Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The Social Capital Project: Reviving ‘associational life’ in America
The Social Capital Project: Reviving ‘associational life’ in America
Apr 2, 2025 9:57 PM

Over the past few decades, America has experienced a wave of drastic economic and social disruption. In our search for solutions, we’ve tended to look either to ourselves orthe State, resulting in a clash between individualism and collectivism that forgets or neglects the space between.

But what might be happening (or not happening) in those middle layers of society, from families to churches to charities to our economic activities? What might we be missing or forgetting about in those mediating institutions that, up until now, have held our country together?

Those basic questions are at the center of a recent crop of popular books, from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, leading many to re-focus their attention on munity-based solutions. And now, they’regetting a bit more attention from the halls of political power.

This week, Sen. Mike Lee launched the Social Capital Project, a multi-year research project dedicated to investigating those same questions on “evolving nature, quality, and importance of our associational life.” “In Washington, we measure GDP, we measure government outlays and revenues — all kind of things that are quantifiable and monitored like vital signs, blood pressure and heart rate,” says Lee. “But we don’t always take the time to measure other things that are just as important to our life as a country.”

The project aims to plish precisely that:

“Associational life” is our shorthand for the web of social relationships through which we pursue joint endeavors—namely, our families, munities, our workplaces, and our religious congregations. These institutions are critical to forming our character and capacities, providing us with meaning and purpose, and for addressing the many challenges we face.

The goal of the project is to better understand why the health of our associational life feels promised, what consequences have followed from changes in the middle social layers of our society, why munities have more robust civil society than others, and what can be done—or can stop being done—to improve the health of our social capital. Through a series of reports and hearings, it will study the state of the relationships that weave together the social fabric enabling our country—our laws, our institutions, our markets, and our democracy—to function so well in the first place.

In its first report, titled “What We Do Together,” the project highlights the profound connections between “associational life” and the nation’s economic success.

As the report details, those intricate ties between family, munity, and work represent a feature of American life that stretches well into its past. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the nineteenth century, he was startled by the peculiar unity that Americans found amid those diverse and intersecting relationships. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds, constantly unite,” Tocqueville wrote. “Not only do they mercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”

Or, as Don Eberly puts it (quoted in the report), those same civic functions “served to cultivate democratic habits and skills,” mitigating the temptations toward isolated individualism and whole-hearted worship of the state. “In the truest sense, they were laboratories of democracy,” he writes. “Local civic associations put democracy within people’s reach, inculcating the customs and many uses of democratic process, tempering self-interest and isolation.”

Drawing from that same intellectual tradition, the report concludes that there are three key reasons why associational life is so important for America’s success (the categories are my own paraphrase, but the rest is quoted directly):

1. Social, moral, and spiritual development

First, the middle social layers are implicated in nearly every aspect of our lives, and therefore are critically important formative structures in which human development occurs. What we do together affects our character, capacities, deepest held mitments, and any number of other aspects of who we are.

2. Finding meaning and purpose

Second, mediating institutions provide an important role in giving meaning and purpose to individual lives. “Meaning” and “purpose” are words that give hives to empirically minded social scientists, but nonetheless deserve our attention. Jointly mon goals—prosaic or profound—draws people out of themselves, gives them a reason to get up in the morning, and to be responsive to the needs of others. When people lack the meaning and purpose derived from strong bonds and routine social attachments, they are more prone to alienation and atomization. Along these lines, David Brooks has argued, “The great challenge of our moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust, and autonomy.”

3. Discovering solutions (social / economic / political)

The third reason our middle social layers are so important, especially today, is that they provide a useful means for discovering solutions to problems. The large institutions of our modern society, polity, and economy are often ill-equipped to address needs that are unique to the particular “circumstances of time and place.” They are sometimes too far removed from local sources of knowledge and networks of trust, and they can be slow to adapt as problems evolve. Some can be out of touch with the values of specific places, breeding resentment and fueling regional polarization. As many analysts have concluded, decentralizing authority and decision-making capacity to our middle layers might go a long way to increasing America’s ability to address challenges incrementally through trial and error in ways that are much closer to the people and their varied situations.

The report proceeds to document a storm of statistical trends in each of those categories (family, munity, and work), demonstrating just how drastic the shifts actually are, from marriage rates to religious involvement to neighborhood sociability to workforce participation.

“The connective tissue that facilitates cooperation has eroded,” the report concludes, “leaving us less equipped to solve problems together within munities,” and more likely to turn to the state (or cynicism).

The solution, as should be obvious, is not prone to quick-and-fast policy grabs or coercive social engineering. Neither is emphasizing the “middle layers” an easy antidote for the problems of our age. And yet reorienting our attitudes and actions is a beginning.

In each of our lives — whether in our families, munities, or workplaces — we have the opportunity to proceed with gradual, long-term “repairs” — mending the fabric of civilization not through sweeping rhetoric about policy solutions, but through mundane faithfulness in our respective spheres.

“An emphasis on the middle layers of our social life is no panacea for the many challenges and opportunities we face,” the report concludes. “But in an era where many of our conversations seem to revolve around the individual and large institutions, an emphasis on the space between them could bring many benefits.”

Image: The County Election, painting byGeorge Caleb Bingham(1852)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
North Korea: We Don’t Need ‘Flashy Lights’
A NASA image released in February 2014 shows a night view of the Korean Peninsula. Apart from a spot of light in Pyongyang, North Korea is mostly cloaked in darkness, with China (top left) and South Korea (bottom right) on either side. -Reuters North Korea finally decided ment on the most famous image of the nation. Almost exactly one year ago, NASA released several photos of the earth at night, showing many brightly lit nations and a shockingly dark North...
Worldwide Freedom Is Under Threat
Global Democracy and freedom are under attack. Freedom House, a nonprofit organization which monitors freedom and advocates for democracy and human rights just released the 2015 “Freedom in the World” report. The results are not good. In his introduction, Arch Puddington, vice president for research says that “the condition of global political rights and civil liberties, showed an overall decline. Indeed, acceptance of democracy as the world’s dominant form of government—and of an international system built on democratic ideals—is under...
How Christianity Gave Us the Modern World
“Christianity undergirded the development of Western liberalism (in the old, good sense of the word),” says Rich Lowry. In fact, without Christianity there would probably not be anything like what we conceive as true liberty: The indispensable role of Christianity in the creation of individual rights and ultimately of secularism itself is the subject of the revelatory new intellectual historyInventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop. Here’s hoping that President Obama gives it a quick skim before he next takes the...
Radio Free Acton: Elise Graveline Hilton on Human Trafficking
This week on Radio Free Acton, I spoke with my colleague Elise Graveline Hilton about her new monographA Vulnerable World: The High Price of Human Trafficking. Human trafficking is not a pleasant subject to discuss; it can be hard to believethat in our modern world, people are still enslaved and exploited sexually or for their labor, treated as nothing more modities to be used in the pursuit of illegal profit. And yet the practice is widespread and growing, even in...
Mike Rowe on the minimum wage: There’s no such thing as a ‘bad job’
In the latest additiontoMike Rowe’s growing catalogof pointed Facebook responses, the former Dirty Jobs host tackles a question on the minimum wage, answering a man named “Darrell Paul,” who asks: The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and hour. A lot of people think it should be raised to $10.10. Seattle now pays $15 an hour, and the The Freedom Socialist Party is demanding a $20 living wage for every working person. What do you think about the minimum wage? How...
A Price is Signal Wrapped in an Incentive to be Coordinated by God
When Christians think of the majesty of God’s handiwork we tend to think of the visible aspects of nature. We agree with King David that, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). But there are intricate and beautiful aspects of God’s creative geniusthat we don’t often think about—or don’t think about as being created by God. Take, for instance, the price system. As economist Alex Tabarrok says in the video...
Fossil Fuel Divestment: Economically Reckless and Morally Callous
“Who cares about the suffering and premature death of millions in the developing world?” asks Bruce Edward Walker in this week’s Acton Commentary.”Not religious activists agitating for fossil fuel divestment.” In another trendy move, environmentalist shareholder activists are pressuring panies in which they invest to scale back in part pletely their interests in oil, gas and coal. For example, Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel at the As You Sow religious shareholder activist outfit, told The Guardian last month that...
Now Available: ‘A Treatise on Money’ by Luis de Molina
CLP Academic has now releasedA Treatise on Money, a newly translated selection from Luis de Molina’s larger work,On Justice and Right (De iustitia et iure). The release is part of the growing series from Acton:Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law. Molina (1535–1600) was one of the most eminent theologians of the Jesuit order in the sixteenth century. Known widely for developing a theory of human freedom of action (and in turn, a new religious doctrine now known as...
Book Giveaway: Win All 4 Primers on Faith, Work, and Economics!
ThroughChristian’s Library Press, the Acton Institute has publishedfour tradition-specific primers on faith, work, and economics, including Baptist, Wesleyan,Pentecostal,andReformed perspectives. Each offers a distinct contribution to the subject, and when taken together provides a rich and coherent framework forChristian stewardship. The books are part of Acton’s growingOikonomia Series. This week, Acton and CLP will be giving away plete sets of the series (that’s 4 books totalfor each winner!), including Chad Brand’s Flourishing Faith,David Wright’s How God Makes the World a Better...
Audio: Jordan Ballor on Honesty in Science
On February 7th, Christopher Booker of Britain’s The Telegraphcaused a stir with his column entitled “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.” Booker remarked: When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved