How do people’s feelings of connection to others relate to their civic and political action? We could imagine the causal arrow running from connection to action: People who feel a strong connection to their community, for example, may feel more invested in its future and willing to sacrifice their time, money, and even their lives for the good of the whole. But we could also imagine this causal arrow running from action to connection: When crowds of protesters swell the streets; when people stand in line to vote; when people volunteer together for a cause, each person ceases to be an “I” and comes to see themselves, however fleetingly, as part of a “we.”
Both of these possibilities are plausible, yet most of what we know about each involves people’s feelings of connection to relatively small-scale “we’s”—from small groups of people who are co-present to larger but still delimited “imagined communities” like the nation. We know relatively little about how this process works when people imagine a significantly wider “circle of compassion” like all of humanity or the entire natural world. How is this form of connection cultivated and strengthened? How does spirituality—alone or with religiosity—relate to this feeling of connection? And how is it related to civic and political action?
We are living in a moment in which strong connections to in-groups at the expense of out-groups threaten to divide the country and undermine humanity’s ability to solve global problems from COVID-19 to climate change. In this context, this study’s attention to spirituality’s role in widening our circles of compassion is timely and important.
This Expert Insight is from Ruth Braunstein, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Connecticut