Do religious communities hold the answer to social isolation?

For several years, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been warning of a “national loneliness epidemic” hiding in plain sight. Our new technologies and glowing rectangles hold power to connect and isolate us, leading more Americans to experience anxiety and depression, “increasing our risk of heart disease (29%), dementia (50%), stroke (32%),” and even premature death (“comparable to smoking daily”), Murthy reports.
Our need for human connection is as essential for survival as food and water, Murthy says. Yet, it’s strangely diminished in the current era, as we turn to partisan bickering, racial stereotypes, social retreat, information rabbit holes reinforced by algorithms and negative news that leads to disconnection. The resulting isolation has created a powder keg of animosity.
Education levels impact the commonality of close friendships, it turns out. Since 1990, the number of college graduates who tell researchers they “have zero close friends” increased from 2% to 10%. But among high school graduates, the lack of friendship rose from 3% to a whopping 24%.
And yet, even if the surgeon general is calling us toward relationships for our own good health, “the average American adult spends approximately 10 hours on mediated devices each day,” retired Harvard professor Robert Putnam recently told a group of clerics and philanthropic leaders convened by the Aspen Institute. If television for three generations most motivated people to go “bowling alone” — a term Putnam coined to describe the breakdown of social bonds created through community engagement — today it’s smartphones.
That’s a surprising turn, given our long tradition of fostering associations, starting clubs, and building civil society in thousands of diverse ways. Consider Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment after touring the country in 1831: “Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions constantly unite. … Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.”
Why isn’t that happening today?
Two centuries ago, religious association was essential for human connection and deeply woven into the social and political reforms that shaped our democratic life. There’s no way to properly understand abolition, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, the Civil Rights Movement or countless other American reforms without understanding the deep role of faith communities and religious convictions in undergirding those moments.
But in the 21st century, our religious engagement has been rapidly declining — which counterintuitively hurts our capacity to deal with differences.
“It was our religious conviction and commitment combined with religious tolerance that set us apart,” Putnam told our group. And today, that’s sharply down.
From 1930 to 2000, at least 71% of Americans were members of a church or religious house of worship. But in this century, Gallup reports that membership and religious engagement levels have fallen to 47% — a seismic shift. More of our leisure time is privatized, not enjoyed together. Smaller and smaller numbers of Americans learn skills or cultivate habits to work out problems through congregational life.
And for society generally, Putnam cautions, it’s disconnected young men — most commonly in their 20s and 30s — who end up falling hardest, either causing the most trouble by resorting to violence or becoming incarcerated, struggling to date and settle down, or unraveling permanently from the workforce.
But Gen Z faces a new problem. On a recent tour of American college campuses, Murthy observed that the room that had always been noisiest at his alma mater in the mid-1990s, has today become the quietest.
It’s the dining hall. Today, a majority of young people at our most elite colleges sit side by side at the lunch or dinner table, smartphones in hand, scrolling and eating in silence. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with corresponding via text to assess a visiting lecturer, or using a digital platform to set plans for Frisbee golf after dinner. But the human connection is still minimized.
This trend is eerie, and it’s becoming increasingly normative.
Murthy is calling on the medical community for help, reminding us of a national suicide hotline, asking Congress to require a warning label on social media and encouraging more of us to set aside our cable-news habits in favor of rekindling friendships and community. That’s certainly a start.
But a growing number of sociologists and leading experts — Jonathan Haidt at New York University, Jean Twenge at San Diego State, Christian Smith at Notre Dame, John DiIulio at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Wuthnow at Princeton, James Davison Hunter at the University of Virginia, Brad Fulton at Indiana University, and many others — have joined Putnam in arguing religious life has a role to play, too.
Whether that’s an argument from history or present-day sociology is an unsettled question. But asking how our leading faith communities could help us transcend contemporary polarization — particularly for Americans who increasingly distrust most public institutions — is a deeply urgent question. How might deep spiritual conviction align with a healthy, even generous, vision of equitable public pluralism?
Putnam points out in his newest book, co-authored with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, that America has experienced downswings and upswings when it comes to renewing association. A century ago — and in particular from 1910-1965 — hundreds of thousands of local community leaders committed to solving hard problems largely by a rebirth in clubs such as the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the YMCA and a bevy of other startup institutions “that were fun, bridging, and morally serious.”
Could we do it again? Putnam says we would need both connection with like-minded, similar individuals — “bonding social capital,” through friendship with those of similar education levels, political instincts, ethnic background and interests — but also “bridging social capital” in which we interact and learn from people of fundamentally different backgrounds and interests. Rather than media silos and isolation cul-de-sacs, Putnam wants us to learn through practice and habit that “we’re all in this together.”
Religious life — particularly for faith communities that teach deep convictions but also help give us psychological and theological security to be open to new views, curious about them, and free to explore with open ears — is essential to a free society. It reinforces the kinds of norms needed to renew or challenge the status quo.
And it’s down, but not out. Even today, there is a still-strong contingent of religious Americans, including evangelicals (25%), Catholics (21%), mainline Protestants (14%), Black Protestants (10%), Jews (2%), Muslims (1%) and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1%). Around the world, there are 2.4 billion Christians, 1.9 billion Muslims, 1.1 billion Hindus, more than 500 million Buddhists and so on — and journalists, diplomats, business leaders and public officials should work with the grain of that reality, not have a blind spot concerning it.
But here in America, the fastest-rising group tracked by religious surveyors in recent years has been the religious “nones,” comprising 28% of Americans. Of that group, 17% identify as atheist, 20% say they’re agnostic and 63% say they’re “nothing in particular.” A clear majority believes in God or a higher power. Nearly half tell surveyors they think of themselves as spiritual or spirituality is important to them.
In other words, while a growing cohort of millennials, Gen Z and Alphas no longer attend religious services, many are still spiritual and still curious. In that sense, even if fewer than half of us are in church on a given Sunday, we’re still a highly religious country.
There’s no doubt that in recent years we’ve seen a broad “de-churching,” particularly in the wake of Covid, amid the political infighting of the Trump years and in the midst of police violence and strained race relations that caused deep unrest in many congregations. In 2021, nearly 38% of U.S. pastors told the Christian research group Barna that, due to increased stress and political divisions impacting their congregations, they considered quitting.
But even in spite of engagement levels that have recently fallen, our religious associations still enliven souls, spur voluntarism, shift our direction, support former prisoners as they regain their footing and provide infrastructure for serving neighbors. They still hold the power to renew.
Sometimes, though, our religious life borrows a playbook from our politics, rather than the other way around. Recently, some Trump supporters have told pollsters they’ve decided to become “evangelical” despite never setting foot in a church. The categories can get confused in search of a tribe that wants to banish political enemies.
That’s backward politics and bad religion.
We do want a public square with disagreement — but with better disagreement. We want arguments that begin from places of conviction and make the case that particular policies can help the most people. But too often, our politics have become “all or nothing,” as if electing a particular candidate will crush one’s opponent, “lock her up” or somehow do away with another candidate’s voters. Video memes mock the idiocy of the other side, as if it’s all “polititainment.”
We can do better. In a liberal democracy like ours, no single faction is a permanent majority. The times are too serious for a politics of burn-it-all-down. As Yuval Levin argues, “we’re not supposed to think alike; we’re supposed to act together. Our constitutional system is designed to bring peace, but not quiet.”
What does that mean? I think it’s that our deep differences are here to stay — and that the moral communities we inhabit should teach us to pursue the common good, love our neighbors, and reimagine basic manners and civic decency. All of us want a secure base from which to launch daring exploits, as the psychologist John Bowlby describes.
But in a modern democracy that also means no one tribe wins out. Equitable public pluralism allows us to honor human dignity, deepen human rights, advance the rule of law and share public spaces in ways that give others a fair footing. That compromise is a gift — over time, it takes us from “freedom from” to “freedom to.” Like fellow citizens of no faith, citizens of deep religious faith need not fear entering public conversations — or new friendships — with those of other backgrounds. Bridging capital, it turns out, is fun — but also morally serious and essential.
Seasons of turning inward may have their place. Who among us doesn’t enjoy scrolling through the latest news, viewing a comic or reading liberally to try to understand larger forces such as national populism?
But eventually, we look up from the glowing screens in our hand to see a physical world — a campus dining hall that’s too quiet. At some point, we realize a topsy-turvy presidential election cycle isn’t just social media political entertainment.
And we realize we need a bigger vision.
Josh Good is director of the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program.
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.