The Concept of "Parachurches"

These two seemingly opposite religious organizations, the conservative, evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network and the liberal, new age Association for Research and Enlightenment, in fact share a similar social positioning in that their core philosophies are religious or metaphysical in nature but their institutions are secular in design; they are part business, part charity, and part educational facility. As parachurches, these non-denominational religious organizations offer religious or spiritual guidance in combination with political discourse, academic knowledge, and public services in realms that for more than 140 years have been dominated by secularism: education and academia, media, law and government, science, and medicine. As a result, both CBN and ARE offer insightful critiques of the concept of "the secular".

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Secondly, the fact that CBN and ARE operate as religious organizations emphasizes the ambiguity of their public roles as religious institutions. CBN and ARE are not churches but rather parachurches, non-denominational religious organizations that straddle the line between religion and the secular. The parachurches‘ identities are frequently in flux, both outside of and within the organizations, partly because they are each unified by belief, practice, and/or engagement with metaphysical material, which is largely what defines religion (popularly), but their multiple components borrow from and compete with nonreligious newsmedia, publications, heath care, education, and legal aid. Thus, CBN and ARE emerge in many ways as competitors with secular institutions, using linguistic cues and genres taken from shared religious and cultural beliefs and merging them with common secular genres bearing authority and legitimacy, such as those taken from media, science, and law, to relate and contextualize religious, spiritual, political, and social information. In fact, despite the religious and spiritual discourses generated through CBN and ARE, structurally they look far more like secular aggregates than religious institutions, and their engagement with theology and metaphysics raises more questions than it answers about how they define ―religion.‖ I describe in the following sections, what binds together each organization is not a spatially cohesive community practice of religion, such as one might find in a local church, but rather a networked (and often virtual) community that is continually producing and re-producing a particular religious-social-political perspective on the world.

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The parachurches are uniquely positioned to critique the secular, being hybrid organizations that operate often indistinguishably from private business, education, health care, media, and political action committees. They engage the public on multiple levels, providing messages about spirituality and religion but also about law and politics, health and science, childhood education, and news broadcasting. Whether specifically organizing or facilitating organizers, they provide inspiration for social movements and as producers and objects of media, they insert new terms into dialogues of public discourses.

Carie Little Hersh, Losing faith in the secular: the politics of faith and knowledge at two American parachurches (2010)

• culture
• institutions
• religion