THE LOST SENSE OF COMMUNITY

The Lost Sense of Community — And the Republic That Cannot Survive Without It

For most of human history, the real value of religion was not its creeds, its doctrines, or its promises of reward. Its value was community.

Religion once brought people together in circles of mutual care. It taught neighbors to look after one another, to share burdens, to visit the sick, to lift the poor, to comfort the grieving, and to make the lonely feel less alone. At its best, religion was a social institution of beneficence, a place where people formed bonds of empathy and responsibility that extended far beyond the sanctuary walls.

That was the true strength of religion in America:
not the theology, but the community;
not the sermons, but the shared humanity;
Not the miracles, but the mutual support.

But that world is gone.

Religion Has Shifted Away From Community

Over the past half-century, organized religion in America has drifted from its communal purpose to something fundamentally different:

• Political machinery, mobilized to win elections, punish opponents, and impose ideology.
• Economic enterprises, focused on prosperity, wealth, and celebrity pastors.
• Cultural combat units, waging war against perceived enemies instead of building bridges between neighbors.

In this transformation, religion has lost the one thing that made it indispensable:
Its role is the builder and sustainer of community.

Today, religion can no longer be trusted to support the moral cohesion a republic requires. It is too fragmented, too politicized, too financially driven, and too invested in tribal identity. Its attention has turned away from the local and the human, toward the national and the partisan.

And with the decline of religious community, something even more profound has collapsed: people have lost the habit of belonging to one another.

Where Is Community Now?

Look at America today and ask a simple question:
Where is the sense of community?

It is not in our churches, too political.
Not in our politics, too hostile.
Not in our neighborhoods, too transient.
Not in our digital world, too remote and shallow.

We live in a nation of isolated individuals, each convinced of their own righteousness, each defending their own grievances, each living inside a sealed bubble of curated information and emotional insulation. The result is a fractured abstraction of “freedom” that leaves citizens adrift, unmoored from one another.

No republic can survive that.

A functioning republic depends on a shared sense of belonging, recognizing that we are responsible not just for ourselves but for one another. Democracy is not merely a system of voting; it is a system of community. Without that, the political structure collapses, because nothing binds the citizens together except anger and fear.

And we are living that collapse now.

The Repair of the Republic Begins With Community

If America is to be repaired, morally, politically, socially, our first task is not constitutional reform or economic restructuring.
It is the reconstruction of the community at every level:

• Local community, where people rediscover neighborliness, responsibility, and the human face of empathy.
• State community, where civic identity transcends political branding.
• National community, where we remember that a nation is not a collection of warring tribes but a union of people with shared stakes in one another’s future.

We must restore what religion once nurtured but can no longer guarantee: a fabric of mutual care.

A New Moral Leadership

This work requires a new kind of leadership, as the old institutions cannot be relied upon. We need:

• Leaders who understand empathy not as weakness but as civic necessity.
• Leaders who see morality as a lived practice, not a rhetorical weapon.
• Leaders who serve all people, not just their own political tribes.
• Leaders who know that a democratic republic is only as strong as the compassion of its citizens.

The restoration of America will not come from ideology, dogma, or false piety. It will come from communities rebuilt, empathy rekindled, and moral leadership reclaimed.

Religion once helped us do this.
Today, it cannot.
So the responsibility now falls on us, citizens who still believe in humanity, decency, and the shared moral destiny of a free people.

Sermons will not save the republic.
It will be saved by the community,
reborn.

William James Spriggs