* Rather than have a local nobleman keep watch over a district, as in England, the cohort of Americans living nearby took joint responsibility for their collective well – being . Many colonists had moved away from the social architecture depicted later in Downton Abbey and toward something more like that portrayed in Little House on the Prairie. 5 And because that sort of community wouldn’t abide the heavy hand of a monarch — communities working collaboratively were less interested in taking orders from on high — the founding generation designed and embraced an alternative kind of government, reflected in the Constitution, that was more appropriate to colonial American life.
In the centuries that followed, that core community building block — what Alexis de Tocqueville and others before him defined as a “township” — remained the defining feature of American society. 6 Americans moved from farm to factory and from town to city. They withstood the Industrial Revolution. They evolved from a society dependent on slave labor to one focused on innovation. But through all of those changes, the core architecture of “townshipped” society — where communities of people with different skills and interests, disparate concerns and values, collaborated with their neighbors in the pursuit of the common good — endured.* Adults today tend to prize different kinds of connections than their grandparents: more of our time and attention today is spent on more intimate contacts and the most casual acquaintances. We’ve abandoned the relationships in between — what I define in a later chapter as “middle – ring” ties.
* Chris Rock would joke that in every town in America there are two malls: “they’ve got the white mall, and the mall where the white people used to go.”
* Where religion once acted as a sort of social obligation passed down from generation to generation, we now view piety as a route to personal expression. We have moved from a sort of institutional religiosity to what Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow has termed a “spirituality of seeking.” 17 Americans today choose much more frequently to abandon their parents’ liturgy in favor of a spiritual journey that feels more individually fulfilling. 18
Moreover, while we’re less likely to attend religious services, when we do choose to frequent a house of worship, we’re much more likely to travel to attend the services we like best.* Among those who bought and sold large quantities of jewels in the Diamond District of Manhattan, he noted that most were Orthodox Jews from certain pockets of Brooklyn. For the most part, they attended the same synagogues and sent their kids to the same schools. And because their lives were so intertwined, they’d developed a series of norms that, taken out of context, might have appeared reckless. For example, when one dealer wanted to sell a bag of gems to another, he generally offered the prospective buyer an opportunity to examine the stones in private.
To most outsiders, that tradition might appear to be an invitation to theft — the buyer, after all, would then have a chance to replace the stones in question with less valuable impostors. But the sellers were rarely snookered — and for good reason: if a buyer tried something sneaky, he faced the wrath of the neighborhood back home. It’s not just that a thief would be shunned from future business transactions in and around the Diamond District — he’d be ostracized from community community gatherings, subjected to glares at shul, and offered the cold shoulder on the street. Integrity in the Diamond District wasn’t the issue it might have been because good behavior was enforced through shame.
Coleman’s explication of social capital contended that interpersonal connections couldn’t be discounted as leisurely pleasures because, in reality, they harnessed very tangible economic value.* Our search for affirmation — what MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has defined as a sort of communal narcissism — has compelled us to avoid relationships that expanded our intellectual horizons or drove conflict. Unless we enjoy it, we no longer have to maintain a close friendship with the woman who wants to haggle over politics. We no longer have to talk football with the guy rooting for our team’s archrival. And life today doesn’t just allow us to spend more time with the acquaintances who comprise our inner and outer rings; we can populate those categories with people who speak our language. 20 Never before have people who shared our concerns been so easily accessible, not only across the dinner table but around the globe.
* The circumstances that once compelled Americans to develop the sort of familiar but less intimate relationships that were a staple of postwar American life have faded. Social capital spent on World of Warcraft or Facebook is time not spent outside talking with neighbors, shooting the breeze at a bar, or grabbing a burger with a colleague from work. And while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, we ought not to be so naïve as to think that that those new relationships don’t come at a cost.
* we tend to e – mail with the same people we visit in real life.
* for every minute an individual spends on the Internet, the time he or she spends with friends is reduced by seven seconds, and time spent with colleagues by eleven. Perhaps more jarring, the study found that for every e – mail sent or received, an individual lost a minute of time with his or her family.
* [Claude Fischer published the 1982 book To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City.] Residents of small towns engaged more frequently in what Fischer termed “traditional” relationships — they were more apt to encompass family members, neighbors, and fellow congregants at church. In cities, by contrast, relationships were more “modern,” meaning that urbanites were more often tied to work associates, club members, and friends. There seemed to be a tacit trade – off at work: people living in downtown San Francisco named a quarter fewer relatives among their network than those in semirural areas; on the flip side, only an eighth of city dwellers lived in a social world dominated by family, compared to a full half of those living further out. 2
Fischer also discerned something else: those who lived in the bedroom communities surrounding cities — suburbanites, in essence — were the least likely to be involved in the traditional relationships of rural America. His broad conclusion: while it wasn’t fair to say that community was in decline, how people in various types of neighborhoods connected to one another varied across disparate environments. 3 Different landscapes begat different flavors of community.* In the early postwar period, being neighborly meant reaching out to the people who lived next door — taking a homemade cake to the family moving into the house across the street, offering to watch the kids in a pinch, saying hello at an annual block party, or inviting acquaintances to join a Wednesday night bowling league.
Over the years, however, the term came to denote almost exactly the opposite. Today, being “neighborly” means leaving those around you in peace. The neighborly family across the street refrains from playing loud music or leaving its garbage on the stoop. A neighborly homeowner avoids letting her house deteriorate and become a blight on the neighborhood. “Neighborly” neighbors avoid mentioning what they’ve overheard through the thin walls separating apartments. The sense of warmth once suggested by the term — a crucial ingredient for the sorts of the middle – ring relationships so important for township community — has been replaced by a kind of detachment.* Americans aren’t nearly as invested in the missions of the membership associations that they choose to join today as their parents and grandparents were decades ago. It isn’t just that the nature of those organizations had changed, as Theda Skocpol discovered. It’s that each individual’s emotional investment in each organization had ebbed.
In the 1950s, for example, a mother might have found satisfaction in the spirit of fellowship and charity that defined her Junior League chapter, and her husband might have taken pride in being a leader of the neighborhood watch. But as Americans increasingly have come to mark their involvement by sending checks to professional lobbying organizations like Planned Parenthood Action Fund or the AARP, their sense of personal responsibility has diminished; roles once filled by voluntary associations have become the government’s responsibility. 7 Community policing, for example, the strategy of having officers become more intimately familiar with the people along their patrols, was promoted during the 1990s largely because the civic organizations that once served the same role had withered.
A similar shift is evident in the American workplace. The patterns that were predominant in the early postwar period — the industrial jobs that peaked during the 1940s and 1950s — facilitated casual acquaintances that are rarer today. The way that businesses have become specialized — farming out discrete responsibilities rather than housing a whole contingent of different sorts of employees — has eaten away at middle – ring relationships that might have existed between different kinds of employees. The interactions that might have flourished in the parking lot between an accountant and an engineer two generations ago don’t happen because the accountants now work on one suburban campus and the engineers on another.* Robert Putnam: “The best evidence suggests that social trust rose from the mid – 1940s to the mid – 1960s, peaking in 1964. . . . In the mid – 1960s, however, this beneficent trend was reversed, initiating a long – term decline. . . . Most, if not all, of the decline in American social trust since the 1960s is attributable to generational succession. . . . At generation’s end, a generation with a trust quotient of nearly 80 percent was being rapidly replaced by one with a trust quotient of barely half that.”
I ask Grok: “What role does diversity play in social trust?”
Grok says:
Robert Putnam’s 2007 study on U.S. communities found that higher diversity often correlates with lower social capital—people tend to “hunker down,” trust their neighbors less, and pull back from civic engagement. The idea is that humans are wired for familiarity; when you’re surrounded by people who don’t look, talk, or act like you, it can trigger an instinctive wariness. Studies in Europe, like those from the Netherlands or Denmark, back this up: trust in strangers (generalized trust) tends to dip in more diverse neighborhoods.
I ask Grok: “How racially segregated are America’s churches?”
Grok says:
America’s churches remain significantly racially segregated, a reflection of both historical patterns and ongoing social dynamics. Studies and data consistently show that most congregations are racially homogenous, with Sunday morning often described as “the most segregated hour in America”—a phrase popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s that still holds true today.
A 2021 study by Lifeway Research found that 67% of U.S. churches are composed of one racial or ethnic group making up 80% or more of the congregation. This means that two-thirds of churches are overwhelmingly dominated by a single race. The National Congregations Study (2018-2019) reported similar findings: about 80% of churchgoers attend a congregation where one racial group comprises at least 80% of the membership. White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian congregations tend to form distinct clusters, with little overlap.
