When I was young, it seemed like we were always going somewhere. I remember making the rounds with my grandfather. The hardware store owner would comment about the Sunday Service. The officer at the coffee shop would ask if Kiwanis was still happening tomrow night.
Then there was Sunday School, but church extended well beyond Sunday morning. There were potlucks, youth activities, service projects and socials. Neighborhoods had block parties. People joined bowling leagues, softball teams, Scouts, Rotary and any number of clubs that seem almost quaint today.
I don’t remember thinking any of this was important. Mostly, I remember being dragged along by my parents. It was just what people did. Looking back, I wonder if we misunderstood what all those ordinary activities were doing for us.
A bowling league wasn’t really about bowling. A block party wasn’t really about hamburgers. Even Sunday School wasn’t only about the lesson being taught. These institutions created something much harder to see: repeated human contact.
Every Tuesday, you saw many of the same people. Every Sunday, someone asked about your children. Every summer, neighbors dragged folding tables into the street.
You accumulated relationships almost accidentally.
That matters because maintaining relationships as an adult takes effort. We have all had the conversation: "We really need to get together." Both people mean it. Neither does anything about it. Six months later, they have the same conversation.
A bowling league solved that problem. Tuesday was bowling night.
You didn’t have to decide every week whether to maintain your friendship with Bob. Bob was going to be standing at lane seven.
Church did the same thing on a larger scale. There were adults who knew your children but weren’t their teachers. People noticed when you hadn’t been around. Someone heard you were looking for work. Someone knew a good mechanic. When a family got sick, food appeared at their house.
A block party transformed the person three houses down from "the guy with the blue truck" into Mike. Most of these people never became close friends. That may have been precisely their value. They occupied the enormous space between family and stranger. And that space appears to be getting emptier.
Americans spend considerably less time with friends than they once did. Church membership has declined. Service clubs, fraternal organizations and other voluntary associations have struggled. Even the old rhythm of Friday night as a night for getting together has weakened.
Yet we haven’t run out of leisure time. We found other things to do with it. Streaming, gaming, social media, online shopping, food delivery and remote work all offer tremendous convenience. But many of our greatest conveniences share a peculiar characteristic.
They eliminate the need to encounter another person.
Amazon means I don’t have to visit the store. DoorDash means I don’t have to visit the restaurant. Remote work means I don’t have to visit the office. Streaming means I don’t have to visit the theater.
Each is useful. Collectively, however, we may be quietly removing the occasions that once caused us to bump into one another.
Perhaps that explains something many people feel but have difficulty naming.
We communicate constantly, yet somehow see one another less. We can know what hundreds of people are doing while knowing almost nothing about the person living four doors away.
The loss isn’t really Sunday School, block parties, or bowling leagues.
We have been dismantling the machinery that manufactured relationships.
Nobody arrived at a church potluck thinking, "Tonight I will strengthen the social fabric of my community." They brought potato salad or that nasty Jell-O with raisins in it.
Nobody joined a bowling league to build social capital. They just showed up on Tuesday. And perhaps showing up, repeatedly, around roughly the same people, was doing far more work than we realized. The question isn’t whether America needs bowling leagues again. The question is what replaced them.
And if the answer is increasingly "nothing," then perhaps these weren’t merely quaint traditions from another era. They were infrastructure. We just couldn’t see it until it started disappearing.
