Church and community in a post-Christian world (Part One)

We live in an increasingly atomised world.

In his book Bowling Alone published in 2000, Harvard’s Robert Putnam brought the disintegration of community life to light by outlining how participation in group activities had declined significantly over several decades.

Americans had become less likely to vote, less likely to attend meetings on local issues and less likely to join civic organisations. Parents were attending parent teacher association meetings more infrequently and families were eating meals together less often. People were still bowling, but Americans were now bowling alone.(1)

Professor Putnam has expanded upon his work significantly since then, and in his latest book titled The Upswing, he cites analysis which has been done on the use of personal pronouns in literature which showed that the use of the pronoun “I” in American books doubled between 1965 and 2008.(2) (3)

The growing social atomisation and narcissism – and the broader social dysfunction which naturally accompanies it – which can be seen in today’s America can be seen in Ireland and across the West.

What is the evidence of the disintegration of community in Ireland?

The first example is the most obvious: the collapse in religious practice. Ireland was until recently not just a Catholic society; it was a parochial society. The creation of that parish structure through the efforts of an impoverished people against the backdrop of a hostile Protestant colonial power represents the supreme organisational accomplishment of the Irish Church.

For all of the cheering about the end of a “parochial” Ireland, very few people have stopped to consider the social implications of the former communal focal point of each community essentially becoming a disused museum.

Politicians of an anti-clerical mindset have little to celebrate. In Ireland, the precise statistics about declining party membership can be hard to obtain, but it is clear that the established parties are far from what they were: in 2019, it was reported that Fine Gael for example had lost a fifth of its membership in just six years.(4)

A similar trend can be seen when it comes to unions. Around 60% of Irish workers were union members in the early 1980s: this has fallen to a figure of around 25% today.(5) Media consumption is also not the unifying practice it once was. Print readership is down,(6) and the circulation of local newspapers has fallen sharply.(7)

Social alienation among Irish people can be measured in broader terms too. The European Commission’s study on “Loneliness prevalence in the EU” published last year showed that of all the twenty-seven countries in the EU, the highest rate of recorded loneliness exists in Ireland, where more than 20% of people report feeling lonely.(8)

It is difficult to understand these trends towards excessive individualism without considering the conception of the individual which is contained within the liberal political ideology which today’s Ireland subscribes to.

A particularly insightful description of how modern Western liberals perceive their own creed comes from the Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen. Writing in his 2023 bestseller, Regime Change, Deneen stated that the architects of what we now know as liberalism “proposed a vision of freedom as liberation from limitations imposed by birthright.”

As Deneen explains:

What had previously been considered as “guardrails” came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations upon individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberal liberty had meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefining, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches.

Anyone familiar with the tone of media and political discourse when it comes to Ireland’s secularisation will recognise Deneen’s description of the “heroic story of progress” and the leaving behind of “the unjust constraints of a dark age.”(9)

Conservative-minded Irishmen and women have become inured to this rhetoric. That is not even to mention the way in which the Deneen’s “wide-open spaces of liberal freedom” in Unholy Modern Ireland are ultimately used and what they lead people to in a country where more than 40% of Irish adults now have a mental health disorder,(10) and where Irish people now rank fourth in the world when it comes to cocaine consumption.(11)

Small-mindedness does not on its own account for the inability of Irish liberals to take a nuanced view of what this country has gained and lost. The broader problem is that Western liberalism does not seek to pursue any shared good for the community.

Alasdair MacIntyre put it best when he wrote in After Virtue that:

[l]iberal political societies are characteristically committed to denying any place for a determinate conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception,” while further adding that this liberal model is “inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life.(12)

Meaningful, durable communities do not arise out of nothing. Instead, they come into existence and are kept alive by the shared commitment of their  members to some ultimate goal. As the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset pointed out, “people do not come together to be together, they come together to do something.”(13)

For the longest period and across many different contexts, the work of many different types of community – both religious and secular – was “directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved.”(14)

If you strip away the common goods or deny their very existence, it is harder to find compelling reasons for people to work together aside from a vague desire for companionship, particularly nowadays when a more accessible type of companionship can be found online. Thus, it appears clear that a society imbued with moral relativism will likely be a society where the communal instinct is lacking.

As well as considering the limitations of liberalism, we should also examine an important philosophical divide when it comes to the role of institutions. That most influential thinker Rousseau is remembered for his proclamation: “Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.”

The chains in Rousseau’s viewpoint are not merely the political repression which was the norm in the eighteenth century, but the social institutions which constrained people by denying them their complete freedom: the constraint of community, the constraint of family, and the constraint of the Christian religion.

It was Rousseau’s goal to create a world in which every individual would “be perfectly independent of all the rest, and at the same time very dependent on the city.”(15)

What this viewpoint means for community is brought to light in the writings of perhaps the most insightful political philosopher today: Yuval Levin. In his 2020 book about the importance of institutions, titled A Time to Build, Levin outlines how America’s individualistic culture has created a polarised, isolated and distrustful society.

People are born free in the way that Rousseau would have wanted, and social allegiances derive very much from individual choice. As Putnam has shown, Americans have increasingly been choosing not to commit to engaging with the world and social institutions around them. This does not just weaken the institutions themselves, it also deprives people of the vital self-development that a previous generation took for granted.

Levin explains that:

[I]nstitutions are by their nature formative. They structure our perceptions and our interactions, and as a result they structure us. They form our habits, our expectations and ultimately our character…. They are at once constraining and enabling. They are the means by which we are socialised, and so they are crucial intermediaries between our inner lives and our social lives.(16)

In an earlier work, Levin argued that the modern left/right divide has its roots in the tumultuous period around the time of the French Revolution. In it, he described how Edmund Burke had defended the importance of social institutions which had developed organically over time while insisting on the importance of their societal role in passing on a cultural and social inheritance to the next generation.(17)

For a great many people in the advanced democracies of today, that inheritance is not being passed on. The best means of transmission is in a communal setting; as a result of choosing to cut themselves off from many institutions, a maimed and immature populace has been left isolated not just from those around them, but from the past as well.

The consequences of this societal shift are potentially disastrous. Indeed, the events of the twentieth century already give us pause for consideration. While the mid-20th century is cited by Robert Putnam and others as being the high water mark of community life in America, one sociologist of particular renown was greatly disturbed by the landscape he saw around him.

Professor Robert Nisbet believed that the “manufactured symbols of togetherness” which could be seen across 1950s’ suburbia did not disguise the “fact that for millions of persons such institutions as state, political party, business, church, labour union, and even family have become remote and increasingly difficult to give any part of one’s self to.” The reasons for this were manifold, including the tendency for the State to absorb an ever-growing amount of the functional roles of institutions such as the family.

Casting his eye over the rise of totalitarian ideologies in Europe and elsewhere, Nisbet argued that the natural social impulse of humans was not being met in modern societies. People were still seeking a form of social connectivity, but they were often looking for it in the form of extreme political movements as the early to mid-twentieth century was a time when the “the image of community contained in the promise of the absolute, communal State that [seemed] to have the greatest evocative power.”

To counteract this tendency, Nisbet proposed a different strategy to that being pursued by most of the American right.  He did not merely call for a reduction in the size and scope of the central government. Instead, he could see the false dichotomy between individualism and centralism, and therefore he called for the creation of a new “laissez faire in which the basic unit will be the social group.”(18)

In raising concerns about the growth of the State, the collapse of the community and the problems which both of these interconnected trends caused, this overlooked prophet was in good company.  Twenty years earlier, Pope Pius XI wrote the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno against the backdrop of the rise of a variant of socialism which left ever diminishing space for civil society, including the Church, to function.

Just as Nisbet would later do, the pontiff shrewdly observed that excessive individualism tended to lead to more collectivism in the end:

[B]ecause things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.

In the century since then, we have seen how much damage has been done.

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1. Putnam, R. (2000) “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community”
2. Putnam, R. (2020) “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again”
3. Twenge, J.M., Campbell, W.K., & Gentile, B. (2013) “Changes in pronoun use in American books and the rise of individualism, 1960-2008,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-06649-005

4. Independent.ie (2019) “Thousands desert Fine Gael, as nearly a decade in power takes its toll,” https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/thousands-desert-fine-gael-as-nearly-a-decade-in-power-takes-its-toll/38543814.html

5. University College Dublin (2021) “Union voice in Ireland: First findings from the UCD Working in Ireland Survey, 2021,” https://www.smurfitschool.ie/t4media/Geary,%20J.%20and%20Belizon,%20M.%20(2022)%20Union%20Voice%20in%20Ireland%20.pdf

6. RTE (2023) “It says in the papers: how newspaper readership is changing in Ireland,” https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0614/1389033-reuters-digital-news-report-ireland-print-newspaper-readership/

7. The Irish Times (2022) “Closure of local Irish newspapers set to “accelerate” after loss of 17 titles since 2008,” https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/11/24/closure-of-local-irish-newspapers-set-to-accelerate-after-loss-of-17-titles-since-2008/#:~:text=Circulation%20for%20local%20paid%2Dfor,Covid%20levels%2C%20Mr%20Hughes%20said

8. European Commission (2023) “Loneliness prevalence in the EU,” https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/scientific-activities-z/loneliness/loneliness-prevalence-eu_en

9. Deneen, P. (2023) “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future”

10. Hyland, P., Fox, R. and Vallières, F.  (2022) “Over 40% of Irish adults have a mental health disorder and one in ten have attempted suicide – MU, NCI and Trinity College research,” https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/news-events/over-40-irish-adults-have-mental-health-disorder-and-one-ten-have-attempted-suicide-mu-nci-and

11. The Irish Times (2023) “Irish people joint-fourth highest consumers of cocaine globally, says UN,” https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/03/19/irish-people-joint-fourth-highest-consumers-of-cocaine-globally-says-un/

12. MacIntyre, A. (2007) “After Virtue” (Third Edition)

13. Public Discourse (2020) “People and Their Relationships,” https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/03/60845/

14. MacIntyre, A. (2007) “After Virtue” (Third Edition)

15. Rousseau, J. (1762) “The Social Contract

16. Levin, Y. (2020) “A Time To Build’

17. Levin, Y. (2013) “The Great Debate’

18. Nisbet, R. (1953) “The Quest for Community”