On November 21, 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released its major report, “Lobbying for the Faithful:  Religious Advocacy Groups in Washington DC.” http://pewforum.org/lobbying-religiousadvocacy-groups-in-washington-dc.aspx This report provides a narrative history of national religious advocacy, its dramatic growth since the 1970s, and major findings about the issues, strategies, budgets, and religious traditions represented in Washington DC. Because it is an on-line report, one can easily navigate to topics or findings of interest. 

Among its major findings: The number of organizations engaged in religious lobbying or religion-related advocacy in Washington DC has increased roughly fivefold in the past four decades, from fewer than 40 in 1970 to more than 200 today.  These groups collectively employ at least 1,000 people in the greater Washington area and spend at least $390 million a year on efforts to influence national public policy.  The agenda of religious advocacy organizations is tremendously broad, as they work collectively on some 300 policy issues. Reflecting the globalization of advocacy, roughly as many groups work on international issues as domestic ones.  Finally, religious advocacy is sophisticated and high tech, as groups increasingly use social media to mobilize constituents and employ lobbying software to track their responses to congressional offices.

Once dominated by a few mainstream denominations, religious advocacy now represents the dizzying plural- ism of religious traditions, values, and constituencies, as the chart below shows. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups have been joined by those representing Muslims, Baha’is, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and others.  It would be hard to find anywhere else in the world such a concentration of diverse faiths and religious organizations engaged public policy advocacy.

As a visiting fellow for the Pew Forum, I directed this effort to inventory the breadth of national religious advocacy.  Even though I authored a study of religious lobbying two decades ago, I was surprised by the growth of the advocacy infrastructure in Washington DC, the incredible diversity of faiths represented, the breadth of the policy agenda, and the financial resources devoted to it.  Religious public policy work is a prominent and enduring feature of the Washington community today.

One of biggest challenges of the project involved obtaining advocacy expenditure data for groups with broader missions than public policy advocacy.  For transparency, comparability, and reliability, we relied on budget breakdowns in public financial statements that conformed to our broad definition of advocacy. Not surprisingly, a few organizations expressed concern that their reported advocacy expenditures greatly inflated what they felt they spent on “lobbying.” The stakes can be high for such tax-exempt groups if critics or stakeholders misunderstand what is meant by advocacy.  So we stressed that “advocacy” in the report is defined much broader than IRS-restricted “lobbying” to include public education about the moral dimensions of public policy issues, and we explained the decision rules we employed to determine advocacy budgets from available categories on public financial documents.  Feedback from these groups will be noted in subsequent versions of the online report.

This brings me to the hallmark of Pew Research Center studies for scholars and teachers: transparency and publicly accessible data.  This report contains an extensive methodology section that outlines the research protocols employed.  In addition, the report stipulates exactly where information was obtained for expenditure data and mission statements.  Thus, researchers who might use a narrower definition of advocacy or employ different criteria to assess spending will find the report a vital platform to replicate aspects of our research or launch their own independent investigations. 

For teachers and students a key feature of the report is its online database, which includes organizational profiles of 200 plus groups and a sortable directory.  A quick mouse click takes you to a profile of each organization containing its mission statement, tax status, budget, and year formed.  Reading through these mission statements conveys how deeply the diverse religious organizations draw upon their faith tenets to frame public policy advocacy. This feature can be a tremendous teaching tool, as students scan and analyze mission statements of select groups for what they illustrate about competing visions of religious communities in America.

Equally valuable is the sortable directory, which allows you to browse and sort groups by religion, organizational structure, and budgets. Thus one can access listings of mainline Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim groups, or see a ranking of annual expenditures.  One can also track when different groups arrived in Washington DC, which signifies their desire to have a place at the civic table.  In a way, tells us something about the sociology of religion in America, but that is for another day.