The collapse of community and the crisis of belonging comprise the biggest stories of the past 50 years. In 2000, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community sounded the siren on this crisis — the long-term decline of “social capital,” as author Robert Putnam put it. If you read the book closely, you learned that the primary source of civic activity in the United States was the church.

Our growing alienation and decreasing neighborliness isn’t a story about bowling leagues, then — it’s a story about secularization.