In recent years social critics like Robert Putnam
(Bowling Alone) and Charles Murray (Coming
Apart) have documented and
deplored a decline of community among Americans. It’s a development
that affects churches along with other institutions of civil
society.
But “decline of community” is an abstraction and hardly
self-explanatory. A story told by a man I know offers a concrete
illustration.
“My wife and I have lived for many years in a nice, quiet
neighborhood inhabited by nice, quiet people. In many ways, we’re very
happy. But as time passes, I become increasingly aware that everything
isn’t as it should be.
“Let me tell you about the Smiths—not their
real name, of course. They lived here almost as long as we have, and
they’re nice, quiet people too. A few weeks ago, my wife phoned their
house hoping to chat with Mrs. Smith. Mr. Smith
answered.
“’Betty is out,’ he told my wife, ‘and I can’t talk now. I’m
packing.’
“’You’re taking a trip?’
“’We sold the house to
our daughter and her husband. We’re moving.’ It turned out that they
were going to a gated townhouse section several blocks away. The movers
would be coming in two days.
“I was flabbergasted when my wife told me. As
I mentioned, the Smiths had lived near us for many years. We weren’t
particularly close friends, but our daughters had babysat their kids,
and they were the only churchgoing Catholics in the vicinity besides
ourselves. Yet here they were, all set to move, and they’d have gone
without a word if my wife hadn’t happened to call.
“Now that, frankly, is
what I call weird. Yet as I think about it, it’s also typical of life
in our neighborhood. People here are strangers who happen to live near
one another. In all the years we’ve been here, only one person—one!—has
been truly friendly, really behaved as you might expect a neighbor to
do. That was a woman who lived across the street from us, and she, I’m
sorry to say, moved into a retirement home several years ago. Now it’s
entirely a neighborhood of nice, quiet strangers.”
And that, I suspect, is
the “decline of community” in one isolated but perhaps not atypical
case.
To some extent, it may be a regional phenomenon. I suspect
there are other parts of the country—perhaps even other parts of the
city where the man who shared this story lives—where neighborliness and
community can still be found. But if the Putnams and the Murrays are
right, there are other places where they can’t.
Is that really so bad?
Writing in The Weekly
Standard, author Gertrude
Himmelfarb maintains that it is. “Individuals are increasingly removed
from the traditional networks of ‘civic engagement’—family, friends,
professional organizations, and other associations. This erosion of
civil society results in a decline of ‘social capital,’ which bodes ill
for democracy at home and for democratization abroad.”
And also for religion.
Himmelfarb notes the problem this poses posed for “traditional
denominational, neighborhood, family-centered churches.” The churches
currently doing well in America, she observes, are megachurches where
thousands gather to hear charismatic preachers and small,
nondenominational “spiritual” churches “unstable in doctrine as in
membership.”
In theory, a Catholic parish, understood as the locus of a
eucharistic community, holds the key to a solution. But in practice?
There are lively, vibrant parishes that are true communities. There are
others that are not. We need to know a lot more than we do about what
makes the difference.