God, State, and Sovereignty: A Discursive Analysis of Catholic Charities’ Immigration and Refugee Services.

Religious social service agencies operate within a complex organizational framework, responding to the demands of both legal and religious constituencies. Current social climate has led to increased scrutiny of religious discourses of service, accompanied by contestation over boundaries between church and state. Such dilemmas have prompted this research, an ethnographic exploration of one agency?s attempt to preserve the integrity of the religious act while remaining true to legal standards and a pluralistic context of service. Interviews with employees of Los Angeles Catholic Charities? Immigration and Refugee Services Department suggest that discourses of service are ambiguous and contested, negotiated between parallel discourses of religiosity and secularity and variable along organizational level. Analyzed through the lens of organization and secularization theories, findings demonstrate how competing authorities compel organizations to develop an adaptive discourse combining both religiosity and secularity. A complex organizational field funnels two competing discourses down to the ground level of service provision, where new meanings of religion emerge, selectively accommodating the organizational field. Both secularity and religiosity are intertwined and re-defined in service provision, imploring a new language for faith-based social service within a non-religious functional domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]