How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder

The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It’s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion–Americans aren’t joining and participating in organizations anymore.

The book’s title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term “social capital,” which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the