I don’t know how you can say, ‘I’m lonely,’ without sounding like I’m saying, ‘I’m a loser,’” a middle-aged man said to me not way back. “And I don’t know how you can say it without sounding like I’m an ungrateful Christian.”
After all, this man said, he’s at church every week—not only there, but energetic. His life is a blur of activities. But he feels alone. In that, a minimum of, he’s not alone.
Repeatedly, just about all of the info show us the identical thing: that the so-called “loneliness epidemic” experts warned about is real. We all understand it’s bad, and we sometimes have a vague sense of why it’s happening. The answers that some provide you with are sometimes too big to truly affect any individual person’s life. Smartphones aren’t going away. We aren’t all moving back to our hometowns. We see a form of resigned powerlessness to vary society’s lonely condition. So why can’t the church fix this?
The answer lies partly in a book published a near quarter-century ago: political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Earlier this summer, The New York Times interviewed Putnam, asking him whether, since he saw the loneliness crisis coming, he saw any hope of it ending.
Putnam reiterated that the reply is what he calls “social capital,” those networks of relationships needed to maintain people together. Social capital is available in two forms, Putnam insists, and each are obligatory. Bonding social capital is made up of the ties that link people to other people like themselves. Bridging social capital consists of the ties that link people to those unlike themselves.
The first time I used to be on set with a television talk-show host who, like me, grew up Southern Baptist, he turned to me before we went on the air and said, “Pop quiz: What should all the time be the primary song in a hymnal?” I immediately responded with the suitable answer (“Holy, Holy, Holy”), and we high-fived. No one else on that set knew what we were talking about. The secularist within the producer’s chair might need thought, “What’s ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’?” The churchgoing evangelical behind the camera might well have thought, “What’s a hymnal?”
That little detail of shared tribal memory, though, represented greater than trivia. It was a way of recognizing each other—the identical form of church background, from the identical form of time period, the identical form of shared experience. We knew in that moment that, even when nobody else in New York City knew the names of Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, we did, and, even when nobody in that television network constructing could say what words would follow “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag,” we might. All of us experience equivalent moments of bonding social capital.
Putnam makes it clear that one type of social capital is just not “good” and the opposite “bad.” When you’re sick and must be taken care of, often that comes from relationships made with bonding capital. That’s good, but—when taken too far—really dangerous. Putnam notes that the Ku Klux Klan is “pure social capital” of the bonding sort. Bridging capital, Putnam argues, is far harder, but each are needed for an individual or a society to flee isolation.
We know the statistics on religious decline within the United States, especially in the case of actual weekly church attendance. Some (though not all) of that decline is driven by the identical aspects that wiped away bowling leagues and Lions Clubs and neighborhood watch programs.
But perhaps we must flip the query around. We live in a rustic with churches in every single place, and the overwhelming majority of individuals—a minimum of for a very long time within the twentieth century—belonged or currently belong to some form of church. So why weren’t the aspects that eroded social capital not arrested long before we arrived at this point?
One factor is what Putnam’s getting at with the need of bridging and bonding. The Bible holds each forms of social capital together.
In the Old Testament, Israel is distinct from the nations, with the best bonding capital conceivable employed to maintain them together. At the identical time, they were reminded consistently that they were to be a “light to the nations,” bridging the divides that had sundered humanity since Babel.
In the New Testament, the pioneer church was to be bonded—serving one another on the Lord’s Table, equipping one another with spiritual gifts, uniting voices together in worship. That’s why the imagery of the family is applied consistently within the epistles to the church. Simultaneously, the Great Commission—to disciple all nations—requires bridging capital, often of the kind we see Paul employ at Mars Hill in Athens or with Gentile audiences of all sorts.
In fact, the bonding of people that were bridged to at least one one other is considered one of the first themes of book after book of the New Testament (Acts, Romans, Galatians, etc.).
A church that’s evangelistic (searching for to share Christ with one’s neighbors and with the nations of the world) relies on bridging social capital. A church that considers its members as brothers and sisters, as one body with many members, counts on bonding social capital.
What we have now long seen within the American church—almost irrespective of theological distinctives or denominational identity—is a severing of bridging social capital from bonding social capital.
Many of the more “missional” congregations—especially the larger ones—did bridging social capital thoroughly. They taught married couples how you can relate to single young adults, how you can discuss with the Buddhist down the road, how you can anticipate the way in which a secularist might take into consideration why a very good God would let bad things occur to good people, and so forth. But a lot of these churches now admit they did so without numerous bonding social capital. The people didn’t know one another. They weren’t deeply discipled.
On the opposite hand, numerous other churches did bonding without bridging. Some of those churches were ingrown, of the kind we’ve all seen, where two or three families are the inner circle and nobody else can ever really belong. Some of them thought themselves to be “evangelistic,” but without teaching their people any real bridging social capital: a church of white, college-educated, suburban young professionals with children, as an example, dedicated to reaching white, college-educated, suburban young professionals with children.
Once the bridging and bonding types of social capital are broken, then, something must take their place. What that’s turned out to be is imaginary social capital. A variety of people turn to imaginary bridging capital. Some who’ve fled what they considered the smothering conformity of the church think they at the moment are bridging people unlike themselves, but just find yourself with other individuals who’ve fled what they considered to be the smothering conformity of the church. That’s imaginary bridging capital—not the true thing.
And some people turn to the imaginary bonding capital of Christian nationalism or ethnic Kinism. Why is sort of every neo-Confederate I do know a Yankee from Minnesota or Ohio or Idaho? It’s since it’s a method to pretend to have bonds with “one’s own kind.” But hating the identical people doesn’t a community make. What’s the final result? More loneliness, after which resentment on the being lonely, and the finding someone guilty for being lonely. As Dwight Schrute from The Office once put it, “They say that no man is an island. False! I’m an island, and this island is volcanic.”
All around us, we see archipelagoes of lonely islands, with volcanoes spewing hot, molten lava on a lot of them.
In his interview with the Times, Putnam makes a degree that too a lot of us miss. We need something like bowling leagues to avoid wasting democracy, he said, however it doesn’t work if individuals are joining the bowling leagues to avoid wasting democracy. They must bowl since it’s fun. Along the way in which, communities get healthier, but that’s a byproduct.
Churches combat loneliness not by telling people, “Come to church so that you won’t be lonely; it’s good for you.” People should come to church since it’s true—Jesus is alive and seated at the suitable hand of the Father, forgiving our sins and coming again. Those of us convinced of this could then remind ourselves that we belong to at least one one other, that we will not be our own. We should remind ourselves that the good congregation in heaven is made up of each tribe, language, people, and nation (Rev. 5:9).
On mission together to bridge the surface world to the God who loves them, we bond along the way in which. In fellowship to bond as a family whose commonality is Christ, we stir ourselves as much as love the people he loves, so we turn out to be bridges along the way in which.
Social capital is just not crucial thing. The kingdom of God is (Matt. 6:33). But the brokenness of social capital—inside and outdoors the church—might prompt us to retrace our steps. We might see some burned bridges, some broken bonds—all of which Jesus knows how you can piece back together again.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
