Many Americans seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.
By Derek Thompson
The Atlantic magazine April 3, 2024
See LinkedIn Newsletter, with links:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/true-cost-churchgoing-bust-the-atlantic-brcpe
"...Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence..."
Some key points:
- Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people — one in eight Americans — stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador.
- Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America. “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me.
- And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone.