Crowns in the Gutter
The same forces emptying the mainline pews are now emptying the town halls
Crowns in the Gutter
My stepson recently got out of the Navy. The chairman of our town’s Republican Town Committee left me a voicemail the other day asking if he might consider joining. The committee was a mess of petty infighting the one time we attended together. The chairman is a good man who has finally realized that he and his Boomer peers never thought through the handoff. He is now, in the kindest sense of the word, scrambling.
I told my stepson to take the meeting.
I told him the reasons why, and the more I think about them, the more I am convinced they reveal the dynamics of a generational hand-off underway across the whole country. They are the civic version of the argument I have been making for two years at American Reformer and elsewhere about the mainline Protestant churches.
The mainline went first because it was furthest from the people. Sunday attendance is voluntary in a way that property taxes are not. But the same demographic undertow that hollowed out the parishes is now hollowing out the town committees, the school boards, the volunteer fire companies, the regional planning boards. Walk into any of them on a weeknight and you will see the same room. Men and women in their seventies. Doing their best, following a playbook from 1985.
AI is now compressing the timeline on every front. The crowns are about to roll into the gutter. The window for picking them up is brief.