We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 4: We’ve Lost Our Community
Edward Hopper, The Automat
I want to argue that, with the decline of the OLD world (omnipresent, lifelong, and dependent) and the rise of modern WEIRD life (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), we’ve lost two necessary things for human life, and we’ve also gained a new unmet need. The two things we’ve lost are community and a regular access to transcendence; the new need we now have, I’ll argue, is adult personal growth. In this newsletter, I’m going to focus on the loss of community.
When intellectuals in the late 1800s and early 1900s thought about what’s changed in their world, social life was an obvious place to start. Many were still close enough to an older way of life where people lived in the same place and had the same economic and social roles over countless generations. People related to each other based on lifelong, personal ties, shared the same overarching worldview (what I referred to in a past newsletter as a “sacred canopy”), and never once had to question or build a self-identity.
Of course, this is an idealized view of the old village way of life, but it captures an important and indisputable point: for most of human history, people lived in tight-knit communities that were neither dense, diverse, nor dynamic. Our personal identities and social roles were never up for questioning, (which might seem like a bummer to our WEIRD minds), but this also meant that we had a deep sense of safety and security. Our communities were not just safety nets, they were webs of acceptance and meaning that grounded and directed us.
Here’s an example of how these OLD communities fell apart. In medieval England, most people lived in OLD communities as serfs, working the land generation after generation. But with the rise of globalization, that land (owned by the few elite) became more valuable to raise sheep on than grow crops. Landlords began kicking peasant communities off their land in favor of sheep and thus began one of the forces that contributed to urbanization. Families moved to cities, scattered quickly and intermingled with other families from other areas with other worldviews. Their daily interactions are no longer with people sharing long inter-generational ties, but rather are now with strangers. Money, contracts, and bureaucratic rules now shape most social interactions.
Within a few generations we can see the breakdown of OLD community by the three Ds of WEIRD modernity: dynamism (in the form of globalization, capitalism), density (in the form of urbanization), and diversity (a fact of city life and also a primary reason for bureaucratic rules). This was a multi-generational shock for people connected to the OLD world. Urban poverty, alcoholism, and domestic violence were well documented in England from the 1600s on. And it’s evident in every metropolitan city in the world.
The best and most enduring solution to these early modern social problems was the rise of the bureaucratic welfare state which produced better working conditions, housing regulations, public health initiatives, and universal education. Living conditions and quality of life improved, and now we’re all Westernized, educated, dependent on capitalist industry, rich (relative to our ancestors and the non-WEIRD parts of the world), and at least somewhat democratic.
But with the loss of OLD world community, we have a massive hole in our social fabric and our individual lives. Without that longstanding, multigenerational web of acceptance and meaning that the OLD world gave humans, we’ve become lost, lonely, depressed, anxious, desperate, confused, angry, and paranoid. The best scientific research shows that humans are naturally altruistic, giving, caring, empathetic, and cooperative. And when we experience these qualities, we have dramatically lower rates of mental and physical illnesses and we live longer. This is our birthright when we are in a safe and supportive community.
So, why can’t religious institutions give this to us? For many people it still does. Quite a bit of research shows that people who regularly attend a religious institution are happier and healthier. But nevertheless, attendance at these institutions declines year after year.
Ryan Burges, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Fortress Press, 2021)
The reasons for this are several:
We all grow up in a diverse society and eventually see that our childhood religion is just one of an infinite variety of worldviews
We don’t need a religious institution to do anything necessary in life like get a job, have a home, raise a family, etc.
Science has explained the material world and no faith or deity is required
The wealthier people get, the less dependent they feel on religious support
We can meet spiritual needs in a private, individualistic way (meditation/prayer, wellness/development retreats, psychedelics, art/music/nature)
As one founder of modern sociology put it: “If there is one truth history teaches us beyond doubt, it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.” He went on to say that eventually, in modern life, religion will have no practical purpose at all . . . except to support a sense of community.
Of course, we have non-religious forms of community: family, friends, bowling leagues, and book clubs, to name a few. But research shows that these have all declined as a source of social support as well. One of the reasons for this is that we WEIRD worlders still haven’t figured out how to “do” community in a diverse and dynamic context. Our community institutions in the recent past––whether they’re churches, fraternal organizations, or bowling clubs––were largely ethnically homogenous and stratified by gender and class. How do we build community in the diverse WEIRD contexts most of us live in?
Another reason that our non-religious community organizations haven’t been able to hold together is that they don’t have practices of transcendence that help bind people together. We’ve lost deep community as we’ve lost religious institutions, but we can’t get community back through friend groups and book clubs. Our modern, WEIRD lives are too diverse and our current practices lack the transcendence that helped bind people together in religious institutions.
In the next newsletter, I’ll write more about this transcendence. I think it does more than bind people together, but that’s one of its key functions. It also lifts us out of our isolated, individualized mode of thinking. We need this just as much as we need community.