By Kate Eubanks
Religious congregations are often on the front lines of responding to poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, and other social challenges. But how do religious leaders understand the causes of poverty—and how do those beliefs shape the ways they respond?
Researchers from the Boniuk Institute recently presented new findings from the Houston Religious Leadership Project at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The study draws on 62 in-depth interviews and four focus groups involving 19 additional religious leaders across Houston’s diverse religious landscape. Funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the two-year project examines how religious leaders understand and respond to the social problems facing their communities.
The research reveals a complex picture of how faith leaders understand poverty. Some leaders emphasized individual explanations, describing poverty in terms of spiritual or moral deprivation, individual choices, or mental health and addiction. Others emphasized structural causes, pointing to systems such as payday lending, educational disparities, inadequate transportation, and insufficient support for mental health and addiction. Some leaders combined both perspectives, recognizing that individual circumstances and broader social structures can interact.
Leaders also described a range of responses, from advocacy and efforts to change public policy, to programs addressing underlying needs such as medical debt, to the more common work of providing immediate assistance through food pantries, blood drives, and other services.
One of the study’s most notable findings, however, is that how leaders explain poverty does not necessarily predict how they respond to it. Instead, the ability to serve beyond a congregation’s immediate community appears to be strongly shaped by available resources. Leaders of better- resourced congregations were more likely to engage in citywide partnerships and advocacy, while working-class and immigrant congregations often focused on meeting needs within their own communities.
These findings also raise practical questions about how religious communities can work together across differences to address shared challenges. The Boniuk Institute will explore some of those questions at Convergence: A Workshop on Multifaith Collaboration bringing religious, nonprofit, and community leaders together. The workshop builds on findings from the Houston Religious Leadership Project and offers an opportunity to consider how research on religious leadership can inform practice.