On the mind of the Rev. J. Gregory Morgan

Oct 4, 2024

“The Loneliness Epidemic and the Church”

The experts tell us the nation is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. When Cigna, the insurance company, conducted a poll in 2019, they discovered that 52% of Americans feel sometimes or always “alone.” To clarify what is meant by the term loneliness in the current context, it is important to consider that it is “a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache;” it is not mere aloneness in the simplest sense of the word. And it is being studied intensely today because of its prevalence. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a project called “Making Caring Common” has been doing research of a highly sophisticated nature on loneliness in America, and its director says that when he examined the results of a recent study, he was stunned by what it revealed: “people were obviously really, really suffering.” Thirty-six percent of respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness with another 37% saying they experience it occasionally or sporadically. Additionally, 46% said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them.

As a phenomenon in the Western world, loneliness in the modern sense is of fairly recent vintage. Before the 1800s, hardly anyone in our cultural zone spent much time discussing loneliness at all. From 1500 to 1800, incidences of the word “loneliness” in print ranged between zero and 0.0001%. Then in the 1820s, the line representing the presence of the word in print “charges vertiginously upward,” primarily reflecting the impact of industrialization, mechanization and urbanization which resulted in the destruction of communities which had previously provided cohesion and meaning. In America, the first real study of the phenomenon in print occurred with the release of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd in 1950, which of course appeared long after many of the other developments referred to here had already fundamentally changed the nature of our relationships with one another.

Today, experts in the field would point to “real holes in our social fabric” as a critical cause of loneliness as it manifests itself today. The struggle with aloneness appears to be particularly conspicuous in young people, ages 18-25. These are the very people most impacted by technological change in our time: they are known, for example, for being wedded to their smart phones and not engaging in as much contact with other people as did their parents of a different generation altogether. The existence of notable levels of loneliness appears also to have been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and its imposition of severe limitations on physical contact even with those closest to us. But what the pandemic exposed and turbocharged has continued to accelerate well beyond the time of the Covid 19 scare with 25% of Americans acknowledging greater loneliness since the end of the period of enforced distancing. EKG-based tests conducted at the University of Missouri- Kansas City in the post-pandemic era reveal that vulnerability is a major stressor on our nervous systems depressing the urge to relate to strangers or to relationships that used to grow naturally out of everyday situations. And, as Robert Putnam pointed out in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, there has been a clear erosion over time in membership in organizations and groups that once bound many Americans together. Additionally, in 2024, marriage rates are far lower than they were in the 1950s, and one-person households have proliferated. At the same time, weekly attendance at church services has plunged to 21% of the population. In all of this, it is clear that something critical in our communal life is gradually disappearing. And virtual meetings which grew up during the pandemic to replace close physical contact for business, educational or personal purposes may be necessary and good for communicating in the absence of in-person get-togethers but are very bad for community-building.

As Matthew Shaer recently reported in the New York Times Magazine (Sept. 1, 2024, “Why is the loneliness epidemic so hard to cure?”), religious communities used to be a place where adults engage kids in big moral questions and stand for moral values, where there’s a fusion of a moral life and a spiritual life,” church attendance is fast disappearing in our culture. This is particularly distressing in that weekly church-going used to provide “a sense that you have obligations to your ancestors and to your descendants, where there is a structure for dealing with grief and loss.” How can we hope to reproduce these aspects of religion in secular life?

As time spent alone has increased in America of late, time spent with friends and family has gone way down as have companionship levels. In the wake of Covid, many young people have suffered by not having access to up-front eye contact or the habit of engaging in ordinary conversation, particularly as these were readily accessible when schooling occurred in a building devoted to that activity rather than in the privacy of one’s bedroom. The larger culture increases these trends through “frictionless forms of interaction” such as self-checkout machines in stores, immediate access to food and other items which can be painlessly delivered to one’s home with little effort, and the phenomenon of “cocooning” (retreating into a digital world which provides everything we think we need except for meaningful communication with other people).

In digesting all of this analysis, I have had a recurring feeling that the church still has a role to play in the larger culture, including not only child-rearing and the raising of responsible young people, but also care for the elderly as they “age out” of so many activities and practices that characterize life through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in the working world. Church used to function as a critical component in healthy human development and living throughout the lifespan (see earlier paragraph on what churches used to provide in our culture). Now that the habit of attending services on Sundays seems to be disappearing, we are left with (sometimes magnificent) facilities for worship in an age when formal belief and practice appear to be in retreat. We regularly conduct historic ceremonies with their vast accompanying resources of music, scripture and homiletics, all of which embrace knowledge and practice acquired over many centuries, which fewer and fewer people take part in or even witness. Yet the church has survived more serious challenges than this. It is my prayer that together we can fundamentally re-think church for the 21st century and do whatever it takes to keep Christian witness at the center of our communal life while serving the people who depend upon us in ways that support their own quest for meaning and a purposeful life. This is something we should do together as a community of the faithful.

Greg+

(Source: Matthew Shaer, “All Alone: Why is the loneliness epidemic so hard to cure?” New York Times Magazine, September 1, 2024)