SEAN F. EVERTON

Scholars have long recognized the important role that social networks play in connecting people to various types of civic engagement and collective action. For example, Beyerlein and Sikkink (2008) showed that individuals who attend church regularly were more likely to volunteer for 9/11 relief efforts than were those who did not. Similarly, Lewis, MacGregor, and Putnam (2013) found that after controlling for religious tradition, religious attendance, number of friends, and sociability, religious social networks have a positive effect on volunteering, informal giving, attending public meetings, participating in a political activity, and the number of political activities in which people participate. And then, of course, there is the civil rights movement, which drew extensively on church-based social ties to spread the news of various events, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott ("Networks and Religion: Political Participation and Civic Engagement") .