Promising Practices: Women Volunteers in Contemporary Japanese Religious Civil Society

There is little research on how and to what extent women’s participation in volunteer groups sponsored by religious organizations might be a vehicle for participative democracy in practice, nor has much attention been given to the different ways in which those groups support citizen participation. Extant research in the sociology of religion and gender studies exploring the rela- tionship between women, religion and volunteering have mainly focused on the structural conditions combined with ideological influence and the socio- cultural circumstances that the religious context and gender socialization bring about in motivating women to engage in social work. As a consequence, studies discussing religious civil society from a gender perspective have tended to overlook the social significance of women’s active participation in volun- teer groups sponsored by religious organizations, especially in view of their empowered role in society at large. Rather than following those established paradigms of resistance to internal- ized social norms or responses to structural constraints, this study empirically explores what types of participation are encouraged by religious civil society groups. Specifically, it approaches women’s faith-based volunteering as a social practice, which helps in downplaying the normative role of belief and gen- der socialization in order to emphasize the binding role of practice.