Thanks for the shout-out.

Actually the author of The Big Sort argues, convincingly in my opinion, that "enmeshment in a community tied to a place" is perhaps the definition of the Big Sort. Drawn by ideology (which includes aesthetic values to no small extent), people with the ability to live anywhere they like will settle in areas that "just feel right," i.e. represent those values that make them comfortable. So if you're a latte-sipping, DINK, dyed-in-the-wool liberal, you're going to feel at home in a more urban environment with a local coffee shop on one corner and an art gallery on the other. But if you're a married, conservative Evanglical with four kids, you're probably looking at the suburbs.

It can be little things that give off the "vibe" the authors are talking about. Are there more bars or family restaurants? Are the cars more imported or domestic? Pickups or subcompacts? Row-house flats or detached housing? Whole Foods or Safeway? Episcopal or non-denom/Baptist churches? All of these can indicate "the right sort of people," which make a given location the right sort of place. Pick all of the former and you're going to find yourself in a liberal landslide neighborhood. Pick all of the latter and your neighbors voted for Bush.

Fair enough, but that's not exactly what I was aiming for with 'enmeshment'.

Let me try two tacks to explain better what I meant.

Definition: What I was thinking of was an alternate societal arrangement, in which permanence displaces mobility as the prevailing living arrangement. I don't think its particularly original of me to observe this, but American culture seems to be defined at this point by a degree of personal mobility that is nearly unprecedented (while the elites have probably always been more mobile than the masses, I think a condition where the average person moves from state to state numerous times in his lifetime is new). An alternate arrangement -- permanence -- would involve forgoing the opportunity to make those ideological choices, and choosing instead to invest in the community/place in which one already is.

How do you know which community/place is the right one? I think you rely on a different set of values (since, in a society with such potential for choice, it is impossible to avoid making a choice, even if you are defaulting). One particularly important one might be the location of one's family. Whether that is the right or wrong value to hold up as an example, it certainly is a different sort of concern than vibe-values like bars and domestic cars.

I'll admit that its rather hard for me to see how you get a society from point A (mobility) to point B (permanence). Particularly a society in which most people uncritically hold radical autonomy as their most cherished value. But I don't think that invalidates the analysis.

Example: So to go back to the Dreher article I linked to in the post body, I think there's a very clear difference between the sort of community in a small town in Louisiana, which he describes, and the Big Sort communities -- both of which are more similar sociologically, I think, to each other than they are to a small town. (The same observation, I think, would apply to an established urban neighborhood, which is probably more similar in functional terms to a small town than it is to either an urban liberal neighborhood or a conservative exurb-- see the fourth comment down on Dreher's post, by John M.). That difference is at least partially explained by the small town/established neighborhood being characterized by the permanence of residents and the urban (maybe rapidly gentrifying) condo haven/conservative exurb being characterized by the extreme mobility of residents.

Hopefully I did an ok job of explaining how "enmeshment in a community tied to a place" is quite different from the sort of Sorting you were criticizing, though I'm not totally satisfied with this explanation.

I think I see what you're getting at, but I'd make two observations. First, the authors of the Big Sort don't limit their analysis to major urban areas and their suburbs. They look at movements of all sorts. And their finding was that when someone moves from a county with a Republican or Democrat landslide, they'll move to a county with the same landslide about 75% of the time.

True, the Louisiana community described in the article did sound pretty tight, but there's no information available about how long any of them had lived there, or who had moved away, or who had moved and then come back. It's just a snapshot. That community was arguably formed by exactly the kind of Sorting that Bishop talks about. One problem I have in the book is the notion that this Sort is somehow new. I think people have always done that to some degree, I just think that technology has 1) made it easier to Sort one's self than previously, and 2) made it far easier to detect such sorting, with the second playing a larger role than the first.

Second, the "permanence" you describe is something of a historical myth. Mobility has been part of human culture forever. There was a massive migration of blacks to the North after the Civil War. Before that, there was a massive move of blacks from Africa to the Americas. The circumstances were even less pleasant, but it being involuntary doesn't make the people any less mobile. Medieval Europe had such strict laws about serfs not leaving their land because they had a pronounced tendency to wander off. The Normans who conquered England in AD 1066 came from Norway by way of France. The Anglo-Saxons they conquered had come from northern Germany a few centuries earlier. People have always traveled quite a bit, especially when crops failed or there were adverse political conditions. Calvin's Geneva and the French Protestant bastion of La Rochelle welcomed refugees from hundreds of miles away during the French Wars of Religion. Even the Old Testament assumes that the Jews would get around Israel quite a bit and that they would regularly encounter not only Jews from elsewhere in the country, but total strangers and foreigners. Yeah, there plenty of examples of towns with four, five, even six generations buried in them (in Europe anyways). But those are just the ones that stayed. How many more didn't? If by "permanent" you mean "moves some place and never moves again," that describes almost no one.

Radical autonomy may not be helping the situation, but I don't think it's the cause of people moving around. If anything, it might just encourage them to move farther than they otherwise would have. It's not just rich people either. Ask Greyhound. The lower social strata are plentymobile. If anything, historically the rich have been the least mobile over time, as owning land gives a strong incentive to stay in a particular place.

Third, I'd advance the argument that the kind of real relationships allegedly only formed in tight communities that have been together for decades don't form because of duration but because of dedication. And I believe that dedication can be found in the church better than anywhere else, regardless of how long one lives in a place. True, relationships need time to grow and flourish, I'm not disputing that. I'm closer to the people I spend the most time around, almost by definition. But ideally, the church should provide exactly the same level of care for all its members, regardless of how long they've been there or where they've come from. Geographic proximity can be a kind of analog for this, and it certainly makes things easier (believe me, trying to minister to the needs of a congregation spread over 20 miles is hard) but it's the dedication, not the geography, that really make the community. With dedication, a community can emerge in even the most adverse geography. Without dedication, even ideal conditions won't produce a healthy community.

Ryan, thanks for the thoughtful reply. In response:

1. Since you had to go and bring up facts, I did a bit of checking. Census data is available here ((http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/migrate.html) see "Historical Data from the CPS), though only from 1948 forward.

That data shows that there has been essentially no trend toward increasing mobility (with caveats about the imperfect nature of the statistics). In fact, if there has been anything in the past ten or so years, its a decline from historic levels of mobility. I would probably argue that the census data doesn't go back nearly far enough to settle the debate about historic mobility even for Americans (because it is quite possible that year 2000 society is more like year 1950 society than 1950 society is like year 1900 society). And it certainly does little to establish old world-new world or 20th century vs. 18th century trends; however, it definitely makes me feel like I should be careful about arguing my point too strenuously (because it looks like my intuitive observation about increasing mobility might be empirically wrong).

2. I think this is somewhat irrelevant, though, because your argument is that the Big Sort doesn't describe anything new, and, other than maybe weighing on the relevance of the example I cited, whether or not Sorting is a new phenomenon has little to do with whether a certain type of community is part of an effective antidote to Sorting's negative effects.)

So, in response to your suggestion about 'dedication', I'd agree that dedication is a key factor in developing 'real relationships' of the sort which might resist the effects of Sorting, but I would argue that both proximity and time are intimately tied to dedication. One expresses dedication in large part through time, and proximity increases the potential for dedicating time. Yes, it is possible to be dedicated without proximity and time -- as I would say, for instance, I am dedicated to my relationship with my father -- but it is much more difficult.

Furthermore, churches are frequently subject themselves to a kind of Sorting. We'd probably agree that this is a bad thing and not reflective of the way that churches should be ordered, but it happens. Grace is an excellent example of Sorting, I think -- because the evangelicals in the city are overwhelmingly young, the church's demographics are massively skewed towards youth. Because the PCA is historically white and Asian, African-Americans and Latinos (and Asians other than Koreans, really) are vastly underrepresented. But the church is consciously trying to resist being Sorted, and one of the means that it is using is rooting its communities in places (an effort which is currently underway in the community groups and is planned to eventually result in multiple congregations meeting in different portions of the city, as I understand it). So I suppose this is sort of what I wanted to express -- that the proper orientation of a person or community of people towards the place he/they is/are in can be a part of the answer to the unhealthy effects of Sorting. I doubt I've really succeeded in explaining what I mean by "proper", but since I'm still trying to figure out for myself what that might be, how to do it, and whether its as important as I'm suggesting it is, I'm ok with that.

I think I may have identified a definitional problem here. Though I don't think people are any more mobile on a macro level than they used to be, we are far more mobile on a micro level. In other words, though we don't actually relocate any more than we used to (i.e. the Big Sort is nothing new), we now travel farther on a daily basis we ever did. Even if the average commute time hasn't changed in 3000 years--and I think it's been less than an hour for most of that time--the distance covered by that hour has gone from two to four miles to twenty, thirty, or more. We are a lot more mobile in that sense: not because we move more often, but because we are able to and in fact do congregate from larger and larger areas.

I think it is this, not macro mobility, that creates the problems your concept of "community tied to a place" is targeted towards. The fact that getting around town is just so easy can serve to minimize our connection with a particular place, because geography simply no longer commands much of our attention. A single church which draws people from 20 minutes in every direction is not only likely to have people who live an hour away from each other but people that live in towns different from both each other and the church building.

But I think you're missing the fact that "proper orientation of a person or community of people towards . . . [a] place" is in fact a value of the kind that produces the Sorting mentioned above. "Orientation" of any sort implies an ideological committment--do we want more farms, multi-family units, big box stores, or commercial space--and even having such an orientation is in itself an ideological committment.

1. Macro vs. micro mobility
If I disagree with you on this point, I haven't realized it yet.

2. Regarding whether a "proper orientation" contains an ideological commitment and thus is
I'm not so sure about this. Does it need to be more complicated than "I am from/I live in X and I love X and the people of X"? While working out what "love" means is a matter of some consequence, I think its a fairly simple formulation that is capable of transcending the sorts of values that produce Sorting. (By transcending, I mean something like "brings people who Sorting would separate into community with one another")

I should note, and maybe this has been confusing the discussion somewhat, that I think there is little relationship between good urban planning practices and a proper orientation toward place -- so it is quite easy to "Be from suburb X and love suburb X and the people of suburb X" or conversely to "Be from urban neighborhood Y and not love u.n. Y or the people of u.n. Y". So when I say that the proper orientation of a community towards its place can help transcend the effects of Sorting, I'm not saying anything about the physical form of that place. I did, however (and this I think might have been confusing), note that certain places -- where people have tended to live for a good bit of time, such as small rural communities or strong urban neighborhoods -- might be places where we can look to see what proper orientation looks like. But that's more or less correlation, and not causation (if I were to guess towards causation, it would be what I said earlier about there not being an economic incentive for newcomers to arrive, which produces a higher degree of permanence among the population).

Whoops... meant to say "Regarding whether a "proper orientation" contains an ideological commitment and thus is a contributing factor in Sorting"