Professor Putnam and the City on a Hill

Pete Peterson

Modeling Diverse Community

My wife and I recently had the great pleasure of attending services at St. Ann Chapel in Palo Alto, California. It was a chance to see friends we had made over a year ago when I did a public policy fellowship at the Hoover Institution. The church is part of the Anglican Province of Christ the King and worships out of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and 1940 Hymnal. It’s a different “speed” than the much larger Presbyterian church we attend in West Los Angeles—quieter and more contemplative.

St. Ann Chapel is a beautifully spartan structure, originally commissioned by Clare Boothe Luce in 1951. Luce, the wife of TIME magazine founder Henry Luce, had the church built in honor of her daughter Ann, who was killed in 1944 in a tragic car accident while she was a student at Stanford. St. Ann not only commemorates Luce’s daughter, but, as the mother of the Virgin Mary, she also symbolizes the loving relationship Luce had with her daughter. At the front of the womb-like sanctuary stands the altar table, on which is a small cabinet (the tabernacle) that holds communion elements. On the tabernacle doors is inscribed Jesus’ prayer for his followers from the Book of John: “That all may be one.” The words take added emphasis from being Jesus’ last to his assembled disciples, as the prayer was offered following the Last Supper.

Maybe it was my prep work for a course I’m about to teach on citizen engagement, or maybe it was just being back in that great little community on Melville Street in Palo Alto, or maybe it’s the work I’m doing helping to build the level of civic involvement here in California, but the morning’s service got me to thinking about the first U.S. national motto, which eerily parallels Jesus’ words: “E Pluribus Unum,” or “Out of many, One.” Congress approved the phrase for the national motto in 1782 to describe the hope for the newly formed United States out of thirteen separate—some might have thought disparate—colonies.

With the massive growth in immigration to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the saying was reinterpreted as a calling to the bubbling “melting pot” that, despite differences in native cultures, there was still a fundamental American ideal to believe in.

The national motto was changed in 1956 to “In God We Trust,” and while the transition between the two sayings seems dramatic, Robert D. Putnam’s recent study on the challenges to citizen engagement in America shows that they may, in fact, be related.

Social Capital and Freedom

Putnam came to national prominence in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone, in which the Harvard sociologist demonstrated (among other things) that television’s negative impact on community involvement was a growing national problem: “it is precisely those Americans most marked by this dependence on televised entertainment who were most likely to have dropped out of civic and social life.”

Importantly, Putnam concluded his study on “Technology and Mass Media” without deciding whether television was the cause of this marked detachment or the result of a previous step away from the public square: “The evidence is powerful and circumstantial, though because it does not derive from randomized experiments, it cannot be fully conclusive about the causal effects of television.”

It is in Bowling Alone that Putnam deeply considered the concept of “social capital”—a term that for decades had bounced around the halls of sociology departments. It was developed to demonstrate how levels of interpersonal trust and the degrees and quantities of relationships possessed on average by a society, carried direct economic implications, much like physical capital and human capital had been in their fields of measurement.

Putnam defines the relationship between the three terms: “Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them . . . social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’”

I would be remiss here—especially given his recent essay in Provocations—if I didn’t also mention that since the promotion of social capital as a field of economic study, Ted Malloch and others have highlighted the effects of “spiritual capital” on the growth or decline of a society.

In his chapter “Religious Participation,” Putnam’s study came to several startling conclusions. Putnam writes that “Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America.” He notes that he came to this conclusion because American churches (of most faiths) inculcate the abilities and behaviors most necessary for the flourishing of a democratic republic: “Churches provide an important incubator for civic skills, civic norms, community interests, and civic recruitment. Religiously active men and women learn to give speeches, run meetings, manage disagreements, and bear administrative responsibility.”

Putnam focuses on the “civic skills” learned in a church environment, but almost two centuries ago Alexis de Tocqueville, in his landmark Democracy in America, concentrated more on the power of Catholic and Protestant Christian churches to develop within the hearts and souls of citizens the “mores” or dispositions necessary for living with the enormous freedoms offered in a democratic republic.

Beginning with an admonition to those who supported a closer relationship between church and state, Tocqueville nonetheless argues for religion’s vital role in supporting the successful conduct of the state: “Religion, which, among Americans, never mixes directly in the government of society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it.”

Joining Putnam’s statistical and Tocqueville’s experiential research together, then, it appears that religion in America has played an important role in preparing the inner and outer man to live in a democratic state.

So they watch television instead

In Putnam’s latest research report, aptly entitled “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” the sociologist takes his earlier work (and Tocqueville’s for that matter) a step further, answering some of the questions left open in Bowling Alone. He also highlights another unique ability of the church: creating community out of a diverse populace.

At the heart of his most recent research, Putnam found that the increased television watching and web-surfing he had tracked earlier are only effects from another cause of diminished civic participation: increased levels of ethnic diversity. Surveying forty-one metropolitan areas across the country from Lewiston, Maine, to Los Angeles, Putnam’s team found that, “in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even in one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

Calling cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco “among the most ethnically diverse human habitations in history,” Putnam found that residents of these cities possess some of the lowest levels of civic trust in the nation. To compare, 70–80 percent of residents in ethnically similar communities like Bismarck, North Dakota said they trusted their neighbors “a lot,” but only 30 percent of Angelinos and San Franciscans answered the same way.

For political and civic leaders across America, the ramifications of diversity on public engagement are particularly alarming. Putnam discovered that in areas with higher ethnic heterogeneity there was a “lower confidence in local government [and] local leaders,” “lower political efficacy” (lesser confidence that one’s voice or vote will matter), “less likelihood of working on a community project,” “less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action,” and “less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.” All these factors lead to the last bullet point in this section of Putnam’s report: “more time spent watching television.”

Political conservatives have generally lauded the report, claiming (now with graphs in hand) that immigration policies must be hardened to reduce this weakening of the civic fabric, and multicultural programs should be shelved because of their ineffectiveness. Blogger Rick Moran writes that Putnam “not only has political dynamite in his hands but .50-caliber ammunition for the enemies of multicultural thought.” In a review of Putnam’s findings for City Journal, John Leo writes, “If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born.” Putnam himself does not avoid these conclusions, but offers that “in the short run there is a tradeoff between diversity and community, but that over time wise policies (public and private) can ameliorate the tradeoff.”

A changing hour

But the report is particularly encouraging for religious leaders in America. While Martin Luther King, Jr. once rightly regarded Sundays at 11:00 A.M. as “the most segregated hour in America,” Putnam’s research shows that this is changing. Putnam spotlighted his recent experiences in evangelical and Catholic churches.

In one of the more bracing statements of the forty-page report, the sociologist proclaims: “In many large evangelical congregations, the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed” (emphasis added). Putnam discovered that the average age of a congregation correlated to the level of diversity, as the younger are a church’s attendees the greater its diversity: “younger people and those who attended evangelical megachurches (and Catholic parishes) report significantly more racial integration.” So apparently while levels of inter-ethnic trust appear to be just as low in younger generations as older among the general population, younger church-goers have formed different opinions.

Why is this happening? Putnam’s research seems to indicate that it is occurring in the same way any deep community is formed, with particular differences laid aside when a central belief or unifying mission is accepted. Putnam found that “for most Americans their religious identity is actually more important to them than their ethnic identity, but the salience of religious differences as lines of social identity has sharply diminished.” In other words, in an ethnically polarized culture, Americans are beginning to find their identity more in their religious faith than in their ethnic origin.

Of course, the faithful in America also appear to be demonstrating the Christian call for unity even within an ethnically diverse environment. Paul’s famous plea to the church in Galatia—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”—is apparently and properly being understood in many American congregations to mean, “there is neither black nor white, Mexican nor Korean, Russian nor Vietnamese.”

Even the prescient Tocqueville from his vantage point in the 1830s could not have foreseen the levels of ethnic diversity America would possess. In one of the more interesting commentaries on the connection between monotheistic religious faith and democratic mores in America, the Frenchman believed that with “equality of conditions” bringing citizens to a more common level politically and economically, men’s faith would logically gravitate towards a singular God: “Men who are alike and equal readily conceive the notion of a single God imposing the same rules on each of them and granting them future happiness at the same price.” It followed then, that with democratic institutions providing equal opportunities to all people, a faith in a particular, just God would soon result: “It appears evident to me that the more the barriers that separate nations within humanity and citizens within the interior of each people tend to disappear, the more the human mind is directed, as if by itself, toward the idea of a single omnipotent being.” A more unified people through political and economic institutions, he implied, leads to a belief in a unified or singular deity.

Yet it appears from Putnam’s national research that the opposite is in fact happening. Around an increasingly diverse America, the religiously devout are entering houses of worship where membership is more heterogeneous than ever before. Through this experience, Americans are learning the newly important “civic skill” of building community out of ethnic diversity. In this sense, the American churches are serving as a “classroom” to their congregants, but as importantly, they are also beginning to reveal themselves as an example to a nation that desperately needs to know that this is possible. Apparently, the American churches are beginning to heed Christ’s call to oneness.

Through this demonstration, America’s churches are rightly reclaiming the understanding of Jesus’ words in his Sermon on the Mount. Since John Winthrop’s famous “Model of Christian Charity” sermon in 1630 to Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address in 1989, the “city on a hill” has been reinterpreted to symbolize either a municipal community or a nation, but these words were originally intended to speak to people of faith and their societal role as distinctive examples of compassionate community. Putnam’s research indicates that America’s national mottoes may, in fact, be conjoined: as Americans practice “In God We Trust” we are working toward “E Pluribus Unum.”  

Pete Peterson is a Lecturer on State and Local Governance at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy.

Features, Public Square, Thu 20 Dec 2007