‘Believing Alone’ Is a Spiritual—Not Just Civic—Problem

Nearly 25 years after its publication, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone continues to be a defining text in 21st-century life. So much so that a new documentary film, Join or Die (screening nationwide on September 15 as part of a new series, In Real Life Movie Club), aims to re-up the book’s arguments for a new generation of readers. The book’s thesis is more urgent than ever and the stakes higher (as the documentary’s title suggests).

The correlated trends Putnam flagged—declining civic community and organizational membership and declining public trust—have only gotten worse. The internet and social media are a big part of why these trends have worsened (more on that later), and the deep entrenchment of digital formation makes it all the harder to reverse course.

Directed by Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis (author of Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing), Join or Die begins by describing itself as “a film about why you should join a club . . . and why the fate of America depends on it.” It presents data on the decades-long decline in associations, both formal (PTA, Kiwanis, Lions Clubs, bowling leagues, church membership, etc.) and informal (dinner parties, picnics, etc.). The documentary summarizes Putnam’s big idea that social networks have value—what he calls “social capital”—and that this is what clubs and similar associations provide. Social capital produces trust and a norm of generalized reciprocity, and it’s an essential ingredient for a healthy democracy.

An impressive array of bipartisan talking head commentary is included (e.g., David Brooks, Glenn Loury, Mike Lee, Pete Buttigieg, and Hillary Clinton), testifying to the broad influence and relevance of Putnam’s ideas. But the film’s implications go beyond politics and have huge relevance for the church. Because while “bowling alone” might have dire temporal implications for the waxing and waning of democracy, the spiritual corollary—“believing alone”—has eternal implications.

Believing Alone: ‘My Own Little Thing with the Lord’

Join or Die mentions declining church membership as a big part of the overall problem, as churches have long been vital venues for cultivating civic life. As Putnam’s Bowling Alone research assistant puts it in the film, “Religion provides at least half of the social capital in the United States.”

The film observes that the things you learn to do at church—run a meeting, give a speech, organize people to solve community problems—are transferable skills to other civic groups. As the vitality of church communities wanes, the ripple effects are felt throughout civic life.

As the vitality of church communities wane, the ripple effects are felt throughout civic life.

But the film’s emphasis on the civic implications of declining church membership is only part of why the “dechurching” trend is concerning. The spiritual implications of “believing without belonging” are even more dire.

Yet this is clearly the trend of religious affiliation in America: identification with a faith without bothering with the inconveniences and uncomfortable dynamics of a faith community; curating a bespoke, tailored-to-me spirituality rather than committing to an institution; having an individualized relationship with Jesus but opting out of church.

A quote from a New York Times article earlier this year has lingered with me as a representative example of what’s going on. The article features 67-year-old Karen Johnson, who grew up in a Lutheran church and even taught Sunday School as an adult but no longer goes to church:

She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. “I have my own little thing with the Lord,” she says. Ms. Johnson’s thing includes frequent prayer, she said, as well as podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics and “what’s going on in the world” from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview.

This is how we do spirituality in the digital age. In a world of smartphones, algorithms, and one-click consumerism, we expect everything to cater to us on our terms, fast and frictionless. That’s why something like committed involvement in a local church—which is anything but fast and frictionless—becomes counterintuitive. Why bother with church when spiritual “content” is in ample supply on YouTube? Why submit myself to a religious “system” (in which I might not fully align with all tenets or all participants all the time) when online life lets me be religious on my own terms, fed only by the voices and expressions I like?

Technology’s Role

Putnam mentions the effects of technology and media on the overall degradation of community, with TV an especially big culprit (he wrote Bowling Alone in the 1990s): “The more TV people watched, the less they went out to connect with other people,” he says in the film. “We’re now watching Friends rather than having friends.”

If Putnam wrote the book today, I think he’d need to make digital technology—the shaping effects of the internet and social media—more central in his overall diagnosis.

In A Web of Our Making (2023), an incisive, deep-dive analysis of the nature of digital formation, Antón Barba-Kay argues that online life shapes us to associate with others in a few-strings-attached way that prioritizes convenience, efficiency, “empowered individuality,” and pain avoidance—where we can “retreat, refrain, or abstract [ourselves] at any point.” Our preferences and comfort reign supreme online, leading us to “identify, speak to, and transact with others who already share our views and preferences.”

We live in a “scrolling alone” world where we listen to the voices and ideas that resonate and mute those that don’t. In this world, each of us is ever more conditioned to subject all things, including relationships and religious beliefs, to the transactional, hypersubjective logic of swiping, scrolling, subscribing, and unsubscribing. This scrolling alone world naturally becomes the believing alone world. But that comes with great risk for our overall spiritual health.

Faith Formed by Feeds

Churchless Christianity is dangerous because it invariably becomes unaccountable to anyone but you and your whims and preferences. Your faith gradually takes the shape of your Facebook feed—a prison of your own algorithmically mirrored disordered desires; a narcissistic echo chamber that, by becoming so much about serving you, becomes totally untrustworthy as a source of truth independent of you.

The scrolling alone world naturally becomes the believing alone world. But that comes with great risk for our overall spiritual health.

Without the accountability of others in a church community—others who love Jesus as you do but are otherwise very different from you (often uncomfortably so)—we’re prone to adopt an iteration of faith formed in the image of some highly online tribe. And an online tribe is different from an offline community. We look to tribes to have our preferences affirmed and our biases validated. We look to communities and institutions to form our preferences and challenge our biases.

Barba-Kay highlights the central problem of the way digital life warps our understanding of community: “It is an online mistake to think of human communities as platforms for furthering our readymade desires, since it is precisely within families, friendships, neighborhoods, congregations, clubs, and other organizations that our desires come to have shared, recognizable, and higher aspirations in the first place.”

We’re positively formed in a real-life community precisely because it isn’t primarily beholden to our preferences. A local church is a crucial part of spiritual health precisely because it’s awkward, uncomfortable, inconvenient, and often costly. Barba-Kay describes strong communities as those where we must “inescapably work out our differences about shared concerns,” regularly forced to “come to grips with those we think disagreeable or dead wrong, with those whom we are tempted to despise.”

Countercultural Choice

It’s countercultural to choose this type of community in a world where online “community” has come to be a seamless, smooth, consumer-friendly experience. But if we want to grow, and discover truly transformative, way-bigger-than-me truth, we have to resist the allure of a “believing alone” life. A “me and Jesus” solitary faith is fickle and fragile, not to mention often heterodox. A local-church-formed faith isn’t perfect but generally more durable and secure, drawing us out of the deceptions of consumer autonomy and into the wisdom of Scripture-bound community.

Believing together is a path to spiritual life. Believing alone is often a path to spiritual decay. Let’s preach this truth to one another, and to ourselves, recognizing that the “join or die” stakes are high not just for the future of healthy democracy but for the future of thriving faith.

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