Crowns in the Gutter
The same forces emptying the mainline pews are now emptying the town halls
My stepson recently got out of the Navy. The chairman of our town’s Republican Town Committee (RTC) 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 a meeting together. (I was trying to show him how a small town worked, so he could see the democracy at work for which he had given five years of his life.) 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 with the chairman, even if he doesn’t think he’ll join the committee. I told him the reasons why, and the more I think about them, the more I am convinced they reveal the dynamics of the generational hand-off underway. They are the civic version of the argument I have been making at American Reformer and elsewhere about the mainline Protestant churches.
America’s historic Protestant denominations — the Episcopal Church, the PCUSA, the United Methodist Church, the ELCA, and their sisters — are dying. Ryan Burge’s numbers tell the story. From 52 percent of the American population in the 1950s to somewhere between 6 and 7 percent within a generation. The Episcopal Church holds five funerals for every wedding. Six percent of Episcopalians are under thirty. The buildings and endowments remain. The members do not.
I have argued that what is being done with what remains amounts to a quiet liquidation. Properties are sold to developers under YIGBY-style legislation that bypasses local zoning. Endowments are redirected toward denominational HQs — now no more than progressive NGOs — whose causes the original donors would not recognize. A small clerisy manages the assets while the pews empty. I have called these institutions “Zombie” denominations, and I stand by the term.
What I have come to see more clearly in the last year is that the mainline was simply the leading edge. It went first because it is furthest from the people. The same thing is happening to every other inherited civic form in the country. The Republican Town Committee. The Democratic Town Committee. The Rotary, the Lions, the Knights of Columbus. The volunteer fire company. The county bar association. The regional planning board. The school board. 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.
The mainline went first because it was furthest from the people. Sunday attendance is voluntary in a way that property taxes are not. When the cultural prestige of belonging to a downtown Episcopal parish evaporated in the 1990s, the pews emptied first. The town party committees took longer. Their work — patronage, candidate vetting, the management of a small municipality — was tied more directly to ordinary self-interest. But the same demographic undertow that hollowed out the parishes is now hollowing out the committees. The mainline was the canary.
AI accelerant
The decline was determined demographically decades ago, but AI is now compressing the timeline on every front, and the civic institutions are next.
I attended a pastor’s conference recently and heard from the mayor of a small city in California’s high desert. He is a working trial attorney who owns his firm, and he had cut his associates’ hours to thirty-two a week. The work was no longer there to bill. AI is doing the document review, the first-draft brief, the discovery summary, the deposition prep. He expects the same thing to spread across the professions. He expects mass professional displacement. He expects universal basic income to follow. He told us, in passing, based on his exposure to biotech, to plan to live to a hundred and fifty.
What he didn’t say, but what I suspect will happen soon, is that AI will move into governance. The mechanism is already in place. For decades only large towns and counties hired professional supervisors — paid, unelected, credentialed administrators — to run things. Small towns made do with volunteer selectmen and part-time clerks. With AI now able to provide much of what a town’s elected officials need — zoning analysis, grant compliance, budget modeling, agenda management — even small towns will be obliged to start using it. They will be obliged because people like my stepson aren’t necessarily interested in filling these roles. Increasingly, even small towns will need paid supervisors to do the work formerly done by volunteers, or to pool resources with regional groups, like Connecticut’s Regional Planning Organizations, also called — and sounding somewhat Orwellian — Councils of Government.
The older generation likely cannot fathom what this means for elected and appointed civic positions. The constitutionally-created bodies — counties, boroughs, transit authorities, boards of education, town committees themselves — will continue to exist. But the operational power will migrate to whoever writes the prompts that AI will execute at the regional or government council level. The formal authority and the actual authority — which is exercised through the prompt — are about to come apart. This is the moment I told my stepson we are in. This is why I told him to take the meeting. It won’t last.
Crowns are in the gutter
The older generation is passing through the demographic neck of the bottle at the same time the AI shock is hitting. The institutions they inherited from their own grandparents’ Episcopal-Presbyterian-Methodist-Republican-Democratic-Town-Committee civic confidence are running on fumes, and they know it.
When the older generation can no longer wear their crowns, those crowns will fall off and roll into the gutter. It’s already happening. There is now a brief window in which the men of my stepson’s generation can simply walk over, pick them up, and put them on. The window will not stay open for very long.
By 2035, either his cohort will be sitting on the town committees, the school boards, and the zoning boards, or these roles will have been quietly absorbed into supervisor-and-AI workflows whose prompts are written somewhere else by someone the public will never meet. The choice now is no longer between performing one’s civic duties and shirking them. The choice is between picking up the crowns and losing what goes with them altogether.
What goes with them — what these little fiefs grant — is legitimacy, however circumscribed. It’s why we have 169 tax assessors and town clerks in Connecticut, one for each town. This was never about economies of scale, but about keeping power close to home. Inefficiency was a feature, not a bug.
AI will finally make government efficient, something management guru Peter Drucker warned it never should become. The crowns in the gutter will get picked up, though likely not by my stepson or men like him.
Reconquista, civic edition
Some readers know I have been an outspoken proponent of what Redeemed Zoomer’s online following calls Operation Reconquista — the project of orthodox Christians reclaiming, rather than abandoning, America’s historic mainline Protestant denominations. The Reconquista argument against Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option is straightforward. The mainline still owns the buildings, the charters, the endowments, and a great deal of residual standing that no parallel institution can replicate in a generation. Withdrawal cedes all of it. Reclamation, however hard, is the better bet.
The same argument applies, with the same force, to civic life. The temptation for the young — the temptation my stepson voiced in our text exchange — is to look at a dysfunctional Republican town committee, a captured school board, a sleepwalking Rotary, and ask what the point is. If governance is going to be outsourced to AI and supervisors anyway, why bother? Why not retreat into private excellence — a good job, a good marriage, a good homeschool, a good church — and let the formal civic structures collapse into administrative gel? (In short, why not become Brazil?)
The answer is the same answer Reconquista gives the young Episcopalian or Presbyterian wondering whether to leave for the ACNA or the PCA. The institutions still hold the assets. They still operate by official charters. Unlike a captured denomination, you can’t just start a new municipality with the same geographical boundaries. Towns, school districts, counties all still hold formal authority. When that authority becomes AI-administered, it will need a way to translate law into prompts. That is the opportunity.
To abandon our civic institutions is to hand the prompt-writing to whoever picks up these crowns. Just as in the mainlines, those who pick them up will not care for the legacies of those who once wore them. Pending or enacted legislation like the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act in New York, SB 4 in California, and An Act Concerning Affordable Housing Development On Certain Land Owned By A Religious Organization in Connecticut is what happens when no orthodox Christians are left in the room and the progressive-captured denomination decides what to do with the real estate. The town-government version of those bills is coming. It is coming faster than anyone thinks. The watchword here is affordable housing. Towns will be saddled with mandates their increasingly understaffed municipal governments can’t fulfill — or even understand. If my stepson’s generation won’t pick up the crowns, the councils of government will.
I told him to take the meeting with the committee chairman. I told him the Republican Town Committee may or may not be of long-term interest to him — I suspect it is not — but he can begin to observe a process here that is unfolding everywhere and will accelerate. I told him that major economic and political upheavals are likely coming, and that when the current generation of Boomers passes — which is already happening — his generation will find a great many of these crowns lying in the gutter. All they will need to do is pick them up, but the window will not stay open.
The exile that conservative mainline Protestants like me have been living through for fifty years is now becoming a general American exile. The institutions that taught us how to govern ourselves are coming apart at the same moment that a new technology is reordering what governance even means. The custodians of the old order are unable to hand it off cleanly.
Take the breakfast. Take the meeting. Sit on the committee. Run for the school board. Get yourself elected to the vestry, the diaconate, the session. Download the town charter and read it. Read the old bequests to your church. Read the by-laws of your school board. Find out what the founders of the various institutions in your town said they were for. AI already has. AI already knows. But AI doesn’t prompt itself — yet. Show up at the next meeting, and the meeting after. Be there when the inevitable decisions to turn the day-to-day operations of government over to AI are made. Be the one who makes them.
If you’re not going to be the one writing the prompts, at least be the one wearing the crown with the authority to press Enter.