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[quote=Anonymous][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]

Not the PP, but I've had experience with scouting and was really put off by the vibe - it was overwhelmingly white, conservative, and Christian, and felt like stepping back in time to the 70's - but not the good 70's.  It was like it hadn't changed changed since I was a kid, but kids and parents (at least most of them) have changed.  Most of the kids there didn't seem to be enjoying themselves, and were being forced by their parents, who seemed to think Eagle Scout would be good on a college application, or that boyscouts was teaching their kid some kind of values (which as far as I could see, it was not).[/quote]
Eagle Scout does look good on a college application (particularly to service academies which I imagine that milieu values highly)[/quote]

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