A time to rebuild our faltering institutions

Our civic, religious, and cultural institutions face a crisis of confidence. In June, Gallup found a continuing, dwindling faith in the collective structures through which our society functions. Only 26 percent of respondents expressed either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools. Organized religion fared only a little better at 32 percent. Our three branches of government ranged from 27 percent for the Supreme Court, 26 percent for the presidency, down to an abysmal 8 percent for Congress.

Even as some of our fellow citizens might wish to discard these institutions, we cannot. We need them for our good, both individually and as a society. In the case of churches and the government, God has ordained their existence. Yet, with such a low view of institutions, restoring each one to a healthy place within our society requires reviving the case for their necessity.

First, we need institutions to establish and maintain community. God did not create us for isolation. From the beginning, He declared it not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). We need relationships, including neighbors, friends, and citizens. America now experiences a crisis of loneliness, a crisis at least partly accounting for the rising “deaths of despair” raging through our country.

In response, we must remember how institutions nurture and perpetuate relationships. They formalize and routinize congregating. This point matters greatly in our own time where individualized schedules and online scrolling keep us from each other’s immediate company. In regularizing coming together, institutions make people visible to each other in their needs, their abilities, in their very humanity. They thereby comprise a context in which we can develop relationships with each other of care, concern, and enjoyment.

On this front, public schools played an outsized role in fostering community. In small towns especially, the school stood as a rallying point for the community. Most families sent their children there. The main sources of common entertainment involved school events, especially sports. Tragedies for particular persons or families became rallying cries for the community as a whole. Even the identity of the town closely tracked with the school’s reputation academically, socially, and athletically.

Churches, too, acted as a kind of community center. They most of all provided a place where people were bonded together in their union with Christ, through God’s Word preached and His sacraments administered. They also did much else. They housed mercy ministries that ministered to physical needs. They provided contexts for those with common beliefs to find spiritual support, marriage partners, and play dates for kids. The collapsing commitment to practicing one’s faith within an actual congregation carries not only pernicious theological but also social ramifications.

Even politics fostered community through party structures, civic associations, and engagement in local government, which was celebrated about Americans nearly 200 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. So much of our political interaction now occurs online these days. People may find some camaraderie in their political (and even theological) keyboard communities. Yet this highly curated, disembodied set of interactions will never replace the human need for neighbors. It will distort our perception of reality as often or more than it will inform and correct those understandings.

Second, institutions educate. Schools and churches present obvious examples. They also show the failure of our present institutions on this front. Our schools continue to struggle to teach students what they need to know. This struggle involves not only job skills but character formation as well. We must learn how to be decent citizens and human beings as well as good workers.

What about America’s churches? The theological knowledge of even basic Christian doctrines among church attendees is simply embarrassing. The explanations for why are many. Some churches have failed to catechize out of hopes of drawing people through entertainment. Others have feared offending present and potential congregants. Yet catechize they must in the message of the gospel and the basic truths of the Scriptures.

Politics plays an educational role as well, though one that is often misunderstood or ignored. Laws do not only command, they also instruct in the nature and source of justice as well as the resulting principles to which we as a political community commit ourselves. Moreover, proper engagement in the political process teaches as well. Our Constitution provides for institutions that are assigned tasks like lawmaking, law enforcement, and adjudication according to law—each structured toward wise and moral decision-making. Participation in these processes was meant to make not only officeholders but regular citizens wiser and more ethical in exercising their political authority.

Taken together, the community-building and educational roles served by our institutions help us to remember. They help us to remember who we are, human beings made in God’s image, in need of redemption, and tasked to pursue justice and holiness in this life. They help us to remember our obligations to each other as well as our need for each other. In this time of great disgruntlement with our institutions, the answer is not to reject. It is for us to rebuild.