Faith-Based Organisations and Welfare States: A Cross-Country Analysis of Religious Engagement in the Provision of Value-Loaded Social Services

It is well acknowledged that religion has affected welfare state formation in Europe and that faith-based organizations (FBOs) play an important role in the provision of social services. Surprisingly, very few studies empirically examine this involvement in a cross-country and cross-policy perspective. This paper contributes to this research gap by comparing the engagement of protestant FBOs in Germany, England and Denmark for one special sub-group of social services, so-called morality-based services (e.g., counseling activity in terms of abortion, assisted dying, prostitution or same-sex marriage). Based on 20 semi-structured interviews and in-depth analyses of primary documents, we discover that protestant FBOs are very active in Germany but only somewhat active in England and Denmark. We demonstrate that the combination of specific welfare regimes, church-state relationships and theological roots of Protestantism results in different governance capacities, rooms for manovering as well as conflict definitions, which in turn cause this deviating behavior of FBOs. These findings enhance not only our understanding of Protestantism and protestant actors in Europe, but also the future potential and limits of FBOs in responding to the challenges modern welfare states are faced with.