I can't state enough how riveting I've found Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. It's been on my list for a long time, but I decided when I last ordered books to pick up a few things that are outside the vein of what I've been reading lately, and this one fit the bill nicely. I dig theology but theologians aren't always the best folks for drawing the connections between theology and everyday existence. Putnam is a Harvard scholar writing from an academic's perspective on social connectedness in America. It has the rigors of an academic study while being accessible to anyone (that is, anyone with a penchant for charts and graphs). And it's surprisingly thick - I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't five hundred pages, I'm certain. This is a book that is both meaty and engaging, both rigorous and readable, and on the whole utterly fascinating.

Putnam's premise is that America has been experiencing a decline in what he calls social capital:

Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals - social networks and the norms of reciprocity that trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called "civic virtue." The difference is that "social capital" calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital. (p.19)

It is this "dense network of reciprocal social relations" that Putnam investigates, and finds that in every measure to which we are put, America is losing social capital. The book is a relentless march of data, in sphere after sphere of our collective lives, that documents this trend, along with Putnam's analysis of why this change is occurring and some thoughts on what to do about it.

Anecdotally, this really should come as no surprise to those of us who are involved in some form of ministry or service at this moment in American cultural history. It particularly rings true to me as someone who desires to live missionally in a suburban context. I've written before about my thoughts on the isolation and disconnectedness of the American suburb, about the loss of a sense of place and the redefinition of community around shared values (most frequently leisure) instead of shared geography. And even within this redefined community, the connections to which community refers are themselves weaker and more transient than in times past.

But perhaps I have a unique perspective on this particular topic, as I grew up in an area that could in no way be described as suburban. I grew up in small town America, a distinct slice of Americana if ever one existed. Actually, small town isn't even quite the right way to describe it - my hometown is a rural community in central Pennsylvania where farming forms a large part of the local landscape and manufacturing jobs are still significant employers. And looming large over my childhood is the image of my grandfather, a product of another time and a place that most of you have probably never experienced. Pap, as he was known to his grandkids, was a steel man who worked for Bethlehem Steel for much of his adult life. He was also a man of the soil - not a farmer by trade but a throwback to an earlier time when families would raise their own livestock and produce. Pap kept a garden that was about a half acre of produce that he raised himself, and for much of my childhood he also had several cows, both for milk and for meat. I remember summer afternoons spent pulling potatoes from the ground, fist-sized golden nuggets that the earth would yield only after a struggle. I remember riding on the back of a tractor-pulled trailer in scorching August heat, catching bales of hay that were thrown from the baler to be stacked later in the barn as winter feed for the cows. I remember ears of corn pulled from the stalk and dropped in boiling water before the sap had a chance to dry on the stalk, and watermelons that left trails of juice running down my chin. But over it all I remember my grandfather, a hardworking man who was a pillar in his community, who showed little affection but great love.

When my grandfather died in the early spring of 2001, the funeral was deeply moving. I think the entire county showed up to pay respect to our family and to Pap. We had to hold two days of viewing for hours at a time, and the line of people would stretch out the door and onto the porch of the funeral home, person after person that knew my grandfather and had been impacted in some way by him. That's the way things were growing up - I knew a deep and rich connection to a large community that couldn't be identified on a map. And even if I didn't participate in that community or appreciate it for what it was, still I knew that if something went wrong that there existed a deep network of folks who would support us and that we would do the same for them.

That experience has no parallel in my current context. In truth, those bonds of community are fading even in my hometown - true to exactly the scenario presented by Putnam. But in my current neighborhood, the situation is strikingly different - I know fewer than one quarter of my neighbors. None of them have ever joined us for dinner or drinks. The turnover in our community is high - we live in a townhouse development that cycles neighbors through every several years. We're actually just starting to get to the point where I'd feel comfortable engaging some of our neighbors on a more personal level, but instead we find ourselves searching for another home with plans to move in the next six months or so. And I feel the lack of connection in my bones - I find that loneliness of late creeps upon me with ever increasing frequency.

All of this to say that I find Putnam's description of social capital compelling: compelling in the sense that I've seen what happens when it is present, and compelling in the sense that I know its lack. I think that Bowling Alone touches on something that those of us who desire to be missional would do well to address. More on this next...

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