Broken bonds and burned bridges can’t be mended by imaginary networks of relationships.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
I don’t know how to say, ‘I’m lonely,’ without sounding like I’m saying, ‘I’m a loser,’” a middle-aged man said to me not long ago. “And I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I’m an ungrateful Christian.”
After all, this man said, he’s at church every week—not just there, but active. His life is a blur of activities. But he feels alone. In that, at least, he’s not alone.
Repeatedly, almost all of the data show us the same thing: that the so-called “loneliness epidemic” experts warned about is real. We all know it’s bad, and we sometimes have a vague sense of why it’s happening. The answers that some come up with are often too big to actually affect any individual person’s life. Smartphones aren’t going away. We aren’t all moving back to our hometowns. We see a kind of resigned powerlessness to change society’s lonely condition. So why can’t the church fix this?
The answer lies partly in a book published a near quarter-century ago: political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Earlier this summer, The New York Times interviewed Putnam, asking him whether, since he saw the loneliness crisis coming, he saw any hope of it ending.
Putnam reiterated that the answer is what he calls “social capital,” those networks of relationships needed to keep people together. Social capital comes in two forms, Putnam insists, and both are necessary. Bonding social capital is made up of the ties that link people to other people like themselves. …
