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Every few months, another report reminds us that Americans are lonelier than ever. We know fewer neighbors, stop joining organizations, and spend more time alone in front of screens. The surgeon general has declared loneliness an epidemic, and before long, the conversation inevitably turns to politics: What should Washington do?
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The answer, I think, is not very much. Washington matters to some extent. Presidents can inspire us, as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan certainly did. But the work of civic renewal has always happened much closer to home.
I’ve spent years thinking and writing about civic life. So I never imagined that one of the best examples I’d encounter of civic renewal would be inside a Chick-fil-A just off the Long Island Expressway.
Sure, Chick-fil-A has a terrific reputation — its owner-operators sponsor school events, support local charities, host family nights, and are famously invested in the neighborhoods they serve. One thing Chick-fil-A seems to understand is that success and community are not competing goals. My son and I stop there whenever we can.
Even so, nothing prepared me for what we found a few weekends ago when we pulled in for breakfast.
As my son and I excitedly walked through the double doors, I honestly thought we’d walked into the wrong restaurant for a second. The dining room was packed. A bingo cage sat along the back wall of the restaurant, colorful lights flashed, numbers echoed through the room, and dozens of retirees, parents, and children were completely engrossed in breakfast bingo. It was the last thing I expected to find inside a fast-food restaurant, and my son and I loved it.
I’ll admit it: My first thought was cynical. Of course, this was smart business. Breakfast bingo brought people through the doors. But after a few games, something occurred to me, and I realized my initial skeptical reaction was too extreme. What I was seeing wasn’t just good business — it was a local restaurant giving people a reason to spend a Saturday morning together.
At one table next to us, three teenage girls sat with an elderly woman, laughing together, and it was clear that they had just met and were all there because of breakfast bingo. I don’t know what they were talking about specifically, but there was laughter and smiles. What Chick-fil-A did with its bingo morning was so powerful in our age of cellphones and isolation: It created the occasion for people who otherwise might never have crossed paths to become part of one another’s lives, if only briefly.
My son and I didn’t win any games, but we spent quality time together and enjoyed the breakfast biscuits, the excitement of the games, and the surprise of walking into a party. That morning experience has stuck with me, though, because it captured a dynamic we overlook far too often.
We spend enormous amounts of time debating how to rebuild American civic life, commissioning studies on loneliness, age segregation, declining trust, and social isolation. The concern is entirely justified. Recent data from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life show that the share of people who regularly spend time at a local gathering place — a coffee shop, restaurant, or park — has fallen from 7 in 10 before the pandemic to a bit over half today.
But sometimes the answers are remarkably ordinary. Community rarely begins with a formal plan or government initiative — it actually begins because someone creates an occasion. Someone opens the doors, sends the invitations, and decides the neighborhood needs a reason to gather. It can be as simple as firing up a grill, bringing a ball to the park, organizing a library lecture, hosting a synagogue breakfast, coaching Little League, or inviting families to play bingo on a Saturday morning. Community grows because someone first creates the opportunity for it to grow.
None of this would have surprised Tocqueville. Nor Robert Nisbet. Nor Robert Bellah. Nor Robert Putnam. Each, in his own way, argued that free societies depend on the institutions standing between the individual and the state. Bellah called them the “habits of the heart” that sustain democracy, while Putnam documented what happens when those habits erode. Different generations and different vocabularies, but one enduring lesson: Communities do not happen by accident. They are built because ordinary people keep creating occasions that bring neighbors together.
That is why I grow uneasy whenever conversations about rebuilding the country habitually turn toward national leaders and Washington, who believe that they can change our nation’s social norms and culture. Our federal government has indispensable responsibilities: protecting our liberties, enforcing the rule of law, and providing the foundations of a free society. But it is not the federal government’s role or ability to create the relationships that sustain a healthy society. While the government can help fund the creation and maintenance of particular social infrastructure, no law can make us know our neighbors, manufacture friendship, or legislate trust. Those responsibilities have always belonged to citizens.
The surveys tell much the same story. In fact, recent data follow a well-established trend where people continue to place far more trust in their local communities than in national institutions.
As far back as 2019, AEI’s Survey on Community and Society found 73% of people were satisfied with the way things were going in their own communities, while just 43% felt the same about the country as a whole. Americans also expressed confidence in their local governments at more than twice the rate they did in the federal government.
The pattern holds today. A more recent report from the Survey Center finds that while 74% of people believe elected officials mostly want to benefit themselves, 63% remain confident that their fellow citizens will do what they can to help those in need, and 85% fully believe a stranger would come to their aid if they were injured in a public place. We may argue bitterly about national politics, but we still believe in the people down the street.
I have become convinced that Americans are far better neighbors than our politics would lead us to believe, and this is why breakfast bingo has stayed with me. It is not because the event solved loneliness or offered some grand policy solution, but because the event reminded me that civic renewal is already happening all around us, often in places observers overlook. It happens whenever someone decides that a neighborhood needs an occasion to come together and then does the work to make it happen.
RECITE THE CREED. SAVE THE COUNTRY
America’s civic renewal will not come from Washington because it never has. The civic sphere is not created by legislation but by millions of ordinary people doing the quiet, often unnoticed work of creating those occasions: coaching the team, setting up the tables, hosting the barbecue, organizing the breakfast, inviting the neighbors, opening the doors.
The lesson here is really simple: Community does not simply happen. Someone has to create the occasion and then send the invitation. The rest of us simply have to decide to show up.
