{"id":841653,"date":"2024-12-18T05:00:14","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?p=841653"},"modified":"2024-12-16T15:22:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T21:22:19","slug":"how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-preview\"><p>The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is <i>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community<\/i> by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore.<\/p> <p>The book&#8217;s title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-login login-toggle\">Already a member? <a href=\"#\">Log in<\/a><\/div>\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-content\">\n\t\t\t\t<h2>Unlock premium content!<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Get access to all Church Answers premium content from our expert contributors plus many other membership benefits.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<h3>$9.97 per month<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Unlimited access<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/join\/\" class=\"button\">Join Now<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-preview\"><p>The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is <i>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community<\/i> by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore.<\/p> <p>The book&#8217;s title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-login login-toggle\">Already a member? <a href=\"#\">Log in<\/a><\/div>\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-content\">\n\t\t\t\t<h2>Unlock premium content!<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Get access to all Church Answers premium content from our expert contributors plus many other membership benefits.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<h3>$9.97 per month<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Unlimited access<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/join\/\" class=\"button\">Join Now<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t","protected":false},"author":17635,"featured_media":841656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"publish_to_discourse":"0","publish_post_category":"1","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,183,184,179,175,186,177,178,14796,180,194,18058,176],"tags":[19876,19875,110,19878,19877],"class_list":["post-841653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-answers","category-communications","category-discipleship","category-first-impressions","category-grow","category-health-and-metrics","category-lead","category-membership-and-assimilation","category-monday-wednesday-featured","category-outreach-and-evangelism","category-preaching","category-premium","category-revitalize","tag-bowling-alone-the-collapse-and-revival-of-american-community","tag-evangelical-distrust","tag-evangelism","tag-interpersonal-trust","tag-robert-putnam","membership-content","access-restricted"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder | Church Answers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore. The book&#039;s title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the invisible bonds that tie us together in a local community. It makes people care about the local school system even though they don\u2019t have children. Or it motivates them to help with an effort to clean up the city park when they don\u2019t use it that often. It\u2019s the glue holding society together and what makes democracy healthy. Putnam published his magnum opus in 2000, meaning his data collection efforts only ran through the mid-1990s. At that point, American religion was still fairly robust. In Bowling Alone, Putnam contended that houses of worship were one of the last remaining engines of social capital in the United States. For anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the data related to religion in the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s become clear that those engines have begun to sputter as attendance has declined, and the share of Americans with no religion has continued to climb.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder | Church Answers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore. The book&#039;s title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the invisible bonds that tie us together in a local community. It makes people care about the local school system even though they don\u2019t have children. Or it motivates them to help with an effort to clean up the city park when they don\u2019t use it that often. It\u2019s the glue holding society together and what makes democracy healthy. Putnam published his magnum opus in 2000, meaning his data collection efforts only ran through the mid-1990s. At that point, American religion was still fairly robust. In Bowling Alone, Putnam contended that houses of worship were one of the last remaining engines of social capital in the United States. For anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the data related to religion in the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s become clear that those engines have begun to sputter as attendance has declined, and the share of Americans with no religion has continued to climb.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Church Answers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-12-18T11:00:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"628\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ryan Burge\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ryan Burge\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Ryan Burge\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/d5a336fe7fb2e2336148e844c396558a\"},\"headline\":\"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-12-18T11:00:14+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\"},\"wordCount\":1475,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png\",\"keywords\":[\"Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community\",\"Evangelical Distrust\",\"Evangelism\",\"Interpersonal Trust\",\"Robert Putnam\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Church Answers\",\"Communications\",\"Discipleship\",\"First Impressions\",\"Grow\",\"Health &amp; Metrics\",\"Lead\",\"Membership &amp; Assimilation\",\"Monday\/Wednesday Featured\",\"Outreach &amp; Evangelism\",\"Preaching\",\"Premium\",\"Revitalize\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\",\"name\":\"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder | Church Answers\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-12-18T11:00:14+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/d5a336fe7fb2e2336148e844c396558a\"},\"description\":\"The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore. The book's title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the invisible bonds that tie us together in a local community. It makes people care about the local school system even though they don\u2019t have children. Or it motivates them to help with an effort to clean up the city park when they don\u2019t use it that often. It\u2019s the glue holding society together and what makes democracy healthy. Putnam published his magnum opus in 2000, meaning his data collection efforts only ran through the mid-1990s. At that point, American religion was still fairly robust. In Bowling Alone, Putnam contended that houses of worship were one of the last remaining engines of social capital in the United States. For anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the data related to religion in the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s become clear that those engines have begun to sputter as attendance has declined, and the share of Americans with no religion has continued to climb.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png\",\"width\":1200,\"height\":628,\"caption\":\"Distrust vs trust written on two arrows\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/\",\"name\":\"Church Answers\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/d5a336fe7fb2e2336148e844c396558a\",\"name\":\"Ryan Burge\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/56879a20cb590828ec05138ab0896cecf173024f2bf472bb1fb8dd0ad8f13fe0?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/56879a20cb590828ec05138ab0896cecf173024f2bf472bb1fb8dd0ad8f13fe0?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Ryan Burge\"},\"description\":\"Dr. Ryan Burge is professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Before that he was an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, and was also the graduate coordinator. He has authored over thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters alongside six books (including The Vanishing Church, The Nones, and The Great Dechurching) about religion and politics in the United States. He served as a pastor in the American Baptist Church for over twenty years, leading First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, IL for 17.5 years until its closure in July 2024.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/author\/ryanburge\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder | Church Answers","description":"The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore. The book's title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the invisible bonds that tie us together in a local community. It makes people care about the local school system even though they don\u2019t have children. Or it motivates them to help with an effort to clean up the city park when they don\u2019t use it that often. It\u2019s the glue holding society together and what makes democracy healthy. Putnam published his magnum opus in 2000, meaning his data collection efforts only ran through the mid-1990s. At that point, American religion was still fairly robust. In Bowling Alone, Putnam contended that houses of worship were one of the last remaining engines of social capital in the United States. For anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the data related to religion in the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s become clear that those engines have begun to sputter as attendance has declined, and the share of Americans with no religion has continued to climb.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder | Church Answers","og_description":"The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore. The book's title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the invisible bonds that tie us together in a local community. It makes people care about the local school system even though they don\u2019t have children. Or it motivates them to help with an effort to clean up the city park when they don\u2019t use it that often. It\u2019s the glue holding society together and what makes democracy healthy. Putnam published his magnum opus in 2000, meaning his data collection efforts only ran through the mid-1990s. At that point, American religion was still fairly robust. In Bowling Alone, Putnam contended that houses of worship were one of the last remaining engines of social capital in the United States. For anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the data related to religion in the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s become clear that those engines have begun to sputter as attendance has declined, and the share of Americans with no religion has continued to climb.","og_url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/","og_site_name":"Church Answers","article_published_time":"2024-12-18T11:00:14+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1200,"height":628,"url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png","type":"image\/png"}],"author":"Ryan Burge","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Ryan Burge","Est. reading time":"8 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/"},"author":{"name":"Ryan Burge","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/d5a336fe7fb2e2336148e844c396558a"},"headline":"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder","datePublished":"2024-12-18T11:00:14+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/"},"wordCount":1475,"commentCount":0,"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png","keywords":["Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community","Evangelical Distrust","Evangelism","Interpersonal Trust","Robert Putnam"],"articleSection":["Church Answers","Communications","Discipleship","First Impressions","Grow","Health &amp; Metrics","Lead","Membership &amp; Assimilation","Monday\/Wednesday Featured","Outreach &amp; Evangelism","Preaching","Premium","Revitalize"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/","url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/","name":"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder | Church Answers","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png","datePublished":"2024-12-18T11:00:14+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/d5a336fe7fb2e2336148e844c396558a"},"description":"The most important book written in political science in my lifetime is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam. It\u2019s a thick volume with hundreds of thousands of words and dozens of graphs that point the reader to a central conclusion\u2013Americans aren\u2019t joining and participating in organizations anymore. The book's title comes from a simple data exercise where Putnam tracked the number of people in bowling leagues over nearly 100 years. What he found was that folks were quite simply bowling alone now. He also showed similar trends in membership in groups like the Elks, the Moose, the VFW, and the Boy Scouts. What worried Putnam the most was not just the decline in participation in these groups but the implications for society. He popularized the term \u201csocial capital,\u201d which has become part of the lexicon of social science. Put succinctly, social capital is the invisible bonds that tie us together in a local community. It makes people care about the local school system even though they don\u2019t have children. Or it motivates them to help with an effort to clean up the city park when they don\u2019t use it that often. It\u2019s the glue holding society together and what makes democracy healthy. Putnam published his magnum opus in 2000, meaning his data collection efforts only ran through the mid-1990s. At that point, American religion was still fairly robust. In Bowling Alone, Putnam contended that houses of worship were one of the last remaining engines of social capital in the United States. For anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the data related to religion in the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s become clear that those engines have begun to sputter as attendance has declined, and the share of Americans with no religion has continued to climb.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Distrust-vs-trust-written-on-two-arrows.png","width":1200,"height":628,"caption":"Distrust vs trust written on two arrows"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-the-rise-of-evangelical-distrust-is-making-evangelism-harder\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"How the Rise of Evangelical Distrust Is Making Evangelism Harder"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/","name":"Church Answers","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/d5a336fe7fb2e2336148e844c396558a","name":"Ryan Burge","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/56879a20cb590828ec05138ab0896cecf173024f2bf472bb1fb8dd0ad8f13fe0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/56879a20cb590828ec05138ab0896cecf173024f2bf472bb1fb8dd0ad8f13fe0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Ryan Burge"},"description":"Dr. Ryan Burge is professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Before that he was an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, and was also the graduate coordinator. He has authored over thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters alongside six books (including The Vanishing Church, The Nones, and The Great Dechurching) about religion and politics in the United States. He served as a pastor in the American Baptist Church for over twenty years, leading First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, IL for 17.5 years until its closure in July 2024.","url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/author\/ryanburge\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17635"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841653"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841663,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841653\/revisions\/841663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/841656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}