Years ago, I wrote about a brilliant friend of mine from New York. He’d moved to St. Louis and after a few setbacks found himself homeless and fighting an addiction to crack. He hated St. Louis and couldn’t wait to leave.
Every city isn’t for everyone. The Dallas metro is seen as the place to be for Muslims in America. Each year thousands of Muslim families move there to find happiness in the booming and sprawling suburbs. Like punk rock and roast beef, I never quite understood the appeal. It wasn’t for me.
There are others who find their joy in places like Portland, San Francisco, Austin, Nashville, Williamsburg Brooklyn, and other gentrified neighborhoods in America. If you've seen one of these neighborhoods you've seen them all and they all end up looking the same and being as conformist as the affluent suburbs the new, young, and mostly white residents grew up in.
Everyone is on their own mission in life. One person's ideal vacation may not have any appeal to their spouse or neighbor. One person's dream home may look like misery to someone else.
My friend ended up leaving St. Louis and moving back to New York and doing relatively well from all that I could tell. We didn't talk much and only kept in contact via social media. A few weeks back I decided to look him up and discovered he had died suddenly.
America is increasingly becoming a lonely society. We’re increasingly raising kids alone, living alone, and dying alone.
“Deaths of despair” are on the rise and there is speculation this may be due to the abandonment of religion. This makes sense to me. With smaller family sizes Americans don’t have that many family members to comfort them and many Americans are products of broken homes or don’t have any family they speak to. The nature of the modern economy is that people follow economic opportunities and therefore may move every few years and live far apart from friends and family.
There was a time when Americans would move to a new city, neighborhoods were more walkable and conducive to meeting new people, everyone wasn’t constantly on their phones, and one of the first things on the agenda was finding a congregation to worship at. Once there they would meet new people, meet a spouse if unmarried, send their kids to the programs offered, and they’d have a social network.
Other things existed that bound the community together. Organizations such as labor unions, the Knights of Columbus, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, neighborhood restaurants and bars, youth sports, pro sports teams, fraternities and sororities, and even street gangs. If an American is unaffiliated from a religious congregation, what do they now have? For many Americans the loneliness is filled by alcohol and drugs. This is particularly true in the Rust Belt and among the working-class. For other Americans the void is being filled by ideology and politics. Replacing the fundamentalist religious zeal for a zealous belief in the all-encompassing power of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement or Bernie Sanders and “the Squad”. Even more just resign to porn, dating apps, video games, reality television, and Door Dash.
If you’re a Muslim and you move to a new city and you find the masjid unwelcoming what is the next stop? The same it is for everyone else and for converts, more than likely, without the family-support many born-Muslims take for granted.
Beyond masjids this is why jamaats, friendship groups, and “third spaces” are important. Third spaces are associated with affluent Muslims, typically progressive, operating near elite universities and wealthy suburbs (the true dungeons of American oppression!). However, that isn’t always the case. In St. Louis we have a brotherhood class and support group comprised entirely of working-class brothers and we benefit greatly from one another. The role performed by our class is similar to ones that have been provided by Black American Sunni jamaats and grassroots urban masjids over the years- minus any formalized leadership or distinct theological preference. Some in the class lean towards Sufism, some towards Salafeeyah, some were students of Imam Warith-deen Mohammed. The commonality is brotherhood, support, food, and discussion.
Loneliness is starting at a young age. Our boys and young men, who are doing far worse in society than women and girls, fall behind fast. As author Richard Reeves lays out in his book “Of Boys and Men: Why The Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It”, the reason boys are struggling isn’t “toxic masculinity”, but due to changes in modern society and the systematic lack of attention paid to the plight of boys and men.
Loneliness is also having an impact upon our politics. The rise of “the woke single female” may be altering the results of elections and campaigns won’t be able to ignore this constituency.
Solving the problem of loneliness and social disengagement in modern America, as author Robert Putnam wrote about in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone”, is one of the major issues America faces. Religious organizations have a role to play- perhaps the biggest role. Even for those who remain religious, they’re increasingly finding more “virtual community”, than in the places they live. Identify more with TikTok imams, rabbis, and pastors, than with those in their communities. This isn’t sustainable in the long term. I’ve known Muslims who spend several hours a day on Muslim social media accounts who’ve told me they haven’t been to a masjid in a year or more.
If we as a community ignore the outcasts, the loners, those why may be struggling, it will be to all of our detriment. In a decade that lonely person could be your family member. Or it could be you.
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I wanted to write about the ridiculous Hamline situation created by the toxic mixed drink of Ikhwani and progressive identity politics: but others have sufficiently covered it. CAIR issued a good statement as did Jonathan Brown (hey, even the Cubs won the World Series and broken clocks are right twice a day). I will attempt to write about a changing Saudi Arabia next. I don’t think there is a more fascinating place in the world at this time.
Wow. This was a good read and I would definitely say is at the core of many of today society's ills (opioid crisis, mass shootings, fake news, etc.), but rarely gets talked about. I'm interested to know exactly what happened to lead to the decline in religion. Surely it's got to be more than just a Higher Being no longer becoming relevant?
If I had to put my finger it I would say it's a loss of personal or communal responsibility (religion is all about being responsible to a Higher Power). Personal responsibility would drive someone to do things like checking on your neighbor, leaving a note if you scratched someone's car, returning something you found that was lost, caretaking elderly family members, intervening when a stranger is in distress (and not just film it on your phone from the sidelines), etc.
I believe the role of today's fledging religious communities is to be proactive in fulfilling those needs in society. Within today's Muslim community, yes, it is in large part going to be more suburban, more socio-economically affluent and less culturally diverse. Which I think leads a lot of community-based projects to unintentionally be limited in their reach--or at the very least may make it difficult to feel welcoming to those outside of their bubble. I have seen some awesome local faith based community acts of kindness in action just in the past month: taking a convert brother from a nursing home to the mosque for jumuah, helping get a homeless Muslim a motel room to stay during a rainstorm, trying to put money on the books for a convert Muslim in jail. These are great and all, but unfortunately they barely leave a dent in the greater society.
What I suggest is taking a cue out of the playbook of indigenous Muslim groups (from the NOI to Darul Islam to Imam Warith Deen), whose emphasis on community-engagement was a core principle in their faith. This led to not only brotherhood/sisterhood, but prison ministries, matrimonial networking, food pantries, entrepreneurship, transitional housing options, etc through the latter part of the 20th century. If we can revive that without the crazy religious polemic and extremism (which unfortunately undid many of those gains in the community), then I think we may on to something...