About a year ago, I was asked to meet with Bob Clarke, a community organizer who heads the Shenango Valley Initiative (SVI) which is based in Sharon, Pennsylvania. SVI is an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation which has approximately forty-five affiliates in its network spread throughout the US and recently has established an affiliate in South Africa. The Gamaliel Foundation was established in 1968 to support the Contract Buyers League, an African American organization fighting to protect homeowners on Chicago's westside. In 1986, the foundation reorganized to become an organizing institute that trains community leaders and provides resources to aid their efforts in fighting for socio-economic and political causes in their own communities. Maintaining along the lines of Tocqueville and Alinsky that power is generated by organized people and organized money, the Gamaliel Foundation is the umbrella organization, organizing and supporting the efforts of its myriad affiliates. The goal of these affiliates, such as SVI, is to improve the quality of life for those who live in their communities. To do this, individuals who feel powerless in the face of social change are encouraged to organize, but the big question is: "How does one organize those who are atomized, alienated, cynical, and discouraged?" A similar question is one that sociologists have constantly pondered: "How is community created?" Or, "How is a social world created in which all have a strong sense of belonging together and all have power in the decisions that are made for the group?"

The meeting between myself and Mr. Clarke took place at my church, Christ Lutheran, in Sharon. The meeting was to be a half hour conversation, what the Gamaliel Foundation calls a One on One. Its purpose was to enable the community organizer to achieve several goals: to learn what community issues I would raise, to assess my self-interests and to see if they were somewhat in accord with those of SVI, to build a relationship on the basis of shared interests, and to offer me the opportunity to work with SVI if I wanted to become involved. As an outgrowth of this first One-on-One, Mr. Clarke and I met a few months later for another and I agreed to help build a core-team at my church. A core-team is a group of people who identify issues of importance to the congregation at the local or church level, in the neighborhood, and in the community at large. Once a core team of approximately ten to fifteen members is formed, it meets regularly to work on the two or three issues that arise out of a congregational In-ReachBa process where several volunteers conduct One-on-Ones with as many members of the church congregation who are willing to give the interview. After the In-Reach, the information gathered is shared with the congregation, and two or three issues are chosen to be pursued by the congregation. One Baptist minister, that I had engaged in a One-on-One as part of my Chicago training by the Gamaliel Foundation, informed me that the core team at his church identified 111 issues. Out of those issues number eleven was the one chosen to be acted upon. In dealing with issue eleven lack of affordable housing issue one a daycare was addressed . The core team itself is formed by those interested in joining it after the In-Reach and information sharing is completed. In SVI, a caucus of core-teams, is to meet regularly to share issues and concerns and to help each other work on them. The purpose of the One-on-0nes is to create relationships, to identify issues that the congregation thinks are important, and to discover those willing to sit on the core team. The monthly meeting of the core teams from all the churches affiliated with SVI is to build relationships between churches and to help organize them into a political body.

In late October of 2000, I was sent to the Gamaliel Foundation for National Leadership Training in Chicago, a week of intensive training in community organizing. Upon my return from Chicago, I was asked to join the SVI Board which is comprised of representatives of approximately twenty-four church congregations in the Shenango Valley (this encompasses the cities and towns of Sharon, Hermitage, Sharpsville, Farrell, and WheatlandBall of which border on each other's municipal boundaries or have basically grown into each other which sometimes makes it hard to distinguish boundaries). I now serve on the SVI Board and am engaged in conducting an In-Reach at Christ Lutheran Church to build a core team. This core team will meet monthly at a core-team assembly to discuss pertinent issues, actions to be undertaken in support of them, and to agitate and offer each other support in community action. The key to our success in addressing the social, economic, political, and environmental decisions comes from our working together as churches under the guidance of SVI to create a strong social organization that can act in public. Organized people, acting together in concert, generate power as the ability to act and realize collective self-interests.

In the past, I had been involved with other community organizations. I applauded their efforts in making a difference in the lives that they touched, but I also was discouraged that the efforts of these groups did little to get at the root causes of such things as the lack of decent housing and inadequate school funding and resources. Instead, of attacking the fundamental causes of poverty, these organizations offered a band-aid approach to solving social problems. Still, as many would say, a band-aid is better than nothing. The rationale is that if some get involved in doing "good works," maybe others will be moved to do "good" themselves. As one of my old professors who often attended peace rallies to ban the atomic bomb remarked to me: "It may not lead to the super powers disarming their nuclear warheads, but I've got to do something or I'll go crazy!" The issue is not just to have one's voice heard and to be seen on television carrying a "Ban all bombs, poverty, and all other social ills" sign; instead, it is to become involved actively in such a way as to actually wield power. This means getting organized and getting in the face of those who already have power in our communities: politicians and business leaders.

According to political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, people have to create a public space to realize their freedom to be self and socially creative. Human beings are the authors of their own miracles; they perform them via their twofold gift freedom and action and thus they establish a reality of their own (Arendt, 1977). Arendt is critical of contemporary society and, from her concern for understanding the conditions of human existence and the uniquely human possibility of attaining freedom, she focused upon the antecedent conditions that bring about freedom: the vita activa, that is human activity devoted to public-political matters, as well as the vita contemplativa or the life of the mind thinking, willing, and judging of which judging is paramount for political concerns (Arendt, 1958 &1982).

It is through action that human beings can transcend what is merely necessary and useful to human life. Thus, action creates a sphere of freedom, or public realm, where individuals can distinguish themselves from each other through discourse and action. The public realm, for Arendt, is the realm of freedom, in contradistinction from the private realm, which is the realm of necessity. In other words, the public realm is a space of appearance where human beings liberated from necessity can engage in speech and action with their peers, whereas the private realm is where human being are concerned not with realizing their freedom but with obtaining what is necessary for life, such as food, shelter and clothing. Only after human beings are liberated from necessity in the private realm can they strive to actualize their freedom in the public realm. These two realms, the public and the private, are fundamental to our understanding of human freedom which arises out of the human condition via the human ability to spontaneously create something new in the world, something unprecedented and totally unexpected. Drawing upon the political experience of the Greek polis and the Roman res publica, Arendt recounts how human freedom enters into the world in a pubic-political realm.

In the Greek city-state or polis, the citizens lived in two separate realms of human existence: the private realm, which is pre-political, for it is concerned with ensuring the maintenance of human life; and the public realm, which is political, for it is concerned with the provision and safeguarding of a space for freedom to appear. The private realm affords individual privacy; a place in which to hide from the prying eyes of their fellow citizens; a home or location in the world which they can call their own. On the other hand, the public realm is a space of appearances, where citizens can enter into the light of day and perform their political duties in full view of the public; a realm in which freedom of action and speech among political equals exits; a realm where individuals can distinguish themselves from their peers by establishing their own unique identities to comprise the story of their individual valor and, thus, ensure an individual's immortality.

With the advent of the modern age, which for Arendt began in the seventeenth century, she noticed the emergence of a new sphere of human existence that she called the social realm:

The social realm is the by-product of the blurring of the private and the public realms: it is characterized by the penetration of private interests into the public realm. In other words, the emergence of economic interests into the public-political realm has resulted in housekeeping concerns becoming Acollective" concerns (Arendt, 1958). With the erosion of the boundary between the private and the public realms, the gulf which the ancients crossed daily to transcend the confines of the household realm and enter into the political realm has disappeared. Politics in the modern age has become nothing but a societal function, and action, speech, and thought have merely been rendered primarily as "superstructures upon societal interest" (Arendt, 1958, p. 33).

The overall result of the emergence of the social realm is that the age-old distinctions between the private and the public realms have not only been blurred, but have undergone a transformation in meaning and in their significance for the individual (Arendt, 1958). Today the private realm has been transformed into the sphere of intimacy, a consequence that can be partially attributed to the rise of modern individualism. The result this has had for the political realm is the development of what Arendt refers to as the "most social form of government": Bureaucracy. This is a form of government characterized by

Juxtaposed with the rule of nobody, or bureaucracy, is the rise of mass society: a society in which individuals have lost their unique individuality through the implementation of modern equality, and the resultant emergence of almost total conformity (Arendt, 1958).

A mass society is one in which everyone acts as if they belong to one giant family embracing only one perspective on their common reality. This reinforces and bolsters this one point of view, which thus renders the world in common into a world in private. By unquestioningly embracing the perspective of one's neighbors, human beings are deprived of a common world in which people can see and hear each other's differing viewpoints. Thus, no "general standpoint" from which to judge human affairs can readily exist, and the world in common becomes entirely privatizedBindividuals become trapped "in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times" (Arendt, 1958, p. 58).

According to William Kornhauser (1959), "a mass society is a social system in which elites are readily accessible to influence by non-elites and non-elites are readily available for mobilization by elites" (p. 39). In other words, a mass society is one in which the elites are not sufficiently insulated from the influence of the masses and the masses, in turn, are not sufficiently insulated from elite domination. Kornhauser's view of mass society is a combination of what he saw as the two predominant views of mass society theorists: the aristocratic and the democratic. The aristocratic critique of mass society focuses on the loss of authority in society that results in the loss of the exclusiveness the elite or elites need in order to function. The major proponent of this view is Ortega y Gasset. In his theory of mass society he sees the major elements of mass society to be:

Mass society, in this view, is seen as a social system in which the masses have obtained authority, raised leaders in their image, and have displaced aristocratic rule. The outcome of this is rule by the incompetent. What aristocratic theorists of mass society are primarily concerned with is defending elite values against the rise of mass participation in political and cultural matters (Kornhauser, 1959).

The democratic critique of mass society focuses on the loss of community in a social system which results in the atomization of the masses, rendering them accessible to elite domination and manipulation. The essential proponents of this viewpoint are Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Emile Lederer, C. Wright Mills and Hannah Arendt. The major components of this view are:

a) growing atomization (loss of community);

b) widespread readiness to embrace new ideologies (quest for community); and

c) totalitarianism (total domination by pseudo-community). (Kornhauser, 1959, p. 33).

The members of mass society are socially alienated and thus are atomized. They will readily mobilize to express their resentment toward the existing social order with the intention of establishing a totally different world. The result is totalitarian society. What democratic theorists of mass society are concerned with is an intellectual defense of democratic values against the rise of elites intent on domination (Kornhauser, 1959).

Within the public realm the loss of community has atomized individuals by breaking down the communication of different viewpoints in a privatized world. Without the freedom to exchange opinions, individuals are subject to the dictates of one opinion, the opinion of the dominant elite. This has led to mass movements which have resulted in the establishment of totalitarian societies comprised of atomized individuals who have such a strong longing for community that they readily become enmeshed in an ideology that becomes the social cement of a pseudo-community (Kornhauser, 1958; Arendt, 1973).For Arendt, the quest for community in a mass society leads individuals to settle for a pseudo-community which is held together by an authority existing outside them, not between them. Extreme loneliness and isolation promote the desire for pseudo-community and gives impetuous for mass socio-political movements of the sort that ushers in totalitarian regimes. The threat of totalitarianism and totalitarian mass movements from Arendt's critique of modern society is based on her own experiences in Nazi Germany before she fled to France and then to the USA.

Arendt would see the social realm as the dominant realm of modern society, replacing the rule of peers with the rule of bureaucracy and substituting the administration of people with the impersonal administration of things. The concerns of the social realm are that of housekeeping, not of safeguarding and maintaining a space for freedom to appear. Within our society, which Arendt would contend is a mass society, it is necessary to address the problem of human freedom and the creation of a genuine community for public-political action. Freedom is inherently connected with politics and human action within the public-political realm. In political activity, freedom is taken for granted, and does not become a problem as long as it is experienced in action, from whence it appears. The conditions necessary for freedom to become manifest in the world are the participation and company of other people in the same state, a public-political space in which each "free man could insert himself by word and deed" (Arendt, 1973, p. 148). Thus, freedom and politics are directly related to each other and each requires the presence of the other to exist. The reason why freedom is so important is that without it there can be no meaningful political life: "The raison d'etre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action" (Arendt, 1973, p. 146). Freedom becomes problematic today in that the rise of the social realm is inimical to the public and private realms, and freedom and action have been relegated to the sphere of intimacy which is all that is left of the private realm.

In a world in which freedom is excluded from a worldly space of appearances, a world, then, where there is no politically guaranteed public realm, individuals become isolated and the mass phenomenon of loneliness becomes pervasive throughout society (Arendt, 1977 & 1958). The atomization evident among the masses in contemporary society has led to the one-dimensionality of thought and this, in turn, has led to the abject conformity found among the masses, who are submissive toward authority figures and have become apolitical in their orientation toward the world (Marcuse, 1964). This results in the eclipse of the public realm, where individuals can form their own opinions through the free exchange of differing perspectives on their reality and challenge those in positions of authority. Without access to a public realm, individuals have no choice but to turn away from public affairs and attend to their own private interests. For atomized individuals public interests have given way to private concerns, and thus governments have become merely the administrators of things. For the most part, human spontaneity has been suppressed, and in most contexts has become meaningless.

We find ourselves living in a world where we exist outside the public realm. We remain isolated with little or no sense of actually belonging to a community of common concerns and interests. We rarely vote, we stay off the streets and hole up in our homes watching television and engaging in our various hobbies. Even if we want to make a difference, want to address issues that invoke in us strong emotions, we often do not know how to organize so that we can act successfully in public life.

Reflecting on a conversation with SVI organizer, Bob Clarke, I made the statement that there was no community center in Sharon and that each of the five cities and towns that comprise the Shenango Valley tend to operate autonomously with duplication of services and often work at cross purposes. How can we bring the community together is an issue that intrigues me. The answer is working with faith-based organizations, namely churches. Even though there is no discernible sense of belonging together as one large community in the Shenango Valley, we have many little centers: churches. Here gemeinschaften (communities) can be found in a gesellschaft (urban) setting. Those who attend church regularly find themselves coming together weekly for public worship. At least here we have people assembling regularity, but do most church members really know each other, share their concerns with each other, interact with each other on public issues? It seems that there are a few highly active people in the church and the rest just show up on Sundays and the only real contribution they make is financial.

Using churches as a way to bridge the private realm and enter into the public realm offers hope for bringing people together to act in public. Here is an opportunity to recreate community and to interact with other communities in the valley. As a sociologist, I have a tendency to separate church and state and to look with great suspicion upon churches and religious leaders who want to impose their values on others as if their view of the world was the only correct one for right living. As one who is critical of organized religion, I tend to discount the genuine ways in which churches can contribute to public life. Involvement in SVI and my training by the Gamaliel Foundation has opened up to me a viable avenue for community organization that I had overlooked.

Parker Palmer's analysis in The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America's Public Life (1997) offers a provocative glimpse of the potential for concerned Christians (and I would claim other religious and civic groups) to mount a revival of public life in society. In our fragmented society a vision of a unity and community has retreated from view. Palmer quotes historian Vincent Harding on this point (Harding quoted in Palmer, 1997, p.p.s. 20-21)

It appears that our society is characterized by competing individual interests that eschew a unifying vision of the common good. In a society in which the public-political realm has been rendered all but inaccessible, except for a few with wealth and power, the private realm becomes the social reality for most people in society. By retreating to the private realm, individuals engage in economic activities divorced from social concerns and analysis of the long term potentially detrimental effects of these activities. But, as Arendt points out, it gets even worse than this for the private and public realms have become blurred with the rise of the social realm. In a society that is highly bureaucratic there are no bases for community action, no place for a public space to emerge, only a disastrous Arule of nobody," in which no one becomes accountable for the governing of human affairs. It is as if the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own independent of the human beings that created it in the first place. It escapes their control and subverts their attempts to engage the world politically, that is, to engage in human freedom and self-determination. The rise of bureaucracy heralds the loss of human freedom. This is the stultifying horror that fueled Max Weber's critique of modernity with its "iron cage of rationality" dominating all human relations.

The effort to mobilize people so that they can be empowered and act in their own interests leads to Parker's hope that the Christian churches can band together to engage in public action, to help people take back their communities, to help people build a common world that is humane and just. The spiritual vision of committed Christians who are open to dialogue and interaction with strangers in a public-political realm can go far in helping us rectify the socio-political and economic ills of our society. As I stated earlier, the church offers us a base from which to build community, each church developing a core-team to identify and examine the issues of most pressing concern, each church core-team meeting regularity with other church core-teams to strategize and try to resolve these issues, and, in so doing, transform private citizens and private church goers into community activists.

By avoiding a position of intolerance, or contempt for those who think differently than us, by being willing to engage in public discourse, Christian churches can bridge the gap between the private and public realms and can try to avoid the pitfalls of the social realm. Arendt would be highly critical of churches or other groups that want to address social questions (those of housekeeping concerns--of economic necessity--such as poverty) in the public realm, but economic issues do need to be addressed in public as they impinge directly on all our lives. Here I take issue with Arendt's strict separation of pubic and private realms as being ideal for a true democracy. The rise of the social realm in her analysis is provocative as it highlights how public-political action has been circumvented in our society and how powerless many of us have become in our "totally administered society" (Adorno, 1973). This blurring of public and private realms with the rise of the social points to our society turning into one giant family, one giant private realm, where conflict is suppressed, where self-expression is subverted to the group as a whole, and where people are left without avenues to true public-political participation. No public realm leads to no freedom. And people remain isolated in a giant private/social realm with no recourse to organize, no ability to build political organizations, no opportunities to direct their lives and participate fully in them.

The church in Palmer's analysis offers us a way to break out of the private realm. In churches we have diverse congregations, even though this diversity is masked by group conformity. We do have churches that represent minority groups and those that represent the dominant culture of our society, yet even within congregations social class differences are present, sometimes minority group presence is to be found in them, and it is by tapping into the diversity in churches and between church congregations we can begin the task of community building.

Palmer points to four reasons on how the church can help bring about a renewal of public life:

It appears that the church can make valuable contributions to reclaiming a public space for socio-political action. As Palmer puts it:

The Gamaliel Foundation has tapped into this great potential of churches for public action and SVI is comprised of faith-based communities all working together to create a community in which people may act in concert and, in so doing, generate power.

As I was thinking about my paper topic, I recalled the film, Network (1976) which featured a fourth rate television station that would broadcast anything to gain ratings. The satire in the film is right on the mark and given the new rash of reality television shows, Network has prophesied the future of television. One show portrayed in the film featured a "mad prophet" who would rant about the ills of society and then exhort everyone to yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I won't take it anymore!" In our society a lot of people are Aas mad as hell," but they do not know how to constructively express their anger. Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals, (1989) states his belief that a community organizer must be angry about social injustice in order to be effective, and that anger must be channeled and directed toward those who represent the forces of oppression in our society. However, for Alinsky, anger is not enough, for the community organizer has to have imagination and imagine how those who are downtrodden feel. By seeing the world from the perspective of the other one takes the other's suffering as one's own. As Clarence Darrow puts it so eloquently:

The role of the church in our society can be a great one. The impact that organized people, arising out of faith-based community organizations, can finally bring about viable social change and social justice by challenging those in power, be refusing to remain atomized in a private realm divorced from politics. If churches can organize, develop core-teams, can create community, then true power can be generated. We can take back our community by forming it anew. The first step is to tap into the resources that we've often overlooked: those of the Christian and other religious communities that exist in the midst of our atomized society as islands of promise in a threatening, alienating ocean of collective despair.

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Alinsky, Saul D. (1989). Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vintage Books.

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Arendt, Hannah. (1970). On Violence. San Diego: A Harvest/HBJ Book.

Arendt, Hannah. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Arendt, Hannah. (1977). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. York: Penguin Books.

Arendt, Hannah. (1982). Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. (Edited with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gottfried, Howard. (Producer), & Lumet, Sidney. (Director). (1976). Network [Film]. MGM/United Artists: Hollywood, CA.

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Whitfield, Stephen J. (1980). Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.