the voice that cues debates and arguments about the place ofreligion in relief efforts. Studying media documents at a regional level offers aninsightful picture of patterns of governmental and religious relationships that would bemore pervasive than occasional local news stories by themselves. In addition, the mediaoccupies a similar status of autonomy in each state; therefore, the value of examiningcomparatively media accounts in these contexts is useful. By not relying on the directelicitation of data (e.g. interviews) we avoid using accounts of respondents who arehighly sensitive to how their politics and position (and what they say) may beinterpreted, for whom it is politically imperative to manage impressions of themselves.

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Thus, we rely on content analysis of media documents in the two months followingthe Mumbai flood and two months following hurricane Katrina. Using Lexis Nexis wesampled 125 documents for each disaster using the key terms “religion, Katrina” and“flood, Mumbai” (and “Bombay” as well), respectively[8]. By eliminating duplicates orannouncements of religious organizations asking for money we found 51 pertinentarticles addressing Katrina and 29 addressing Mumbai[9]. Lexis Nexis was an idealsource for finding national and regional documents in the USA and in India, and localnews outlets were avoided to keep the scale of analysis at the level of the nation-state.Thus, specific local news documents (particularly those from NewOrleans and the stateof Louisiana and Mumbai and the state of Maharashtra) were not used so as to keepsymmetry of data for comparison. After reviewing the articles we developed a protocolto distill categories for “transforming this collection ofmaterials intowritings that speakto wider, outside audiences” (Emerson et al., 1995, p. 142). Next we establishedpre-arranged node trees in NUD*IST that included all the themes, frames, and generalcategories that emerged while building the protocol; these categories are largelyexplored below, specifically those that define the place of religion and government inrelief efforts. This process of developing protocol is essential to media analysis(Altheide, 1996) as it involves a careful process of “reflexive or dialectical interplaybetween theory and data whereby theory enters in at every point, shaping not onlyanalysis but how social events come to be perceived and written up as data in the firstplace” (Emerson et al., 1995, p. 167). Therefore, while this process was largely inductive,the theoretical approach described above was integral to the coding process. In the end,this study analyzed 80 documents that were generated in the twomonths following eachdisaster. We do recognize that amajority of these (51) address the NewOrleans disaster;it is, however, a variation that becomes an important part of the argument that will beteased out below.

5. Religion and government in disaster reliefKatrina floodThe New Orleans articles demonstrate how religion emerged as a way to offer meaningin light of the disaster and distinguished itself as an entity operating outsidegovernmental actions (although this was later negotiated). That meaning actuallyseemed to reinforce the necessary conditions by which formal religious organizationsclaimed legitimacy. Religious organizationswere able tomobilize resources through thislegitimacy to help secure coordination and cooperation on behalf of disaster victims. Inprinciple, religion was generally tied to communities with shared discourse andpractices, and was informed by what was often deemed as a “religious organizationalapparatus” (e.g. Catholic Charities USA, The Dream Center in Los Angeles, or CampKatrina in Colorado and Mississippi). Through this apparatus religion initially meant“controlling” actions of “religious” people in disaster relief through language thatcarried some authoritative weight beyond the state. While interpretations of the Koran,the Torah, or the Bible provided reasons to believe the disaster relief indeed followedstrict moral codes, these were provided in the frame of a “calling”:

Kathy Powers, a staff member at Aurora who receives the volunteers, had similar sentiments.“Most people speak of feeling a real compelling call,” Powers said. “It’s a feeling that this iswhat God wants me to do, and many say it’s so strong they simply cannot say no.” (ReligionNews Service, 2005b, November 2).

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The “calling” was directed toward specific religious communities. Several individualswere featured in media articles, from Rick Warren to “Pastor Mary” from Washingtonin “feel good” anecdotal pieces articulating the meaning of religious people as helpers(Religion News Service, 2005a, September 12). One such article focused on ReverendS. Smith Sr of Houston. He was shown in a picture at the bottom of the page activelyinvolved in coordinating relief at the Houston Astrodome sports center, where manydisplaced were sent, and is depicted in the caption as a “dynamo” in helping others.The article offers his account of the “calling” to do relief for Katrina:

“I couldn’t be one who just stood on the outside and watched,” Smith said. “Once we gotinvolved, somehow, God provided us the resources we needed.” (Los Angeles Times, 2005,September 15).

Religion was couched in language that spoke to institutional fields as distinctlyChristian or Muslim, for example, and effectiveness and altruism (i.e. selflessness, love,charity, help, hope, virtue, compassion, collaboration and non-discrimination) weredefined as the linked meanings of the more abstract morality fields. This is interestingconsidering how often religion can be manipulated as an identity that allows andencourages violence and discrimination ( Juergensmeyer, 2003). Instead, theinstitutionalized altruistic nature was repeatedly framed as the meaning of religionfor the production of social order in almost every Katrina article:

Most importantly, according to relief workers with religious groups, is that the spirit ofgiving permeates the teachings of all churches. “The church is not there for itself, but forothers,” said Clyde Pressley, executive director for the Disaster Recovery Ministry in Mobile.“We get a sense of joy helping others. We high-five one another after we’ve done something”(Religion News Service, 2005c, September 21).

This interpretation of religion provided much of the reasoning behind religiousorganizations and their efficiency and immediacy in contributing to relief. Reliefassistance was initially seen as something that religious groups simply do regardlessof government relief:

As you guys know, this is really the mission of the church and other religious institutions.They are generally the first people in the community to step forward. This is what they do(Cable News Network, 2005, September 27).

In these accounts we can begin to see that the controlling and altruistic nature of religion,through the “calling” of faithworkers,was emphasized as a significant element in framingrelief efforts and social control. These accounts legitimized the work of religiousorganizations, but this legitimacy became even more accentuated when religion came tomeangovernment-sponsored (FEMA) relief aswell. This is to say that eventually religiousrelief and FEMA relief came to be discussed with considerably less differentiation. Thisblurring of the relationship between religious relief and government relief offered furtheropportunities for religious organizations to articulate their legitimacy.

Initially when government was discussed in the various documents as an institutionor definitive entity it was largely confined to the George W. Bush administration orFEMA; in any case, this reference meant the federal government. In many cases thearticles specifically framed government as an entity outside of “politicians”, the political“left”, or “civil libertarians”. Interestingly, however, what mattered was not howgovernmentwas defined in relief situations, but rather the essential and functional ways

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government relief was framed. Government relief was defined as bureaucratic, slow, andinefficient. The concept of “red tape” was brought up often, especially when contrastedto religious groups’ effectiveness:

“Being on site, we can immediately see the needs and in many occasions have been able toreach out and get something settled rather than going through the bureaucracy ofgovernment red tape,” she said (The Denver Post, 2005, September 16).

Bureaucratic red tape was brought up as the number one problem that religious groupswere able to avoid in providing relief. Indeed, religious groups were able to fill the voidleft by the inefficient relief efforts of the government (e.g. FEMA); they had the liberty tooperate free of constraints where government workers were restricted. One pastorrelated this freedomof religious relief compared to governmental relief in ametaphoricalanecdote:

Churchofficials offer several reasons for their quick response.Hale, the SpanishFort senior pastor,credited a lack of bureaucracy. In his Internet blog, Hale alluded to Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’sTravels,” comparing FEMA to Gulliver tied down on the isle of Lilliput, and said the churcheswere able to move freely like the tiny Lilliputians (Religion News Service, 2005c, September 21).

It is important to note that the overall picture of slow government relief provided a spacefor quick, efficient religious relief to be visible and enviable. Government discourses,through the media, began relying on the meaning of the effectiveness of religious reliefas part and parcel of its own strategy, perhaps attempting to negate the meaning ofgovernmental slowness and framing “religion” as closely linked to “government”. Byco-opting the effective and altruistic meanings from religious groups as part of theirstrategy for social order, an attempt wasmade by government actors to create a positiveimage of government by following a discourse based on the morality of religion.

Government officials especially, but also politically conservative journalists andop-ed writers, offered a less clear cut definition of religious and government relief thanthe dichotomy elaborated above. In the 51 documents we analyzed, the language offaith-based initiatives – and government working through religion – became thedominant discourse of the governmental relief “blueprint”. The meaning of reliefthrough religion was often emphasized as the government’s objective all along:

Religious organizations wanting to take a larger role in society have found a friend in thecurrent president. In 2001, President Bush established a White House Office of Faith-Basedand Community Initiatives to help such organizations compete for federal funding. In 2002,Bush signed an order guaranteeing equal treatment for religious groups vying for federalgrants (Religion News Service, 2005c, September 21).

These articles demonstrate the visible interaction between government and religiousrelief in the USA. Government relief came to mean religious relief by way of federaldollars “reimbursing” and “enabling” religious organizations for both their currentcontributions in the disaster relief and any further relief efforts, such as religious(non-public) education for young disaster victims. The following excerpt exemplifies the“enabling” meaning of government relief through religion:

The Bush administration is using that same argument to steer federal relief dollars toreligious service organizations. On Wednesday, FEMA announced a $66 million grant,funded by donations from other countries, for the United Methodist Committee on Relief anda national volunteer group that will help Katrina victims (Associated Press, 2005, October 28).

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This image of an amalgamated religion and government relationship thus helpedprovide one of two opportunities for legitimacy for religious organizations:

(1) declarations of agreement with governmental support for religious relief; and

(2) declarations of disagreement with governmental support for religious relief.

Through such an amalgamated meaning of religion and government, groups andnetworks built a more institutionalized social order through religion after Katrina;faith-based organizations had those two opportunities to further build their ownlegitimacy. For example, some faith-based organizations built legitimacy for their ownefforts by arguing that partnerships existed only between specific religiousorganizations and government:

How do you justify the fact that pastors, pastoral counselors, certified psychologists weredenied access to the Katrina victims by the Red Cross? How do you justify the fact thatOperation Blessing and the Southern Baptist Convention are subcontractors of the Red Cross?And where black churches came with resources – food resources, hot meals – they weredenied access to the victims and they were given box lunches provided by Operation Bless –how do you justify that morally? (National Public Radio, 2005, September 23).

The discourse surrounding religion emerged and submerged in relation to government,thus suggesting a certain blurring of these boundaries in the case of Katrina inNew Orleans. Because of the blurred relationship between government and religion inthe US case, there were many points of legitimacy for religious organizations tomobilizeresources and help establish more delayed but a higher intensity of coordination andcooperation after Katrina in comparison to disaster relief in India.

India and Mumbai floodIn India, religion traditionally has had a powerful set of framing mechanisms formobilizations by political actors. In its history of colonization under Britain, India wentthrough several modern, secular transformative periods (van der Veer, 2001). However,this is not to say that India became a secular country at any point. Evenwith the partitionthat led to the creation of India and Pakistan for largely religious cleavages in 1947,religion in India has presented a counter-force for many anti-governmental agendas aswell as a point of defense for governmental actors (Ludden, 1996), and the stateaccordingly has comprehensively addressed the extent to which religion occupies agovernmental voice (Brass, 2005). Most recently, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, Hindunationalismand other religiousmovements havemobilized politicians to establish severalpatterns of governance to define the role of culture in the Indian state (Juergensmeyer,2006). However, given the complex place of religion in India’s political landscape, therelationship between religion and government has beenmore clearly defined, limiting theformal role religion takes in civil society, as evident in the findings here. Thus, religionremains important to the activities of non-governmental civil actors, contributing tomanydynamics, including to social order; however, in the case of the Mumbai flood religioncontributed to social order primarily by shaping and informing values and norms of civilsociety actors in a less formal and institutionalized manner than was the case in the USA.This caused more immediacy but lower intensity of coordination and cooperation.

In the media discourse surrounding the Mumbai floods there was significantly lessreference to “religion” in relief efforts. A great deal of discourse defined the Indian state

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as inefficient in relief efforts, which was similar to the US case, but religious relief wasat no point tied to the state in India. It was indeed quite a stark difference; only fourtimes in the 29 documents on the Mumbai flood was religion mentioned in the contextof the provision of financial relief. In the first instance a Sikh charity, Shakti SevaSamiti, was recognized as offering assistance. This charity was based in New Delhiand offered a similar “altruistic” reasoning for assistance to religious relief in theKatrina case, but it did not reference government relief in its statements:

All these [500 blankets, clothes and other materials] are for the people affected by the flood inMaharashtra. Our revered Satguru Deva Maa Ji has tried to help the victims of flood bydonating 500 blankets, 500 mattresses, 500 quilts along with sarees and clothes for children.The members of the trust have co-operated and we will carry this work,” said Rajeev Bhatia,the trustee of Shakti Seva Samiti Charitable Trust (Hindustan Times, 2005, September 13).

Second, apparently some organizations (specificallyMuslim) offered relief to quite a fewvictims; however, no government reimbursement had been given to these organizations.In addition, these organizations made reference to coordination with other NGOs inCanada and the USA, and religion was not a strong component in the discourse of eitherthe government or formal organizations’ relief in India. Any relationships withgovernment were not mentioned, and there did not appear to be any indication of Indianpolitical maneuvering to co-opt religion in efforts to redefine government relief. Oneexample comes from an organization presenting a fundraising dinner illustrates thisnon-existent government-religion link:

Abdul Raheman Nakadar [. . .] urged the gathering not to ignore the sufferings of theunderprivileged in India and said AFMI [American Federation of Muslims of IndianOrigin-Canada] would work for achieving 100 percent literacy for the Muslim community inIndia (Indo-Asian News Service, 2005b, October 3).

The only other two instances when religion was mentioned were:

(1) one woman’s mention of going to a Hindu temple to pray; and

(2) when evaluating the Mumbai flood in comparison to Katrina.

In the first instance, religious values and norms were emphasized as important todirecting coordination and cooperation. In the second instance, Christian organizationswere mentioned as being ineffective in the US comparatively speaking, but even herereligion’s formal, institutional role in Indian civil society was not discussed. The onlymention of this formal role of religion was that Indians typically did not trust Christianevangelicals due to prior experiences with particular people, but this had no connectionto the flood relief (TheAmericanThinker, 2005, September 14). The reason given for thisvariation was that civil society operates quite differently in India compared to the USA:

The reason is not difficult to find. India is essentially a tradition and community-run – andnot a system or state-run – nation. State [. . .] is too distant a mechanism for instantintervention, particularly in a crisis. It is [. . .] the family, neighborhood and community,which act as social safety net normally and in emergency. The West has undermined thissocial safety net in the name of unbridled individualism. With the result the West has becomestate-dependent [. . .] (Commentary from Indian columnist S. Gurumurthy, published inThe American Thinker, 2005, September 14).

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Often discourse emerged suggesting an Indian civil society as quite strong in and ofitself regardless of the strength of Western civil society. However, at no point was thisIndian civil society tied to government, and relief discourse did not acknowledge formal,institutionalized religious groups as the source of coordination and cooperation:

With self-help being the best help for flood-hit Mumbai, a profusion of blogs, websites andSMS campaigns has been helping people deal with the disaster as civil society steps in wherethe government has not (Indo-Asian News Service, 2005a, August 6).

Again, according to many media depictions, government was depicted as inefficient inrelief, similar to the discourse about government surrounding the Katrina disaster.In some articles religion was even offered as the cause of some of the vulnerabilities ofthe population, but in no case were formal religious organizations brought up as aresource outside of or as working in conjunction with government:

Urban India [. . .] is the casualty ward and band-aid is not enough. Local governance hascollapsed, land mafia, organised and from the underworld, has successfully stifled cities and acitizenry too busy existing has abdicated its right to accountability, helping successive regimesconvert the urban populace into a silent milch class. And since political power emanates fromthe rural economy it seems to suit the political elite to let urban India rot (India Today, 2005,August 22).

Here, we also see the emergence of other organizations taking control where thegovernment falls short, andnot just in relief but ingovernance in general.However, religionis not significant in an institutional or governance sense here. This analysis paints adifferent picture of the religion-government nexus in India, where divergent routes for- andforms of- social order through religion emerged in comparison to the US case. Noopportunities for legitimizationwere given to religious organizations. Instead, coordinationand cooperationwasmore immediatebut less intense and sustainedafter theMumbaifloodas religious values and normswere the primarymechanisms for social order, such as in thedescription of the woman going to a temple to praywithout accompanying accounts of herutilizing or working with a faith-based organization in disaster relief efforts.

This variation may in fact be a reflection of the political leadership in India and theUSA during these floods. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came into power in1998 and 1999 we could see much more religious discourse coming from Hindunationalist politicians until this party lost control of the government in 2004(Juergensmeyer, 2006). In fact, Hinduism inmodern Indian andMaharasthan society hasa lived experience that can easily become militarized and political (Zelliot and Berntsen,1988). The patterns we observed in the media could therefore partially reflect thepolitical leadership. In the Katrina case, for instance, during the presidency of GeorgeW. Bush there seemed to be an increase in the amalgamation of religionwith governancewith the creation of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which received$2.15 billion in federal grants in 2005 (Associated Press, 2007, May 19). Regardless, weillustrate the ways in which religion seems to have contributed to coordination andcooperation in two different ways at the time of disaster, offering some insight into thecomplexity of religion-state dynamics.

6. Discussion/conclusionWhen comparing the two disaster contexts, religion emerged as a visible, formallyorganized entity in the US media surrounding the New Orleans disaster and its meaning

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became more nuanced and negotiated in relation to government. This providedlegitimizing opportunities for religious organizations andmore delayed and higher levelsof cooperation and coordination through formal groups and networks. In the Mumbaicase, significantly fewer media accounts showed religious organizations emerging in thecontext of relief discourse, and any reference to religionwas not tied to the government inany explicit sense. Instead religious values and normswere important to producingmoreimmediate and lower intensity levels of social order. This comparative point suggeststhat while religion had a distinct role in shaping values, norms, and the framing ofcooperation in India, formal religious groups and networks did not emerge with anyconsistent visibility, andwhen they did theywere not overtly linked to the state. Thiswasparticularly the case when the disaster relief in Mumbai is juxtaposed to Katrina relief.Results here reflect recent findings by Fox and Tabory (2008) that show religiousparticipation is often reduced by government control of religion, but belief (or faith) is not.What is significant here is that the result of the immediate post-disaster efforts in thesetwo cases was cooperation and coordination, but this social order varied in its immediacyand intensity and in the social mechanisms by which it emerged.

Theoretically, this paper expands our knowledge of the relationship between religionand government and how this relationship affects the way people help one another intimes of need. We address an understudied outcome of the relationship between churchand state (at least in the scholarship of the last 20 years on the topic): order instead ofconflict. When this has been studied recently, it has been framed in terms of thetheological capacity of various religious traditions to contribute to social order within apluralistic civil society (Schindler, 2008). This paper addresses this neglected area ofscholarship, in addition to tackling the understudied role of religion in disaster relief.According to our findings, it seems that when there is a blurred, ambiguous relationshipbetween religion and government there are more opportunities for religious NGOs toestablish and build their legitimacy to offer high levels of coordination and cooperation insociety.However, this analysis also suggests thatwith amore clearly defined relationshipbetween religion and government we may see more widespread intrinsic religiosityinforming people’s immediate efforts to coordinate and cooperate following a disaster. Insuch a case, religious activities do not take place in a formal, institutionalizedmanner in away thatwould stand out andbe visible and aremore akin to a normalized away of being.

With these propositions in mind, this analysis of disaster relief in the USA and Indiaoffers new categories for understanding the role of religion in civil society by focusing ondisaster relief in comparative fashion. We hope that this paper provides a framework forpursuing comparative analyses to aid in understanding themore nuancedways inwhichreligion in civil societyworks in particular places, at specific points in history, and amongcertain groups (e.g. Hindus and Muslims within the Maharashtra state of India) and/ormore general patterns among a larger variety of groups. In fact,while suchdetails on localdisaster relief efforts or generalizations across nation-states around the world were bothshortcomings of this middle-level analysis; however, this paper provides an importantstarting point for future research along those lines. In addition, the framework offeredhere can contribute to further our understandings of how social order emerges throughcivil society in other contexts beyond disaster relief (e.g. wildlife management programs)and in other forms beyond religion (e.g. environmentalists). In general, we hope that theexamination we presented here encourages further productive discussions about

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the relationship between government and religion, both for applied purposes and toexpand our theoretical conceptualizations of religion in contemporary civil society.

Notes

1. We investigate “social order” through levels of coordination and cooperation, followinghedefinition offered by Hechter and Horne (2003). Furthermore, these are two conditions ofimport to disaster relief. With this definition we specifically avoid contributing to astructural functionalist perspective of social order, and we do not wish to address here anymeta-theoretical debates between a functionalist perspective and a those that focus onconflict as the impetus of sociological patterns.

2. This is based on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, which offers a 1-5 rating based on thehurricane’s present intensity. This is used to give an estimate of the potential property damageandflooding expected along the coast fromahurricane landfall.Wind speed is the determiningfactor in the scale, as storm surge values are highly dependent on the slope of the continentalshelf and the shape of the coastline, in the landfall region. Winds are measured using the USone minute average. This information comes from the US National Hurricane Center.

3. Details of this database are available from the WVS web sites http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/ andwww.worldvaluessurvey.com. Further methodological details (questionnaires, samplingprocedures, fieldwork procedures, principal investigators, etc.) are available at: http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/wvs-samp.html/

4. Following a x 2 test of significance, the variation in these categories is significant at all alphalevels.

5. Details of this database, including further methodological details (e.g. questionnaires,sampling procedures, fieldwork procedures, principal investigators, etc.) are available fromthe ARDA web site: www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/RAS1.asp

6. To note here, part of the basis for comparison of these two religious contexts comes fromPaden’s (2004) “Comparison in the study of religion”. Paden builds on Smith’s, J.Z. (1978)suggestion that comparative religion is possible as a sub-discipline as long as it adheres tocertain modes of control, description, and re-description. Paden (2004, p. 89) suggests thatcomparison, and abstraction through comparison, is possible as long as categories andanalogies are “understood in a heuristic sense” where “points or nodes of comparison are notstatic, essential entities, forever fixed but have an open, evolving texture and life”. We believethat by adhering to a Foucauldian discourse analysis (Foucault, 1990 [1978]) in this paper the“evolving texture and life” of the “points or nodes of comparison” will be explored, thusmaking the strength of comparisons more salient.

7. Much of this visible discourse was drawn from media documents surrounding both disasterson the assumption that no other source provides the visibility of such broad societal meaningthan the media.

8. Due to the fewer number of articles available regarding the Mumbai flood we had to broadenthe keyword search to find enough relevant articles.

9. To note, Marathi (the most dominant non-English language used in Maharashtra state and inMumbai) media articles were not used, and it is likely that religious discourse wasmissed fromlocal newspapers. However, due to the fact that regional/national newspaperswere the primarymedia documents investigated in the Katrina relief articles we wanted to maintain continuityacross the two contexts. Also, regional/national discourse matters more here in this analysisdue to the broad questions asked, and consistency in sampling between the two contexts wasmore important than uncovering the most local of interpretations in this analysis.

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Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Polity,Cambridge.

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About the authorsNels Paulson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Wisconsin-Stout. Hisresearch focuses on environmental and religious issues in civil society with a global andcomparative emphasis. His research projects on civil society include have included therelationship between religious tension and law in West Africa, hunting as a substantive issueamong international environmental organizations, and the place of indigenous organizations inglobal environmental advocacy. Nels Paulson is the corresponding author and can be contactedat: paulsonne@uwstout.edu

Cecilia Menjı́var is a Cowden Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the School of Social andFamily Dynamics at Arizona State University. Among her research projects, she has examinedthe place of religion in immigrants’ lives and the meaning faith workers and immigrants attachto church-based assistance. She was guest editor of “Public Religion and Immigration acrossNational Contexts”, American Behavioral Scientist (2006).

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