Across races, religions, coalitions organize for solidarity

(RNS) — Rachel Prestipino knows how segregated Miami can be every day, including Sunday: “It’s not just at 11 a.m.”

But one thing all groups in Miami share, said Prestipino, lead organizer for a local faith-based organization called People Acting for Community Together, is an interest in solving local problems. “That desire, for whatever reason, goes across all these lines of difference, whether that’s faith background or race.”

PACT has helped Christians, Jews and Muslims in her community overcome their racial, ethnic and faith divides outside of their congregations.

More than a half century after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the Christian church to "remove the yoke of segregation from its own body," an estimated one-sixth of U.S. congregations have succeeded in becoming at least partly multiracial — but not without struggles. A handful of religious institutions, meanwhile, are pursuing reconciliation by pushing for reparations.

But in more than 100 U.S. cities, people of faith are choosing to come together across historic racial and religious boundaries, not at the congregational or even denominational level, but by mobilizing outside of weekly worship services to address daily problems where they live. Even if racial reconciliation is not the primary purpose of these nonpartisan coalitions, a byproduct of their work is often relationships with people who do not look — or believe — as they do.

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This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.

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Indiana University sociologist Brad Fulton, who directs the National Study of Community Organizing, said the number of faith-based community...