He writes:
An American Enterprise Institute study of loneliness (“AEI Survey on Community and Society: Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States”) indicates that loneliness and political activism are strongly correlated.I'll go out on a limb and guess that the correlation is stronger the more radical the activists are. People who commit their lives to political causes are often seeking a substitute religion to compensate for the lack of meaning and community that pervades contemporary secular life.
Here is a summary of results penned by Ryan Streeter and David Wilde:Political volunteers [for campaigns], for example, are less embedded in the social and communal environments that produce trust and social capital.Streeter and Wilde speculate that lonely people are attracted to the ersatz fellowship of feverish political agreement. “Lacking regular community, political joiners compensate ideologically. Eighty-seven percent report that their ideology gives them a sense of community, compared to 63 percent of ordinary Americans.”
They are more than twice as likely as ordinary Americans, and three times more likely than religious Americans, to say “rarely” or “never” when asked if there are people they feel close to.
They are five times more likely than religious joiners to say they rarely or never have someone they can turn to in times of need. And they are also more likely than other joiners to say their relationships are superficial.
As our families become increasingly fragmented, our neighborhoods increasingly transitory, and our churches increasingly empty there are fewer places people can find a sense rootedness, a sense that they belong to something significant.
Joining with others in a political cause affords not only a sense of community but also a sense of purpose and fulfillment, both of which are hard to come by in a secular culture in which so much of what engages our attention seems ultimately empty, pointless, and boring.