BOWLING ALONE Read online

  This ambiguous conclusion, however, is drastically altered when we examine evidence on more active forms of participation than mere card-carrying membership. Service as an organizational officer or committee member is very common among active members of American organizations. In 1987, 61 percent of all organization members had served on a committee at some time or other, and 46 percent had served as an officer.28 Among self-described “active” members—roughly half of the adult population—73 percent had served at some time as a committee member, 58 percent had served at some time as an officer, and only 21 percent had never served as either an officer or a committee member. Sooner or later, in short, the overwhelming majority of active members in most voluntary associations in America are cajoled into playing some leadership role in the organization.

  How has the number of Americans who fit this bill changed over the last few decades? Between 1973 and 1994 the number of men and women who took any leadership role in any local organization—from “old-fashioned” fraternal organizations to new age encounter groups—was sliced by more than 50 percent.29 (Figure 10 summarizes this evidence by showing the changing fraction of the population who have been actively involved in organizational life as either a local officer or a local committee member.) This dismaying trend began to accelerate after 1985: in the ten short years between 1985 and 1994, active involvement in community organizations in this country fell by 45 percent. By this measure, at least, nearly half of America’s civic infrastructure was obliterated in barely a decade.

  Eighty percent of life, Woody Allen once quipped,30 is simply showing up. The same might be said of civic engagement, and “showing up” provides a useful standard for evaluating trends in associational life in our communities. In twenty-five annual surveys between 1975 and 1999 the DDB Needham Life Style surveys asked more than eighty-seven thousand Americans, “How many times in the last year did you attend a club meeting?” Figure 11 shows how this form of civic engagement has dwindled over the last quarter of the twentieth

  Figure 10: Active Organizational Involvement, 1973–1994 century. In 1975–76 American men and women attended twelve club meetings on average each year—essentially once a month.31 By 1999 that figure had shrunk by fully 58 percent to five meetings per year. In 1975–76, 64 percent of all Americans still attended at least one club meeting in the previous year. By 1999 that figure had fallen to 38 percent. In short, in the mid-1970s nearly two-thirds of all Americans attended club meetings, but by the late 1990s nearly two-thirds of all Americans never do. By comparison with other countries, we may still seem a nation of joiners, but by comparison with our own recent past, we are not—at least if “joining” means more than nominal affiliation.

  Thus two different survey archives suggest that active involvement in local clubs and organizations of all sorts fell by more than half in the last several decades of the twentieth century. This estimate is remarkably consistent with evidence of an entirely unexpected sort. Each decade between 1965 and 1995, national samples of Americans were asked to complete “time diaries,” recording how they spent every minute of a randomly chosen “diary day.” From these sets of diaries we can reconstruct how the average American’s use of time gradually evolved over the three decades between 1965 and 1995.32

  Broadly speaking, as John Robinson, director of the time diary project, has shown, our time allocations have not changed dramatically over this period— we have averaged just about exactly eight hours of sleep a night throughout the decades, for example—but there are some important exceptions. Watching

  Figure 11: Club Meeting Attendance Dwindles, 1975–1999

  TV consumes more time now than it used to, while we spend less time now on housework and child care. The slice of time devoted to organizational activity has always been relatively modest on any given day, since even faithful reading groups or service clubs usually meet only once a week or once a month, not once a day. Nevertheless, the diaries show clearly that the time we devote to community organizations has fallen steadily over this period.33

  Measured in terms of hours per month, the average American’s investment in organizational life (apart from religious groups, which we shall examine separately) fell from 3.7 hours per month in 1965 to 2.9 in 1975 to 2.3 in 1985 and 1995. On an average day in 1965, 7 percent of Americans spent some time in a community organization. By 1995 that figure had fallen to 3 percent of all Americans. Those numbers suggest that nearly half of all Americans in the 1960s invested some time each week in clubs and local associations, as compared to less than one-quarter in the 1990s.34 Further analysis of the time diary evidence suggests that virtually all of this decline is attributable to generational replacement: members of any given generation are investing as much time in organizational activity as they ever were, but each successive generation is investing less.

  If we take into account the rapid growth in educational levels over this period, all these slumps in associational involvement (leadership involvement, meeting attendance, time spent, and so on) are even more dramatic. Among the burgeoning numbers of college graduates, the average number of club meetings per year fell by 55 percent (from thirteen meetings per year to six), while among high school graduates, the drop in annual meeting attendance was 60 percent (from ten meetings per year to four), and among the dwindling number of Americans who had not completed high school, the drop in annual meeting attendance was 73 percent (from nine meetings per year to two per year).

  In absolute terms the declines in organizational activity and club meeting attendance were roughly parallel at all educational and social levels. However, because the less well educated were less involved in community organizations to begin with, the relative decline was even greater at the bottom of the hierarchy. A similar pattern appears in the time diary data—declines at all levels in the educational hierarchy, though slightly greater in this case among the more educated. In other words, the gross decline in community involvement has been masked to some degree by the fact that more and more Americans have the skills and social resources that traditionally encouraged participation in community affairs.

  In community life, as in the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, so it is hazardous to assume that trends over the next several decades will mirror those over the last several. Nevertheless, the down-trend shown in figure 11 has been more or less uninterrupted for more than a quarter century, and if the current rate of decline were to continue, clubs would become extinct in America within less than twenty years. Considering that such local associations have been a feature of American community life for several hundred years, it is remarkable to see them so high on the endangered species list.

  The organizational slumps reported here come from four entirely different streams of evidence—different sampling techniques, different survey organizations, different questions—but each is based on tens of thousands of interviews in scores of independent surveys, and together they cover associational involvement of all sorts. That they converge so closely in their estimate that active involvement in local organizations fell by more than half in the last several decades of the twentieth century is as striking and persuasive as if southwestern tree rings and Arctic ice cores and British Admiralty records all confirmed the same rate of global warming.

  Another “hard” indicator of the priority Americans attribute to organizational involvement is the fraction of our leisure dollar that we spend on dues, a measure that the Commerce Department has tracked for the last seventy years. In 1929, 6 cents of every dollar of consumer spending for leisure and recreation was for club and fraternal dues. With the arrival of television in the 1950s (and the nationwide explosion in sales of TV sets), this figure fell to 4 cents, but by the end of that decade it had risen back to 5 cents, in accord with the 1950s–1960s civic boom that appears repeatedly in our evidence. During the last three decades of the century, however, this figure fell to 3 cents, so that by 1997 this measure of the relative priority that Americans give
to our organizational commitments was down 40 percent from its postwar peak in 1958.35

  To summarize: Organizational records suggest that for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century Americans’ involvement in civic associations of all sorts rose steadily, except for the parenthesis of the Great Depression. In the last third of the century, by contrast, only mailing list membership has continued to expand, with the creation of an entirely new species of “tertiary” association whose members never actually meet. At the same time, active involvement in face-to-face organizations has plummeted, whether we consider organizational records, survey reports, time diaries, or consumer expenditures. We could surely find individual exceptions—specific organizations that successfully sailed against the prevailing winds and tides—but the broad picture is one of declining membership in community organizations. During the last third of the twentieth century formal membership in organizations in general has edged downward by perhaps 10–20 percent. More important, active involvement in clubs and other voluntary associations has collapsed at an astonishing rate, more than halving most indexes of participation within barely a few decades.

  Many Americans continue to claim that we are “members” of various organizations, but most Americans no longer spend much time in community organizations—we’ve stopped doing committee work, stopped serving as officers, and stopped going to meetings. And all this despite rapid increases in education that have given more of us than ever before the skills, the resources, and the interests that once fostered civic engagement. In short, Americans have been dropping out in droves, not merely from political life, but from organized community life more generally.

  Before reaching any firm conclusion about trends in Americans’ involvement in formal social organizations, however, we need to consider changes in the worlds of religion and work. Religion remains today, as in the past, an extremely important sector of American civil society, and work has come to occupy an ever more important place in the lives of many Americans, so trends in those two domains will have an important effect on our collective stock of social capital.

  CHAPTER 4

  Religious Participation

  CHURCHES AND other religious organizations have a unique importance in American civil society. America is one of the most religiously observant countries in the contemporary world. With the exception of “a few agrarian states such as Ireland and Poland,” observes one scholar, “the United States has been the most God-believing and religion-adhering, fundamentalist, and religiously traditional country in Christendom,” as well as “the most religiously fecund country” where “more new religions have been born … than in any other society.”1

  American churches* over the centuries have been incredibly robust social institutions. Tocqueville himself commented at length on Americans’ religiosity. Religious historian Phillip Hammond observes that “ever since the nation’s founding, a higher and higher proportion of Americans have affiliated with a church or synagogue—right through the 1950s.”2 Although most often we think of the colonists as a deeply religious people, one systematic study of the history of religious observance in America estimates that the rate of formal religious adherence grew steadily from 17 percent in 1776 to 62 percent in 1980.3 Other observers, such as E. Brooks Holifield, argue that the meaning of church “membership” has become less stringent over time and conclude that “from the seventeenth century through the twentieth, participation in congregations has probably remained relatively constant. For most of the past three hundred years, from 35 to 40 percent of the population has probably participated in congregations with some degree of regularity.”4 In either case, one reason for this resilience is that religion in America (unlike in most other advanced Western nations) has been pluralistic and constantly evolving, expressed in a kaleidoscopic series of revivals and awakenings rather than a single-state religion that could become ossified.5

  Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America. “The church is people,” says Reverend Craig McMullen, the activist co-pastor of the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church in Boston. “It’s not a building; it’s not an institution, even. It is relationships between one person and the next.”6 As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. So how involved we are in religion today matters a lot for America’s social capital.

  Religious institutions directly support a wide range of social activities well beyond conventional worship. Among the entries on the weekly calendar for October 14, 1990, of the Riverside Church in New York City, a mainline Protestant congregation, were meetings of the Social Service Training Session, the AIDS Awareness Seminar, the Ecology Task Force, the Chinese Christian Fellowship, Narcotics Anonymous, Riverside Business and Professional Women’s Club, Gulf Crisis Study Series, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Martial Arts Class for Adults and Teens. In January 1991 the weekly calendar of the Crystal Cathedral, an evangelical church in Garden Grove, California, included sessions devoted to Women in the Marketplace, Conquering Compulsive Behaviors, Career Builders’ Workshop, Stretch and Walk Time for Women, Cancer Conquerors, Positive Christian Singles, Gamblers Anonymous, Women Who Love Too Much, Overeaters Anonymous, and Friday Night Live (for junior high schoolers). The Garden Grove Crystal Cathedral complex also includes restaurants and a Family Life Center with a swimming pool, weight room, saunas, and steamrooms. In at least one new megachurch, social activism has extended even to classes in charm, modeling, and cake decorating and the inclusion of a bowling alley in a seven-story recreational center.7

  Churches provide an important incubator for civic skills, civic norms, community interests, and civic recruitment. Religiously active men and women learn to give speeches, run meetings, manage disagreements, and bear administrative responsibility. They also befriend others who are in turn likely to recruit them into other forms of community activity. In part for these reasons, churchgoers are substantially more likely to be involved in secular organizations, to vote and participate politically in other ways, and to have deeper informal social connections.8

  Regular worshipers and people who say that religion is very important to them are much more likely than other people to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.9 In one survey of twenty-two different types of voluntary associations, from hobby groups to professional associations to veterans groups to self-help groups to sports clubs to service clubs, it was membership in religious groups that was most closely associated with other forms of civic involvement, like voting, jury service, community projects, talking with neighbors, and giving to charity.10

  Religiosity rivals education as a powerful correlate of most forms of civic engagement.11 In fact, religiously involved people seem simply to know more people. One intriguing survey that asked people to enumerate all individuals with whom they had had a face-to-face conversation in the course of the day found that religious attendance was the most powerful predictor of the number of one’s daily personal encounters.12 Regular church attendees reported talking with 40 percent more people in the course of the day. These studies cannot show conclusively that churchgoing itself “produces” social connectivity— probably the causal arrow between the two points in both directions—but it is clear that religious people are unusually active social capitalists.

  Religious involvement is an especially strong predictor of volunteering and philanthropy. About 75–80 percent of church members give to charity, as compared with 55–60 percent of nonmembers, and 50–60 percent of church membe
rs volunteer, while only 30–35 percent of nonmembers do. In part, of course, this is because churches themselves do things that require funds and volunteers, but religious adherents are also more likely to contribute time and money to activities beyond their own congregation. Even excluding contributions to religious causes, active involvement in religious organizations is among the strongest predictors of both philanthropy and volunteering.13

  In part, the tie between religion and altruism embodies the power of religious values. As Kenneth Wald, a close student of religion, observes, “Religious ideals are potentially powerful sources of commitment and motivation,” so that “human beings will make enormous sacrifices if they believe themselves to be driven by a divine force.”14 But the social ties embodied in religious communities are at least as important as religious beliefs per se in accounting for volunteerism and philanthropy.15 Connectedness, not merely faith, is responsible for the beneficence of church people. Once again, the evidence does not prove beyond all doubt that churchgoing itself produces generosity, but religious involvement is certainly associated with greater attention to the needs of our brothers and sisters.