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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"What are your thoughts?"

My thoughts are that it's not exclusive to religious participation. Americans are leading increasingly lonely and isolated lives. They're not just not attending church, they're pulling back from Ruritans, ladies clubs, book groups, bowling leagues, golf leagues, yacht clubs, country clubs, DAR, union halls, VFW clubs and events, hunting clubs...

There is basically one exception. Those of us who have minor children and sufficient financial means spend a lot of our time driving and watching our kids play soccer or practice dance routines.

Pretty much anything that was once a staple of American working and middle class community life is struggling for membership or dying. Never before in the history of humankind have so many people been living alone. It's an enormous mental health problem that's rapidly worsening. So we spend a lot of time online in silo'd groups getting fed algorithms that are scientifically designed to make us angrier about whatever we're inclined to be angry about.

DCUM will love to snicker at the idea of churches declining. For our family, ours is a major source of community, friendship, service work, youth activities and friends, and so on. [/quote]

Spot on.
[b]Add Scouting to that list - those numbers have plummeted as well. [/b]Even the local chamber of commerce and things like that.  Anything that has a non-competitive community aspect seems to be dying.  And it's those things that are most critical to knitting together the fabric of society.[/quote]

Could you think of any possible reason for that?[/quote]

NP.  We have scouts in our family.  The big drop was 2019 -> 2020.  The reason was the pandemic.  Many families stopped attending meetings and camping due to Covid 19 concerns and many families dropped their memberships.  But 2021 and 2022 have seen modest increases since the big drop.  Scouting USA is still down to about 60% of what it was pre-pandemic, but it is climbing slowly.  Expect it to take several years to recover, but people are coming back to scouting slowly.[/quote]

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