Saddleback's Social Capital

The Book Report: A Lonely Day in the Neighborhood

The breakdown of community is not just a hunch of social commentators, but a sociological fact with severe consequences.

By Robert Wuthnow | posted 6/12/2000 12:00AM

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam, Simon & Schuster, 516 pages, $26. In 1954 my aunt and uncle, flush from rising wheat prices and an oil well, purchased a new Buick and joined the only form of entertainment within driving distance of their Kansas farm—a bowling league. They were part of a national trend. By the early 1960s, more than 8 percent of American men and 5 percent of American women had joined bowling leagues.But the nation's interest in bowling leagues soon passed. Fewer than 3 percent of Americans went bowling in leagues by 1998. My aunt, now a widow who lives alone, is too old to bowl. Her son, who lives 2,000 miles away, bowls alone if he bowls at all.For Robert Putnam, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the lonely bowler is emblematic of the serious collapse of community that has taken place over the past 30 years.Americans no longer spend as many evenings with their neighbors, less often join civic organizations like Kiwanis and the League of Women Voters, less frequently believe that other people are honest and trustworthy, and more and more adopt a private stance toward their religious convictions. Voter turnout, attending political rallies, working for political parties, and serving on local committees have all diminished markedly since the early 1970s. Many observers have commented on the rampant individualism that undermines Americans' community spirit. Indeed, polls show that a majority of Americans perceive the breakdown of community as a serious national problem. Yet most of the discussion about declining community consciousness has been conducted without benefit of solid evidence.Until now. Putnam has amassed more data on social trends than anyone in recent memory. With assistance from several major foundations and a stable of research assistants, he has spent the past six or seven years tracking down and analyzing virtually every conceivable piece of evidence about Americans' participation in their communities. The result is a veritable compendium of facts and figures about civic life.We learn, for instance, that voter turnout in national elections has actually decreased more than most observers have imagined—the reason being that the precipitous decline in northern states has been somewhat offset by rising voter turnout among black voters in the South since the cessation of Jim Crow laws. We learn that Americans spent about 80 minutes a day schmoozing with their friends in 1965 but only 57 minutes a day doing this in 1995. And we learn that Americans spent about twice as much time playing cards in the 1970s as they do now. Putnam "guesstimates" that no more than 10 percent of Americans' declining involvement in their communities is attributable to increasing workplace pressures, that 25 percent of the problem stems from watching too much television, and that at least half the trouble reflects baby boomers and Generation Xers simply not being as civic-minded as the generation that fought in World War II. These guesses are backed up by some evidence, although Putnam's arguments about cause and effect are often more speculative than one would wish.He also documents some of the benefits of high community participation: better schools, less violent crime, fewer fistfights, lower rates of tax evasion, and citizens who report leading happier lives. Unfortunately, Putnam's analysis of these data does not take into account other factors that might explain these differences among states (such as the proportion of residents who live in cities, racial differences, or differences in age distributions and income levels). His argument that social connectedness is associated with being healthier is, however, consistent with other studies showing that active church members tend to live somewhat longer and report fewer serious health problems than people who do not go to church.

Religion on the Wane?

Although the book focuses on other kinds of community, Putnam includes a valuable summary of trends in American religion. He shows that church membership and attendance increased until the 1960s but have declined by as much as 10 percent since then. Like other observers, he worries that baby boomers' spirituality may be too inward to generate strong community involvement. His overall assessment—based largely on a measure that he constructs by combining various surveys asking about church attendance—is that American religion is weaker now than a half-century ago.Yet he also notes some recent signs of vitality: the vibrancy of evangelical churches, the large percentage of congregations that provide social ministries to their communities, the evidence that people are joining small Bible-study groups and that such groups are generating stronger commitments to service within churches and in the wider community, the growing importance of faith-based nonprofit organizations, and the recent growth in church-based community organizing. Putnam somehow thinks these signs of vitality are not, on the whole, very impressive—a view that is perhaps rooted more in his pessimistic outlook about American society in general than in a thorough understanding of American religion. In the last ten pages of the book Putnam discusses (all too briefly) how the present collapse of community might be halted and reversed. He calls on Americans over the next decade to encourage children and teenagers to be as civic-minded as their grandparents, to resist workplace pressures that erode the family, to travel less and interact more with their neighbors, to spend less time watching television, and to participate in the public life of their communities.Recognizing the historic importance of religion, he also calls for a new "great awakening" (he does not say how this might happen) that will draw more Americans into "spiritual communities of meaning."The social scientist in me responds, yes, but what about the millions of inner-city families working two or three jobs at minimum wage just to pay the bills? How will they find the time and energy to do more than what they are doing?What about the thousands of urban neighborhoods in which civic organizations will have to be reinvented virtually from scratch?And what about the trillions of dollars now being invested to encourage us to spend even more time watching television, surfing the Internet, and purchasing unnecessary consumer goods?Nor does he persuade me that Americans are genuinely less civic-minded now than in the past. Quite a lot of evidence (which Putnam ignores or misinterprets) suggests that our social connections are changing rather than simply weakening: more of us are volunteering than ever before (even though we may volunteer for only a few hours a week), and this is true among the young as well as the old; more of us serve by working in nonprofit organizations (which have grown by 500 percent since the 1960s); more of us spend evenings with friends outside our neighborhoods (even though we visit less often with our neighbors); and more of us join Bible studies and other self-help groups, which in turn lead us to volunteer at our churches, join community-service projects, and become more interested in social and political issues.Still, Putnam does us all a service by reminding us of our civic responsibilities. Americans have as much freedom now to make informed moral choices as they ever have. Just because social institutions sometimes seem to be unraveling does not mean we have to sit passively waiting for their further demise.

Robert Wuthnowdirects the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. He is author of Loose Connections: Joining Together in America's Fragmented Communities (Harvard, 1998).

Related Elsewhere

See today's related article," The New Civic Family." Bowlingalone.com has detailed information about the decline of community, reviews of Putnam's book, an interview with the author, lists of ways Americans can reconnect with one another, and a number of excellent related links.Robert Putnam's original Journal of Democracy article" Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" is available online. Bowling Alone is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.Wuthnow's home page at Princeton offers a listing of his books and links to a number of his articles.Last year, Wuthnow was one of the panelists on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio program titled " In God We Trust: Civil and Uncivil Religion in America." He was also a guest on a 1997 PBS Newshour segment dealing with American spirituality.Leadership, our sister publication, looks at how one church is building community from scratch, shows how to connect women in communities, and examines the quest for community. Beliefnet reports on how one woman is trying to maintain her identity in the midst of a church community. An article posted by a British writer looks at the meaning of Christian community in our postmodern age. A speech delivered by John Perkins at the Family Research Council looks at Christian community development.

Saddleback's Social Capital

The author of Bowling Alone discovers Evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table. Reviewed by John Wilson | posted 2/01/2004 12:00AM

Better Together: Restoring the American Community
Robert D. Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein with Don Cohen Simon & Schuster, 318 pp., $26.95

In 2000, political scientist Robert Putnam published a massive book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which became that rarest of things: an intellectually meaty bestseller.

Putnam, it turned out, was in the right place at the right time. Across the ideological spectrum, Americans have become increasingly troubled by a decline in community. The remedy? "Social capital," referring to the cumulative clout of "social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and trustworthiness." It is the glue that helps people achieve concrete goals while at the same time benefiting others who may not be directly involved. For example, crime tends to be lower where there are strong neighborhood associations, benefiting residents who are not active in community organizing as well as those who are.

Hence Putnam's latest project, Better Together, a collaboration with Lewis Feldstein, president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and Don Cohen, "who did much of the field research and most of the actual writing of the case studies" that make up the book.

These 12 case studies range widely across the United States, offering examples of very different enterprises, from the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers to Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California; from branch libraries in Chicago to a far-sighted strategy for local business growth in Tupelo, Mississippi. Each example is intended to show in a practical way what is involved in "creating social capital: developing networks of relationships that weave individuals into groups and communities."

Taken together, they "suggest that social capital is usually developed in pursuit of a particular goal or set of goals and not for its own sake"—an important point that helps to explain the failure of initiatives with a strong utopian bent, such as those that seek "community" because, well, community is good.

Why should evangelicals read this book? First and most obviously, "Christians must actively work for the well-being of the larger societies in which we have been providentially placed." The words are from Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw's book, He Shines in All That's Fair: Culture and Common Grace. As citizens, we may learn a good deal from the studies assembled here.

Furthermore, this book is part of an ongoing public conversation—sometimes a debate, sometimes a shouting match—concerning the role of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in American civil society. Is it even possible to be a card-carrying evangelical and a good citizen in a "liberal democracy"? Many people say no. Some claim that evangelicals are all theocrats at heart, forever scheming for a grand coup d'état; others, notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, claim that evangelicals have been co-opted by the imperial state, giving up their distinctive Christian identity. Some are merely skeptical that religion makes much difference one way or another. (Two useful recent books bearing on these questions are Religion as Social Capital: Producing the Common Good, edited by Corwin Smidt, and A Public Faith: Evangelicals and Civic Engagement, edited by Michael Cromartie.)

Putnam himself has been an important voice in this conversation—important because of his immense influence, not because he is particularly knowledgeable about religion. In Bowling Alone he claimed that religious participation has declined markedly over the past three or four decades while conceding that, "measured by the yardstick of private beliefs, Americans' religious commitment has been reasonably stable over the last century" [italics added]. Many scholars of American religion would dispute the force of Putnam's distinction, but it does help to account for his confused treatment of conservative Protestants in that book.

One moment he acknowledges that even as religious participation in general has been sharply declining, fundamentalists and evangelicals have experienced growth. But before you can turn around, he refers us to a footnote in which sociologist Robert Wuthnow says that evangelicals are primarily interested in individual piety and thus support the "bowling alone" megatrend. (Dutifully following up on that footnote, we discover that Wuthnow was referring to "the first half of the twentieth century." Whoops!) Several chapters later, lo and behold, "evangelical and fundamentalist churches (along with their counterparts in Judaism and other religious traditions) constitute one of the most notable exceptions to the general decline in social capital that I have traced in this book." Go figure.

So it is all the more noteworthy, given the animus many people feel at the very word evangelical and the confusing treatment of conservative Protestants in Bowling Alone, that Better Together includes Saddleback Church as one of the case studies. Don Cohen, who visited Saddleback in May 2002 and interviewed Rick Warren, members of the staff, and church members, gives a very positive view of the "Purpose-Driven" program, with special emphasis on small groups. The unmistakable conclusion is that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table; Cohen observes correctly that "evangelism is, finally, the engine that drives" Saddleback, but there's not a hint of paranoia in his account.

As we have noted, not all Christians believe that we should strive to have a place at the civic table. But we do have a precedent—a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraff.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.

Related Elsewhere:

Better Together is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture, which also reviewedBowling Alone.

Robert Wuthnow reviewed Robert D. Putnam's earlier book, Bowling Alone.

Church as Civics 101
The robust civic engagement of Protestant clergy
John Schmalzbauer

May 1, 2003

Have Americans withdrawn from civic life? Have we become a "nation of couch potatoes," choosing HBO over the PTA, MTV over the YMCA? Political scientist Robert Putnam thinks so. Putnam argues that Americans have become increasingly disengaged from voluntary associations since the 1960s, spending more time in front of the television and less time with their fellow citizens. While surveys show that Americans devote less time to clubs and groups and belong to fewer of them, organizations such as the Red Cross, the PTA, labor unions, and fraternal organizations report steady declines in membership. Even worse, fewer Americans belong to bowling leagues, preferring to "bowl alone." 1

The publication of Putnam's article, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," along with a subsequent book, has led to a vigorous debate about the level of civic participation in America. Citing rival surveys, some scholars argue that participation in voluntary associations has actually increased.

Others argue that Putnam has focused on the wrong sorts of groups. To be sure, they concede, membership in bowling leagues and fraternal organizations has declined, but what about soccer leagues and Habitat for Humanity? 2

And what about churches? Religious congregations remain the most widespread form of voluntary associations in American society. Has participation in American congregations also declined? In Bowling Alone, Putnam estimates that "attendance and involvement in religious activities has fallen by roughly 25 to 50 percent" since the 1950s and 1960s. 3 Despite a temporary post-9/11 surge in religiosity, church attendance is back where it was before the attacks on Washington and New York. 4