Community
By Dan Smolnik
From where does community originate? What is the source and effect of a community’s presence?
These questions have taken on a new importance in the last several days as we have faithfully participated in the democratic process through our votes. One is entitled to wonder aloud about the resilience of community.
Our community is the source and effect of its own authority – one which we, as its inhabitants and participants, control – and from which we draw, and, indeed, contribute, all our hope.
History bears this out. Government, policy, rules, and the very ecosystem in which we live, as individuals and as a society, do not spring forth from the machinery of government. Rather, the forces by which we govern ourselves come from each other.
When we gather in church, a coffee shop, or even at a chance meeting in the grocery store (the Gospel of Matthew reminds us that two is a community), we do considerably more than exchange views. We provide each other a sense of validation, of hope, and of promise.
Those implied promises, even the ones exchanged tacitly, are covenants in every sense. Put another way, the community device that serves as the powerhouse and the glue of our lives is not the local, state, or federal government. It is ourselves. Consider the contrast in our emotional response to a change in an elected official to our response to the loss of a member of our congregation or our gardening club. The first is reflective and prevails on us to plan. The second can only be described as sadness resulting from a sincere sense of irreplaceable loss. In the context of our governmental machinery, we bind ourselves and our officials to be and remain commutable. In the context of our communities, we, each of us, are irreplaceable.
Our federal constitution makes provision for federal and state governments. It is, however, conspicuously silent about towns and cities. As a nation, the Founders determined the reach of government should go only so far. Fundamentally, the people remain sovereign. That notion was, however, not a new invention.
In 6th century Athens, under the rule of Pericles, the popular franchise became the lingua franca, and every citizen had equal rights at law. Citizens each took their turn at participation in the ekklisia, or Assembly, and the responsibility was considered solemn. Nevertheless, citizenship was restricted to sons of Athenian parents over the age of 21, or about fourteen percent of the population. Pericles knew that maintaining the strength and integrity of Athens was a matter of empowering the governed, so he assented to the demos, or expression of the voice of the people in this nascent experiment in democracy. Demos remained firmly in the embrace of the people of Athens and its ideas were combined and refined in the furnace of the communities within the city.
Those either not eligible for or not currently serving their turn in the assembly would gather together in what amounted to mutual support organizations (eranoi) or religious organizations (thiasoi). There, they freely shared views and encouraged each other to propagate those opinions and aspirations for the community widely. The ears of the Assembly ignored the demos at their peril.
A millennium later, King Charles II, fully aware of the power of the demos, and fearing rebellion, issued a proclamation closing all of the coffee shops in England, thereby, he imagined, in order to stop the people from sharing subversive ideas. Ironically, those very subjects of the kingdom promptly met in coffee shops all over the realm to discuss their response. Upon learning of this paradoxical result, His Majesty withdrew the proclamation. Expression by the people, it turns out, is the fabric of the nation that holds it together. Not the local hereditary lords, not the parliament, not even the king could claim that kind of enduring influence.
In 1831, forty-two years after the U.S. ratified its Constitution, France sent a young lawyer to report back on the American prison system. This he did, but his report was comprised less of the details of justice under democracy than of democracy itself. Alexis De Tocqueville was enraptured by the success of the American experiment in participatory government, when it had failed so compellingly in France and elsewhere in Europe. His report, Democracy in America, provided a granulated review of the moving parts of what made, and makes, America work. De Tocqueville characterized the populace of the new nation in the New World as sharing a local public spirit, run at the local level by volunteers who are animated by a shared sense of duty to one another. Moreover, he observed, the absence of that public spirit in Europe served as a source of “regret” to government officials who were thereby deprived of access to the demos that had informed Pericles and the Assembly in the earliest days of decentralized government.
Government in Europe had, in large part, been systemically disposed to emigration to America. Those people leaving the continent included second and third sons, who could not anticipate any inheritance, and rural residents whose livelihoods depended on agriculture but whose incomes were taxed rapaciously by a remote and inaccessible authority, which treated its subjects as little more than sources from which to extract revenue. In America, they anticipated, and, in fact, established, local governments that were weak, cheap, and close to home. The promise of the demos rose brightly on the western horizon. By the middle of the 18th century, New England resembled Olde England only in the names of its towns. The legislative device of the town meeting was conducted in churches and attendance was civically, if not always legally, compulsory.
In his seminal book, Bowling Alone, published in 2000, Robert Putnam at once despaired of the profound loss over the decades of public participation in civic institutions and celebrated the remarkable resilience of people’s participation in church activities, book clubs, and hobby organizations. He notes, “intense personal, intellectual, and occasionally even political bonds are forged” in these meetings. Further, Putnam observes, “regular participants become more involved in wider community affairs as well.” This phenomenon represents merely the ever-widening circles of the small group dropping its collective pebbles into the pond. The pond can never push the pebbles back out but responds, inexorably, to the pebbles.
Two decades ago, 42% of adults reported attending church weekly. Now, that figure is 30%. My own research has suggested that these metrics are done around established name brand religious groups and denominations, something that Christianity itself was not even called until Ignatius assigned the label in AD 100. Those brands, as they always have, continue to evolve in name and meaning and new names, if any, don’t always appear as a choice in surveys. Yet 71% of U.S. adults still say that religion is “Very” or “Fairly” important in their lives. Hence, “religiosity” and church attendance are experiencing something of a bifurcation. My own sense is that the spirit of the Athenian thiasoi, or religiously based mutual values and aid societies, lives on, and is even growing, in living rooms, coffeehouses, and food pantries all over this country. Perhaps the notion of “going to church” is changing in meaning.
The demos is, and always has been, the engine of society. Put another way, government is derivative of the demos, and not the other way around. Pretenses at inverting that relationship provide the momentary illusion of disenfranchisement. . . of closed coffeehouses and selectively deaf authorities. . .but those pretenses serve only their actors. The intended audience continues to gather in mutual support. That is our covenant.
Selah
November 2024