Broad-based community organizing (BBCO) is seen as anomalous in contemporary politics because it operates with institutions, traditions, and customary practices. To understand the significance of its approach and why it stands in contradiction to so much contemporary political thought, we have to locate it within broader conceptions of sovereignty. When we do so we discover that the standard view is to see sovereignty as indivisible, monistic, and transcendent. The implication of such a view is that autonomous or semiautonomous corporate bodies necessarily appear as a threat to the indivisible and transcendent authority of the political sovereign. The primary corporate body that has been a lightning rod through which this sense of threat is projected is the church and, in the wake of religious plurality, other religious groups. Yet religious groups are not alone as being perceived as a threat to the cohesion and stability of the sovereign state; other forms of corporate body, notably trade unions, suffer the same suspicion. In this chapter, I will argue that a view of sovereignty as derived from and distributed among a number of sources is both closer to the reality of the world as it exists and is open to forms of consociational democratic practice of the kind that broad-based community organizing represents. Having surveyed debates about the nature of sovereignty and defined more clearly what is meant by the term “consociational democracy,” not only can we delineate a more precise, theoretical definition of community organizing, but also, we can better understand the incomprehension of BBCO as a political form by external observers that we witnessed in earlier chapters.

Indivisible, Monistic, and Transcendent Conceptions of Sovereignty

We return to the anomalous nature of BBCO within the context of Anglo-American liberal democracy. To understand something of the challenge that BBCO, as a form of consociational democracy, poses to standard accounts of democratic citizenship, we must locate it within broader accounts of the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship. At the same time, we can excavate the simultaneously “secular” and theological nature of discussions of political order so as to further challenge simplistic assumptions about the relationship between religion and politics in modernity.