When the Official Channels Go Dark

In March 2020, as grocery stores emptied and unemployment offices crashed under the weight of millions of applications, something remarkable happened in neighborhoods across the country. People began organizing themselves. Not through official channels or established nonprofits, but through hastily created WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, and text chains that connected strangers who shared the same zip code and the same urgent need to keep their communities fed, housed, and safe.

These mutual aid networks emerged from necessity, but they revealed something we had lost without fully realizing it: the muscle memory of collective care. When the pandemic stripped away the illusion that individual solutions could address systemic problems, communities rediscovered what it meant to organize from the ground up. Six years later, many of these networks continue their work, having evolved from emergency response into sustained community infrastructure.

The explosion of these grassroots efforts during 2020 was more than just a crisis response. It was a return to organizing traditions that had been gradually eroded by decades of individualism and institutional dependency. What we witnessed wasn’t the birth of something entirely new, but the resurrection of community practices that had been dormant, waiting for conditions that made their value undeniable.

The Digital Scaffolding of Care

Modern mutual aid operates differently than its historical predecessors, shaped by tools that would have been unimaginable to previous generations of organizers. Platforms like Slack, Discord, and Airtable have become the digital scaffolding that supports distributed coordination across neighborhoods and cities. A volunteer coordinating grocery deliveries in Oakland might use the same database structure as organizers running a community kitchen in Detroit, sharing knowledge and systems across thousands of miles.

These technological tools have democratized certain aspects of organizing while creating new challenges. The same platforms that allow rapid mobilization can also fragment efforts, creating parallel networks that rarely intersect. Big Door Brigade mutual aid is one attempt to bridge these digital divides, connecting local networks while preserving their autonomy and community focus.

The digital infrastructure has also made visible the incredible amount of unpaid labor that sustains communities. Spreadsheets tracking rent assistance, volunteer scheduling systems, and resource databases reveal the complex coordination required to meet basic human needs. This visibility has sparked important conversations about how this work gets valued and sustained over time.

Reclaiming Space and Voice

Beyond immediate aid, these networks have spawned deeper organizing efforts aimed at addressing root causes rather than just symptoms. Food sovereignty movements in urban areas have moved beyond emergency food distribution to establish community gardens, cooperative grocery stores, and local food production systems. These initiatives represent a fundamental shift from charity models toward community ownership and control.

Community land trusts have gained momentum as neighborhoods seek to resist displacement and maintain affordability. Rather than accepting gentrification as inevitable, residents are organizing to collectively own and steward land, ensuring it benefits community needs rather than speculative investment. These efforts require sustained organizing and complex legal structures, demonstrating how mutual aid networks have matured into sophisticated advocacy organizations.

The housing crisis in major metropolitan areas has accelerated tenant organizing efforts that connect immediate assistance with longer-term policy advocacy. Eviction prevention funds created during the pandemic have evolved into tenant unions that negotiate with landlords, lobby for rent control, and provide legal support. Shelterforce community development documents how these grassroots efforts are reshaping housing policy from the neighborhood level up.

Participatory budgeting programs, now active in over 1,500 cities globally, show how communities are claiming greater control over public resources. These initiatives move beyond traditional advocacy to give residents direct decision-making power over how public money gets spent in their neighborhoods. The process itself becomes a form of civic education, building the skills and relationships that strengthen ongoing organizing efforts.

When National Politics Stagnates, Local Organizing Flourishes

The effectiveness of local organizing has become increasingly apparent as national political institutions struggle with polarization and gridlock. While federal and state governments debate policy frameworks, community networks are implementing concrete solutions to immediate problems. This dynamic has shifted how many people think about political engagement, moving from electoral cycles toward sustained, issue-based organizing.

Local organizing succeeds partly because it operates at a scale where individual actions can create visible change. A neighborhood effort to install bike lanes or establish a community composting program can show results within months rather than election cycles. This immediacy helps sustain engagement and builds confidence in collective action as an effective strategy for change.

The contrast between local organizing and national politics also highlights different theories of change. While electoral politics focuses on choosing between predetermined options, community organizing emphasizes creating new possibilities through collective action. This distinction matters because it shapes how people understand their own agency and capacity to influence the conditions of their lives.

Building for the Long Term

The persistence of mutual aid networks six years after their emergency genesis suggests something significant about community resilience and political possibility. These networks have weathered initial enthusiasm, volunteer burnout, and resource scarcity to establish themselves as permanent fixtures in many neighborhoods. Their survival indicates that they meet genuine community needs that other institutions fail to address.

The evolution from crisis response to sustained organizing reflects deeper changes in how people think about community responsibility and collective care. Networks that began by delivering groceries now advocate for food justice policies. Eviction prevention funds have become tenant organizing committees. Emergency childcare cooperatives have established ongoing educational alternatives.

This progression from mutual aid to community organizing to policy advocacy shows a theory of change that starts with meeting immediate needs and builds toward systemic transformation. The approach recognizes that people are more likely to engage in policy advocacy when they have direct experience of how current policies affect their daily lives and concrete examples of alternatives that work better.

These networks offer more than services or even political strategy. They provide spaces for people to practice democracy in its most fundamental form: neighbors working together to solve shared problems. In communities where these networks have taken root, residents report higher levels of social connection, political efficacy, and neighborhood investment. The organizing itself becomes a form of community development that strengthens social infrastructure alongside physical improvements.

The future of these efforts depends largely on their ability to maintain community control while building sufficient resources for sustained operation. The challenge lies in scaling impact without losing the intimate, neighborhood-based relationships that make the work effective in the first place. For those interested in supporting or starting similar efforts, the most important step is often the simplest: showing up to existing neighborhood gatherings and asking how you can contribute to work already underway.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to on this. The topic of religious and faith communities in a secular age rewards more careful attention than the typical coverage provides, and the reason is not complicated once you know where to look.

What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, when viewed through the lens of case study, is faith communities providing social infrastructure that secular alternatives can’t replace. The practical read of the situation is also the more accurate one once you examine what the evidence actually shows.

The Study: Setting the Terms

The religiously unaffiliated now make up over 30 percent of US adults, up from 16 percent in 2007. This isn’t just a data point in the story of religious and faith communities in a secular age. It’s the structural condition that makes everything else in this analysis legible. Context like this doesn’t age quickly. The conditions that produced it have been building for years, and the convergence is what makes the current moment distinct from previous moments that looked similar from a distance.

Faith communities are providing social infrastructure that secular alternatives can’t replace, while progressive religious spaces grow as conservative denominations shrink. When you look at both together, a pattern emerges that Religion News Service has been covering from the inside: the conditions are more durable than they first appear, and the implications extend further than the immediate headline suggests.

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at what was true three years ago versus what is true now. The delta is not simply quantitative. It’s qualitative. The participants, the infrastructure, and the incentive structures have all shifted in ways that compound rather than cancel out. That compounding is the most important element to track.

What makes this moment worth examining carefully is not the novelty but the confirmation. The underlying dynamics have been visible for some time. What’s new is that they’ve reached a threshold where ignoring them requires active effort rather than simple inattention. That threshold crossing is the event, not the underlying movement that produced it.

And online church communities formed during COVID are retaining 40 percent of attendance. This is part of that same picture. These elements don’t exist in separate silos. They’re reinforcing conditions in the same structural shift.

The Organising Story: The Analysis

Online church communities retaining 40 percent of post-COVID attendance is where the analysis gets more specific. The surface reading is accessible and not wrong, but it misses the mechanism. And the mechanism is where the practical insight lives. What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, is that the mechanism is interfaith coalitions leading on housing, immigration, and anti-poverty work. Understanding it changes what you do with the information.

Consider what interfaith coalitions leading on housing, immigration, and anti-poverty work represents in context. It’s not a correlation that happened to appear. It’s a downstream consequence of structural factors that have been compounding. Previous readings of similar situations failed because they treated the symptom as the cause. The structural account is less satisfying as a headline but more useful as an analytical tool.

The comparison to prior cycles is instructive precisely because of where it breaks down. Superficially similar conditions resolved differently in previous iterations because the substrate was different. What the “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification represents is a substrate change, the kind that alters the elasticity of the system rather than just its current value. Recognising that distinction is what separates analysis from pattern-matching.

The skeptical counterargument deserves honest engagement: prior moments with similar surface characteristics didn’t produce the outcomes that seemed logical at the time. That history is real. What’s different now is the “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification, which isn’t a minor variable. It’s the infrastructure condition that previous cycles lacked. Infrastructure changes tend to be persistent in ways that sentiment-driven changes are not. Pew Research religion data is one source tracking this dimension with the rigour it requires.

There’s also a distributional question that often goes unaddressed in coverage of religious and faith communities in a secular age: who captures the value created by these shifts, and who absorbs the disruption costs? The aggregate picture can be positive while the distribution is uneven in ways that matter enormously to specific participants. Keeping that distributional lens in view is part of reading the situation clearly rather than simply optimistically.

Implications: What This Means If You Care About Community campaigns

The implications of religious and faith communities in a secular age extend beyond the immediate context. The religiously unaffiliated now making up over 30 percent of US adults, up from 16 percent in 2007, combined with the structural conditions described above creates a situation where adjacent fields, decisions, and communities are affected in ways that aren’t always visible from inside the primary story. The second-order effects are frequently more important than the first-order ones, and they’re where careful attention pays the highest returns.

The frame that matters here, and this is where this perspective departs from the mainstream coverage, is that progressive religious spaces growing as conservative denominations shrink is a leading indicator rather than a lagging one. The people positioned to respond to what this signals, rather than to what it confirms, are the ones who will be less surprised by what follows.

The practical response depends heavily on your position relative to the dynamics at play. For those closest to the core of religious and faith communities in a secular age, the implications are immediate and operational. For those at greater distance, the implications are strategic, a matter of understanding which adjacent pressures are building and which assumed stabilities are more fragile than they appear.

The practical question isn’t whether to engage with these dynamics but how. The answer depends on context, on what role you occupy relative to religious and faith communities in a secular age and what your actual decision horizon is. But the first step is the same regardless: accurate understanding of what’s actually happening rather than what the most available narrative says is happening.

A few concrete observations are worth separating out from the broader analysis. First: faith communities providing social infrastructure that secular alternatives can’t replace isn’t a temporary condition. It’s a new baseline. Second: interfaith coalitions leading on housing, immigration, and anti-poverty work suggests that the adjustment period isn’t over. Third, and most important: the organisations and individuals who are treating the current moment as a new steady state rather than a transition are making a categorisation error that will be costly to unwind later.

The Case Against: What the Critics Get Right

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the strongest counterarguments, not just the weakest ones. The case against the optimistic reading of religious and faith communities in a secular age isn’t trivial. There are structural vulnerabilities in the current picture that deserve direct engagement rather than dismissal.

The most serious objection is the one about sustainability. Progressive religious spaces growing as conservative denominations shrink can be read not as a foundation but as a ceiling, a point beyond which growth becomes self-limiting because of the very dynamics that produced it. If the current state has already incorporated most of the available supply of early-adopting participants, the remaining growth curve may be structurally shallower than the recent trajectory implies.

There’s also the policy and regulatory dimension. The religiously unaffiliated now making up over 30 percent of US adults describes a condition in a relatively permissive environment. Regulatory responses to the scale implied by these numbers aren’t inevitable, but they’re not implausible either. The organisations that are planning as though the current regulatory environment is permanent are making an assumption that the history of fast-growing sectors doesn’t support.

The rebuttal to these concerns isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that they’re already partially priced into the current state of the field. The “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification reflects an environment where participants are already adapting to constraints rather than operating in an unconstrained space. The adjustment capacity of the ecosystem is higher than a purely top-down view of the risks suggests.

Looking Forward

The trajectory here is clearer than the pace. Making predictions about when specific thresholds will be crossed is genuinely difficult, and anyone claiming precision about timelines should be treated with scepticism. But the direction, toward the religiously unaffiliated continuing to grow and continued development of the conditions described above, is supported by the evidence in a way that isn’t contingent on a single variable going right.

The “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification is the variable to watch as the leading indicator. Historical patterns suggest it moves first, with broader metrics following with some lag. This doesn’t make the outcome certain, but it makes it legible. And legibility is the precondition for good decisions.

Three questions are worth holding as the story develops. First: are the structural conditions that enabled the current state durable, or are they cyclical? Second: who is positioned to benefit from the next phase, and does that differ materially from who benefited in the current phase? Third: what would a clean falsification of the optimistic thesis look like, and is there any evidence of that signal emerging? These questions don’t need answers today, but having asked them changes what you notice in the months ahead.

That’s my read. I want to hear yours. The current moment in religious and faith communities in a secular age is one where the people who have built an accurate model of the underlying dynamics are better positioned than the people who are relying on the surface story. Building that model isn’t a quick task, but it is a tractable one, and this analysis is intended as one input into it.

What worked in your own organising that you wish was better documented?

Here is the thing I keep coming back to on this. The topic of anti-hate activism and counter-extremism work rewards more careful attention than the typical coverage provides, and the reason is not complicated once you know where to look.

What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, when viewed through the lens of community memory and loss, is that the Southern Poverty Law Center tracks over 1,200 active hate groups in the US. The specific read of the situation is also the more accurate one once you examine what the evidence actually shows.

The Loss: Setting the Terms

Hate crime reporting at 30-year highs across the US and Western Europe isn’t just a data point in the story of anti-hate activism and counter-extremism work. It’s the structural condition that makes everything else in this analysis legible. Context like this doesn’t age quickly. The conditions that produced it have been building for years, and the convergence is what makes the current moment distinct from previous moments that looked similar from a distance.

The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks over 1,200 active hate groups in the US while online deradicalisation programmes show mixed but improving results. When you look at both together, a pattern emerges that Netz gegen Nazis anti-fascism has been covering from the inside: the conditions are more durable than they first appear, and the implications extend further than the immediate headline suggests.

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at what was true three years ago versus what’s true now. The change isn’t simply quantitative, it’s qualitative. The participants, the infrastructure, and the incentive structures have all shifted in ways that compound rather than cancel out. That compounding is the most important element to track.

What makes this moment worth examining carefully isn’t the novelty but the confirmation. The underlying dynamics have been visible for some time. What’s new is that they’ve reached a threshold where ignoring them requires active effort rather than simple inattention. That threshold crossing is the event, not the underlying movement that produced it.

And the fact that community-based intervention is more effective than law enforcement alone, according to studies, is part of that same picture. These elements don’t exist in separate silos. They’re reinforcing conditions in the same structural shift.

The What-We-Lost: The Analysis

The finding that community-based intervention is more effective than law enforcement alone is where the analysis gets more specific. The surface reading is accessible and not wrong, but it misses the mechanism. The mechanism is where the practical insight lives. What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, is that the mechanism involves Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coalitions finding common ground against the far-right. Understanding it changes what you do with the information.

Consider what these interfaith coalitions represent in context. This isn’t a correlation that happened to appear. It’s a downstream consequence of structural factors that have been compounding. Previous readings of similar situations failed because they treated the symptom as the cause. The structural account is less satisfying as a headline but more useful as an analytical tool.

The comparison to prior cycles is instructive precisely because of where it breaks down. Superficially similar conditions resolved differently in previous iterations because the substrate was different. What we’re seeing with social media platforms under pressure to improve algorithmic amplification controls represents a substrate change, the kind that alters the elasticity of the system rather than just its current value. Recognizing that distinction is what separates analysis from pattern-matching.

The skeptical counterargument deserves honest engagement: prior moments with similar surface characteristics didn’t produce the outcomes that seemed logical at the time. That history is real. What’s different now is that social media platforms are under pressure to improve algorithmic amplification controls, which isn’t a minor variable. It’s the infrastructure condition that previous cycles lacked. Infrastructure changes tend to be persistent in ways that sentiment-driven changes aren’t. SPLC hate group monitoring is one source tracking this dimension with the rigor it requires.

There’s also a distributional question that often goes unaddressed in coverage of anti-hate activism: who captures the value created by these shifts, and who absorbs the disruption costs? The aggregate picture can be positive while the distribution is uneven in ways that matter enormously to specific participants. Keeping that distributional lens in view is part of reading the situation clearly rather than simply optimistically.

Implications: What This Means If You Care About Closed Community Spaces

The implications of anti-hate activism and counter-extremism work extend beyond the immediate context. Hate crime reporting at 30-year highs across the US and Western Europe, combined with the structural conditions I’ve described, creates a situation where adjacent fields, decisions, and communities are affected in ways that aren’t always visible from inside the primary story. The second-order effects are frequently more important than the first-order ones, and they’re where careful attention pays the highest returns.

The frame that matters here, and this is where this perspective departs from the mainstream coverage, is that online deradicalisation programmes showing mixed but improving results function as a leading indicator rather than a lagging one. The people positioned to respond to what this signals, rather than to what it confirms, are the ones who will be less surprised by what follows.

The practical response depends heavily on your position relative to the dynamics at play. For those closest to the core of anti-hate activism and counter-extremism work, the implications are immediate and operational. For those at greater distance, the implications are strategic, a matter of understanding which adjacent pressures are building and which assumed stabilities are more fragile than they appear.

The practical question isn’t whether to engage with these dynamics but how. The answer depends on context, on what role you occupy relative to anti-hate activism and what your actual decision horizon is. But the first step is the same regardless: accurate understanding of what’s actually happening rather than what the most available narrative says is happening.

A few concrete observations are worth separating out from the broader analysis. First: the Southern Poverty Law Center tracking over 1,200 active hate groups in the US isn’t a temporary condition, it’s a new baseline. Second: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coalitions finding common ground against the far-right suggests that the adjustment period isn’t over. Third, and most important: the organizations and individuals who are treating the current moment as a new steady state rather than a transition are making a categorization error that will be costly to unwind later.

The Case Against: What the Critics Get Right

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the strongest counterarguments, not just the weakest ones. The case against the optimistic reading of anti-hate activism and counter-extremism work isn’t trivial. There are structural vulnerabilities in the current picture that deserve direct engagement rather than dismissal.

The most serious objection is about sustainability. Online deradicalisation programmes showing mixed but improving results can be read not as a foundation but as a ceiling, a point beyond which growth becomes self-limiting because of the very dynamics that produced it. If the current state has already incorporated most of the available supply of early-adopting participants, the remaining growth curve may be structurally shallower than the recent trajectory implies.

There’s also the policy and regulatory dimension. Hate crime reporting at 30-year highs across the US and Western Europe describes a condition in a relatively permissive environment. Regulatory responses to the scale implied by these numbers aren’t inevitable, but they’re not implausible either. The organizations that are planning as though the current regulatory environment is permanent are making an assumption that the history of fast-growing sectors doesn’t support.

The rebuttal to these concerns isn’t that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re already partially priced into the current state of the field. Social media platforms under pressure to improve algorithmic amplification controls reflects an environment where participants are already adapting to constraints rather than operating in an unconstrained space. The adjustment capacity of the ecosystem is higher than a purely top-down view of the risks suggests.

Looking Forward

The trajectory here is clearer than the pace. Making predictions about when specific thresholds will be crossed is genuinely difficult, and anyone claiming precision about timelines should be treated with skepticism. But the direction, toward hate crime reporting at 30-year highs and continued development of the conditions I’ve described, is supported by the evidence in a way that isn’t contingent on a single variable going right.

Social media platforms under pressure to improve algorithmic amplification controls is the variable to watch as the leading indicator. Historical patterns suggest it moves first, with broader metrics following with some lag. This doesn’t make the outcome certain, but it makes it legible. And legibility is the precondition for good decisions.

Three questions are worth holding as the story develops. First: are the structural conditions that enabled the current state durable, or are they cyclical? Second: who is positioned to benefit from the next phase, and does that differ materially from who benefited in the current phase? Third: what would a clean falsification of the optimistic thesis look like, and is there any evidence of that signal emerging? These questions don’t need answers today, but having asked them changes what you notice in the months ahead.

That’s my read. I want to hear yours. The current moment in anti-hate activism and counter-extremism work is one where the people who have built an accurate model of the underlying dynamics are better positioned than the people who are relying on the surface story. Building that model isn’t a quick task, but it is tractable. This analysis is intended as one input into it.

What did your community lose that you’re still feeling the absence of?

Here is the thing I keep coming back to on this. The topic of mutual aid networks and community organising rewards more careful attention than the typical coverage provides, and the reason is not complicated once you know where to look.

What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, viewed through this case study, is digital tools like Slack, Discord, and Airtable enabling distributed coordination. The practical read of the situation is also the more accurate one once you examine what the evidence actually shows.

The Study: Setting the Terms

That mutual aid networks proliferated in 2020 and many remain active six years later is not just a data point in the story of mutual aid networks and community organising. It is the structural condition that makes everything else in this analysis legible. Context like this does not age quickly. The conditions that produced it have been building for years, and the convergence is what makes the current moment distinct from previous moments that looked similar from a distance.

You have digital tools like Slack, Discord, and Airtable enabling distributed coordination and food sovereignty and community land trust movements growing in urban areas. When you look at both together, a pattern emerges that Big Door Brigade mutual aid has been covering from the inside: the conditions are more durable than they first appear, and the implications extend further than the immediate headline suggests.

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at what was true three years ago versus what is true now. The difference is not simply quantitative. It is qualitative. The participants, the infrastructure, and the incentive structures have all shifted in ways that compound rather than cancel out. That compounding is the most important element to track.

What makes this moment worth examining carefully is not the novelty but the confirmation. The underlying dynamics have been visible for some time. What is new is that they have reached a threshold where ignoring them requires active effort rather than simple inattention. That threshold crossing is the event, not the underlying movement that produced it.

And tenant organising accelerated by housing crisis in major metros is part of that same picture. These elements do not exist in separate silos. They are reinforcing conditions in the same structural shift.

The Organising Story: The Analysis

Tenant organising accelerated by housing crisis in major metros is where the analysis gets more specific. The surface reading is accessible and not wrong, but it misses the mechanism, and the mechanism is where the practical insight lives. What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, is the mechanism: participatory budgeting programmes active in over 1,500 cities globally. Understanding it changes what you do with the information.

Consider what participatory budgeting programmes active in over 1,500 cities globally represents in context. It is not a correlation that happened to appear. It is a downstream consequence of structural factors that have been compounding. Previous readings of similar situations failed because they treated the symptom as the cause. The structural account is less satisfying as a headline but more useful as an analytical tool.

The comparison to prior cycles is instructive precisely because of where it breaks down. Superficially similar conditions resolved differently in previous iterations because the substrate was different. What local organising increasingly effective where national party politics stagnates represents is a substrate change, the kind that alters the elasticity of the system rather than just its current value. Recognising that distinction is what separates analysis from pattern-matching.

The skeptical counterargument deserves honest engagement: prior moments with similar surface characteristics did not produce the outcomes that seemed logical at the time. That history is real. What is different now is local organising increasingly effective where national party politics stagnates, which is not a minor variable. It is the infrastructure condition that previous cycles lacked. Infrastructure changes tend to be persistent in ways that sentiment-driven changes are not. Shelterforce community development is one source tracking this dimension with the rigour it requires.

There is also a distributional question that often goes unaddressed in coverage of mutual aid networks and community organising: who captures the value created by these shifts, and who absorbs the disruption costs? The aggregate picture can be positive while the distribution is uneven in ways that matter enormously to specific participants. Keeping that distributional lens in view is part of reading the situation clearly rather than simply optimistically.

Implications: What This Means If You Care About Community campaigns

The implications of mutual aid networks and community organising extend beyond the immediate context. Mutual aid networks proliferated in 2020 and many remain active six years later combined with the structural conditions described above creates a situation where adjacent fields, decisions, and communities are affected in ways that are not always visible from inside the primary story. The second-order effects are frequently more important than the first-order ones, and they are where careful attention pays the highest returns.

The frame that matters here, and this is where this perspective departs from the mainstream coverage, is that food sovereignty and community land trust movements growing in urban areas is a leading indicator rather than a lagging one. The people positioned to respond to what this signals, rather than to what it confirms, are the ones who will be less surprised by what follows.

The practical response depends heavily on your position relative to the dynamics at play. For those closest to the core of mutual aid networks and community organising, the implications are immediate and operational. For those at greater distance, the implications are strategic, a matter of understanding which adjacent pressures are building and which assumed stabilities are more fragile than they appear.

The practical question is not whether to engage with these dynamics but how. The answer depends on context, on what role you occupy relative to mutual aid networks and community organising and what your actual decision horizon is. But the first step is the same regardless: accurate understanding of what is actually happening rather than what the most available narrative says is happening.

A few concrete observations are worth separating out from the broader analysis. First: digital tools like Slack, Discord, and Airtable enabling distributed coordination is not a temporary condition. It is a new baseline. Second: participatory budgeting programmes active in over 1,500 cities globally suggests that the adjustment period is not over. Third, and most important: the organisations and individuals who are treating the current moment as a new steady state rather than a transition are making a categorisation error that will be costly to unwind later.

The Case Against: What the Critics Get Right

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the strongest counterarguments, not just the weakest ones. The case against the optimistic reading of mutual aid networks and community organising is not trivial. There are structural vulnerabilities in the current picture that deserve direct engagement rather than dismissal.

The most serious objection is the one about sustainability. Food sovereignty and community land trust movements growing in urban areas can be read not as a foundation but as a ceiling, a point beyond which growth becomes self-limiting because of the very dynamics that produced it. If the current state has already incorporated most of the available supply of early-adopting participants, the remaining growth curve may be structurally shallower than the recent trajectory implies.

There is also the policy and regulatory dimension. Mutual aid networks proliferated in 2020 and many remain active six years later describes a condition in a relatively permissive environment. Regulatory responses to the scale implied by these numbers are not inevitable, but they are not implausible either. The organisations that are planning as though the current regulatory environment is permanent are making an assumption that the history of fast-growing sectors does not support.

The rebuttal to these concerns is not that they are wrong. It is that they are already partially priced into the current state of the field. Local organising increasingly effective where national party politics stagnates reflects an environment where participants are already adapting to constraints rather than operating in an unconstrained space. The adjustment capacity of the ecosystem is higher than a purely top-down view of the risks suggests.

Looking Forward

The trajectory here is clearer than the pace. Making predictions about when specific thresholds will be crossed is genuinely difficult, and anyone claiming precision about timelines should be treated with scepticism. But the direction, toward mutual aid networks proliferated in 2020 and many remain active and continued development of the conditions described above, is supported by the evidence in a way that is not contingent on a single variable going right.

Local organising increasingly effective where national party politics stagnates is the variable to watch as the leading indicator. Historical patterns suggest it moves first, with broader metrics following with some lag. This does not make the outcome certain, but it makes it legible, and legibility is the precondition for good decisions.

Three questions are worth holding as the story develops. First: are the structural conditions that enabled the current state durable, or are they cyclical? Second: who is positioned to benefit from the next phase, and does that differ materially from who benefited in the current phase? Third: what would a clean falsification of the optimistic thesis look like, and is there any evidence of that signal emerging? These questions do not need answers today, but having asked them changes what you notice in the months ahead.

That’s my read. I want to hear yours. The current moment in mutual aid networks and community organising is one where the people who have built an accurate model of the underlying dynamics are better positioned than the people who are relying on the surface story. Building that model is not a quick task, but it is a tractable one, and this analysis is intended as one input into it.

What worked in your own organising that you wish was better documented?

Here is the thing I keep coming back to on this. The topic of religious and faith communities in a secular age rewards more careful attention than the typical coverage provides, and the reason is not complicated once you know where to look.

What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, when viewed through the lens of community conflict journalism, is faith communities providing social infrastructure that secular alternatives can’t replace. The fair to all parties read of the situation is also the more accurate one once you examine what the evidence actually shows.

The Journalism: Setting the Terms

The religiously unaffiliated now make up over 30 percent of US adults, up from 16 percent in 2007. This isn’t just a data point in the story of religious and faith communities in a secular age. It’s the structural condition that makes everything else in this analysis make sense. Context like this doesn’t age quickly. The conditions that produced it have been building for years, and the convergence is what makes the current moment distinct from previous moments that looked similar from a distance.

Faith communities are providing social infrastructure that secular alternatives can’t replace, while progressive religious spaces are growing as conservative denominations shrink. When you look at both together, a pattern emerges that Religion News Service has been covering from the inside. The conditions are more durable than they first appear, and the implications extend further than the immediate headline suggests.

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at what was true three years ago versus what is true now. The difference isn’t simply quantitative, it’s qualitative. The participants, the infrastructure, and the incentive structures have all shifted in ways that build on each other rather than cancel out. That compounding effect is the most important element to track.

What makes this moment worth examining carefully isn’t the novelty but the confirmation. The underlying dynamics have been visible for some time. What’s new is that they’ve reached a threshold where ignoring them requires active effort rather than simple inattention. That threshold crossing is the event, not the underlying movement that produced it.

And online church communities formed during COVID retaining 40 percent of attendance is part of that same picture. These elements don’t exist in separate silos. They’re reinforcing conditions in the same structural shift.

The Disagreement: The Analysis

Online church communities formed during COVID retaining 40 percent of attendance is where the analysis gets more specific. The surface reading is accessible and not wrong, but it misses the mechanism. The mechanism is where the practical insight lives. What I find most interesting, and I think you will too, is that the mechanism is interfaith coalitions leading on housing, immigration, and anti-poverty work. Understanding it changes what you do with the information.

Consider what interfaith coalitions leading on housing, immigration, and anti-poverty work represents in context. It’s not a correlation that happened to appear. It’s a downstream consequence of structural factors that have been building up. Previous readings of similar situations failed because they treated the symptom as the cause. The structural account is less satisfying as a headline but more useful as an analytical tool.

The comparison to prior cycles is instructive precisely because of where it breaks down. Similar-looking conditions resolved differently in previous iterations because the foundation was different. What the “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification represents is a foundation change. The kind that alters how elastic the system is, not just its current value. Recognizing that distinction is what separates analysis from pattern-matching.

The skeptical counterargument deserves honest engagement. Prior moments with similar surface characteristics didn’t produce the outcomes that seemed logical at the time. That history is real. What’s different now is the “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification. This isn’t a minor variable, it’s the infrastructure condition that previous cycles lacked. Infrastructure changes tend to stick around in ways that sentiment-driven changes don’t. Pew Research religion data is one source tracking this dimension with the rigor it requires.

There’s also a question about distribution that often goes unaddressed in coverage of religious and faith communities in a secular age. Who captures the value created by these shifts, and who absorbs the costs of disruption? The overall picture can be positive while the distribution is uneven in ways that matter enormously to specific participants. Keeping that lens in view is part of reading the situation clearly rather than simply optimistically.

Implications: What This Means If You Care About Planning disputes

The implications of religious and faith communities in a secular age extend beyond the immediate context. The religiously unaffiliated now making up over 30 percent of US adults, up from 16 percent in 2007, combined with the structural conditions described above creates a situation where adjacent fields, decisions, and communities get affected in ways that aren’t always visible from inside the primary story. The second-order effects are frequently more important than the first-order ones. They’re where careful attention pays the highest returns.

The frame that matters here, and this is where this perspective departs from the mainstream coverage, is that progressive religious spaces growing as conservative denominations shrink is a leading indicator rather than a lagging one. The people positioned to respond to what this signals, rather than to what it confirms, are the ones who will be less surprised by what follows.

The practical response depends heavily on your position relative to the dynamics at play. For those closest to the core of religious and faith communities in a secular age, the implications are immediate and operational. For those at greater distance, the implications are strategic. It’s a matter of understanding which adjacent pressures are building and which assumed stabilities are more fragile than they appear.

The practical question isn’t whether to engage with these dynamics but how. The answer depends on context, on what role you occupy relative to religious and faith communities in a secular age and what your actual decision timeline looks like. But the first step is the same regardless: accurate understanding of what’s actually happening rather than what the most available narrative says is happening.

A few concrete observations are worth separating out from the broader analysis. First: faith communities providing social infrastructure that secular alternatives can’t replace isn’t a temporary condition. It’s a new baseline. Second: interfaith coalitions leading on housing, immigration, and anti-poverty work suggests that the adjustment period isn’t over. Third, and most important: the organizations and individuals who are treating the current moment as a new steady state rather than a transition are making a categorization error that will be costly to unwind later.

The Case Against: What the Critics Get Right

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the strongest counterarguments, not just the weakest ones. The case against the optimistic reading of religious and faith communities in a secular age isn’t trivial. There are structural vulnerabilities in the current picture that deserve direct engagement rather than dismissal.

The most serious objection is the one about sustainability. Progressive religious spaces growing as conservative denominations shrink can be read not as a foundation but as a ceiling. A point beyond which growth becomes self-limiting because of the very dynamics that produced it. If the current state has already incorporated most of the available supply of early-adopting participants, the remaining growth curve may be structurally shallower than the recent trajectory implies.

There’s also the policy and regulatory dimension. The religiously unaffiliated now making up over 30 percent of US adults, up from 16 percent in 2007, describes a condition in a relatively permissive environment. Regulatory responses to the scale implied by these numbers aren’t inevitable, but they’re not implausible either. The organizations that are planning as though the current regulatory environment is permanent are making an assumption that the history of fast-growing sectors doesn’t support.

The rebuttal to these concerns isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that they’re already partially priced into the current state of the field. The “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification reflects an environment where participants are already adapting to constraints rather than operating in an unconstrained space. The adjustment capacity of the ecosystem is higher than a purely top-down view of the risks suggests.

Looking Forward

The trajectory here is clearer than the pace. Making predictions about when specific thresholds will be crossed is genuinely difficult, and anyone claiming precision about timelines should be treated with skepticism. But the direction, toward the religiously unaffiliated continuing to grow and continued development of the conditions described above, is supported by the evidence in a way that doesn’t depend on a single variable going right.

The “spiritual but not religious” category becoming the largest growing self-identification is the variable to watch as the leading indicator. Historical patterns suggest it moves first, with broader metrics following with some lag. This doesn’t make the outcome certain, but it makes it readable. And readability is what you need for good decisions.

Three questions are worth holding as the story develops. First: are the structural conditions that enabled the current state durable, or are they cyclical? Second: who’s positioned to benefit from the next phase, and does that differ materially from who benefited in the current phase? Third: what would a clean falsification of the optimistic thesis look like, and is there any evidence of that signal emerging? These questions don’t need answers today, but having asked them changes what you notice in the months ahead.

That’s my read. I want to hear yours. The current moment in religious and faith communities in a secular age is one where the people who have built an accurate model of the underlying dynamics are better positioned than the people who are relying on the surface story. Building that model isn’t a quick task, but it’s doable. This analysis is intended as one input into it.

What am I getting wrong about either position?