We Need to Build by Eboo Patel

Author:Eboo Patel [Patel, Eboo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Catholic Church is unique in scale, but not in kind. In their book The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett write, “Religious institutions have long been the single most important source of community connectedness and social solidarity in America. Even in our secular age, roughly half of all group memberships are religious in nature—congregations, Bible study groups, prayer circles, and so forth—and roughly half of all philanthropy and volunteering is carried out in a religious context.”2

Here is how Putnam puts it in his earlier work, Bowling Alone: “[religious communities] 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.”3 As proof, he lists the programs on the calendar of a single day at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The activities included everything from meetings of the Ecology Task Force and the Narcotics Anonymous group to trainings for the staff of various social service programs to martial arts classes.

Importantly, that civic energy doesn’t stay within the confines of the religious community; it gets offered to the broader society. People who join the Ecology Task Force at Riverside Church might find themselves being asked to lead a meeting, then being elected to chair the Task Force, and then deciding to start a similar Ecology Task Force in their workplace or neighborhood. Putnam and Romney Garrett report that people who are active in religious communities “are more than twice as likely to volunteer as demographically matched Americans who rarely attend church, and to volunteer not merely for church ushering, but also for secular causes.” Moreover, they make a claim to something that social scientists are generally enormously cautious about: “the link between religious involvement and civic do-gooding is not spurious, but probably causal.”

Americans remain remarkably religious in comparison to citizens of other industrialized nations, but our involvement with religious communities has fallen dramatically. Congregations virtually across the board are losing participants. In their book American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell note that involvement in religious communities has always had ups and downs in American history.4 It hit a high point in the 1950s, then a low point in the 1960s, then rose again in the 1970s and 1980s. As I write, religious involvement is at another low, and it is having a deep impact on the types of civic institutions that religious communities establish. The Southern Baptist denomination has trained eighty thousand people in disaster relief. They are on the ground within twenty-four hours of a tornado or a hurricane, doing everything from cleaning debris to helping people find shelter to preparing food. And it’s not just the Southern Baptists. Over half of the members of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster are faith-based groups—Catholics, Methodists, Buddhists, Lutherans, Latter-day Saints, Muslims. It is interfaith America in action.

But as the numbers of people involved in those religious communities decline, so does the strength of faith-based agencies.

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