In 'Join or Die,' a powerful case for Group Think

Over the three decades from the 1970s to the turn of the century, there was a 50 percent decline in the number of Americans who assumed a leadership position in a local organization. There was a 35 percent drop in church attendance and a 40 percent slide in the number of Americans who went to even one public meeting. Membership in the national PTA dropped from 12 million to 5 million. For the Masons of California, membership has fallen from a high of over 244,000 in 1965 to about 40,000 today.

By virtually any measure, Americans over the past half-century have stopped joining clubs. The result of that mass drop-out has been catastrophic, according to Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist who popularized the concept of social capital in his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. As Americans stopped making connections to their neighbors, he argues, we became increasingly isolated and polarized.

Today that trend appears to have reached crisis proportions—and a new generation is looking for answers. For filmmakers Pete and Rebecca Davis, that led them back to Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the hiding-in-plain-sight importance of social clubs. The result is Join or Die, a new documentary that traces Putnam’s work over half a century and makes a powerful case for the value of social and civic clubs. “To tackle today’s challenges, we need millions of Americans to become joiners,” Pete Davis explains in the film.

Here, co-director Rebecca Davis explains what drew her to rural lodge rooms, church picnics, and other meetups, and how she became an evangelist for membership of all stripes.

You co-produced this film with your brother, Pete. What attracted you to this idea of the role of social capital in civic life?
We first approached Robert Putnam in 2017, as he was about to retire from teaching. That seemed like a moment he might be able to look back on his career and potentially do a documentary for the 20th anniversary of Bowling Alone. 

My brother was a student of Robert’s, so he had a personal connection. I was working as a TV journalist for NBC News, covering things like school shootings, the opioid epidemic, veterans coming back and feeling kind of at a loss for community. For me, I got to a place where I felt I couldn’t keep covering these symptoms. I needed to zoom out and try to find some solution-based story idea I could work on.

Join or Die is a pretty grabby title. In the film, you link social clubs with the very future of our democracy. Did you feel this was a real existential threat?
Our title has been a little controversial to some people, but yes, the stakes are that high—even for joining a bowling league or, as people have pointed out, maybe today it would be a pickleball league. It’s no small thing to have a space where you can have fun, meet people, and improve your mental health.

That’s what drew us to Bob’s work. It’s about lifting up the bowling club and the church bake sale, which are important not only for our personal health and well-being, but also for that secondary meaning behind our title, the health of our democracy. 

It’s in those spaces that we learn to practice ways to be shared co-creators in the world that we’re building. And a lot of what’s happening today, especially online, is anti-that.