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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: On being tired of bowling alone [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-20
We begin today with Lauren Jackson of The New York Times and her major report that America is now becoming a little more—and not less— religious.
Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed. [...] Even in the institutions where conservatives are sure that elite liberals are indoctrinating youth with godlessness, something is changing. “I have served as a chaplain at Harvard for 25 years, and the interest in and openness to religion and spirituality has never been higher on campus,” said Tammy McLeod, the president of the Harvard Chaplains. [...] Secular organizations tried to provide the same benefits of religion, but without any theology. A few years ago, I biked on a warm summer morning to the meeting of one such organization, Sunday Assembly. I sat in the back and watched people sing pop songs by Miley Cyrus and Adele instead of hymns and give talks about morality. Afterward, I ate cookies and chatted with other attendees. They had all left religion in some form and were looking for another community, a new space to access and express their spirituality. I kept in touch with a few of them. None of us became regulars.
I disagree (rather vehemently) with Ms. Jackson’s central premise that a lack of “theology” is a central problem.
I think that the central problem is that in today’s post-pandemic digital world, there are not enough opportunities to form in-person community outside of churches; communities, organizations, and establishments like those documented in Robert Putnam’s 2000 classic book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,
I went back and read the transcript of Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s July 2024 interview with Robert Putnam, also in The New York Times.
I want to understand a little bit about the terms that you use for how you describe this. You distinguish between two types of social capital, right? There’s bonding social capital and there’s bridging social capital. Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital. I’m not saying “bridging good, bonding bad,” because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. But I am saying that in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital. And some forms of bonding social capital are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.
FWIW, I also think that political engagement alone cannot bridge this gap nearly enough.
Rosemary (Marah) Al-Kire, Clara L. Wilkins, and Michael Pasek write for The Conversation that complaints (and even executive orders) alleging “anti-Christian bias” might also be racist dog-whistles.
True enough, I don’t see very many (white) American Christians all that concerned about the fates of other Christians in places like Palestine or Syria. Not in the MSM, at any rate.
Linda Feldmann of The Christian Science Monitor assesses the overall effects that the tacky shoe salesman is having on American culture.
In late March, Mr. Trump ordered the Smithsonian Institution’s many museums, libraries, and research centers to promote “American greatness.” The executive order described a concerted effort by the left to “rewrite” history, recasting America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” as instead “racist, sexist, [and] oppressive,” and it tapped Vice President Vance to oversee the removal of “improper ideology” from all Smithsonian properties. Mr. Trump also directed the Department of Interior to determine whether public monuments and other memorials have been altered since 2020 to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” He’s targeted America’s higher education as well. His threats to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants from major universities – in Harvard’s case, $9 billion – have led to lawsuits, protests, and, in some cases, capitulation by the schools. Longtime Trump-watchers say they didn’t necessarily expect all these particular moves, but they see a certain logic at play. “Taking over the Kennedy Center seems of a piece with taking over, well, everything else,” says Gwenda Blair, author of a biography on three generations of the Trump family.
On the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Timothy Snyder writes for his “Thinking About...” Substack that Trump has made another terrorist attack much more likely.
In just three months, the Trump people have made the unthinkable much more likely. They have created the conditions for terrorism, and thus for terror management. This is true at several levels. Most obviously, they have debilitated the services that detect terrorist threats and prevent attacks: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA is a foreign intelligence service. The FBI is the federal police force. The NSA, which specializes in cryptography and foreign signals intelligence, is part of the Department of Defense. Homeland Security is a cabinet-level department that amalgamates a number of functions from immigration control through disaster relief and anti-terrorism. [...] The Musk-Trump people run national security, intelligence, and law enforcement like a television show. The entire operation of forcible rendition of migrants to a Salvadoran concentration camp was based upon lies. It is not just that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly apprehended. The entire thing was made for television. Its point was the creation of the fascist videos. But this is a media strategy, meant to frighten Americans. And a media strategy does not stop actual terrorists. It summons them. Terrorism is a real risk in the real world. The constant use of the word to denote unreal threats creates unreality. And unreality inside ket (sic) institutions degrades capability. Security agencies that have been trained to follow political instructions about imaginary threats do not investigate actual threats. Fiction is dangerous. Treating the administration’s abduction of a legal permanent resident as a heroic defense against terror is not only mendacious and unconstitutional but also dangerous.
Finally today, David Nield of ScienceAlert reports on some surprising results of a major study assessing people’s susceptibility to misinformation.
Led by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada and the University of Cambridge in the UK, the main aim of the study was to assess how misinformation is gaining traction across different populations in different countries. The idea wasn't to call out particular groups for being more gullible than others, but to get a better understanding of the danger that misinformation poses: to public health, to the future of the planet, and to modern democracies. [...] The researchers used an online test designed by psychologists to poll 66,242 people across 24 countries. Called the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST), the quiz takes a couple of minutes to complete and asks participants to rank news headlines as real or fake. [...] There was a twist: Gen Z had a better-than-average awareness of their own strengths and shortcomings in terms of spotting misinformation than other groups. Conservatives were also fairly good at judging their own abilities, while more educated groups overestimated their skill in distinguishing real news from fake news.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
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