Americans stopped having people over. Jesus had already rewritten the guest list.
Friday, October 2, 2026
The Atlantic · https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/americans-socialization-dinner-decline-hosting/688846/
The open door is closing for ordinary reasons: time, effort, screens. Jesus once told a host what was wrong with his guest list: everyone on it could pay him back.
When you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind; and you will be blessed, because they don't have the resources to repay you. For you will be repaid in the resurrection of the righteous.
Luke 14:13-14
On September 29, Data for Progress released a survey of 1,098 American adults that repeated questions from the old DDB Needham Life Style surveys. Derek Thompson set the new answers beside the old ones. In 1975, 42 percent of Americans said they had friends or family over at least once a month. This year it was 12 percent. That is a 70 percent drop in half a century, steep enough that Thompson calls the fall in church attendance "downright modest" by comparison.
The number is softer than it looks. The older surveys came by mail and the new one online, so the pollsters call the comparison "suggestive of trends." That caveat is about the size of the drop, and the direction holds.
So what happened? Thompson points to ordinary costs. A dinner takes planning, messages and shopping, plus questions like "does your eldest kid eat eggplant?" Women had long kept the social calendar, and today about 80 percent of women aged 25 to 54 are in the labor force. In what Thompson calls "the age of the dual-earner household," he writes, "men failed to pick up the slack." And the couch got better, with Americans spending nearly two extra hours a day at home, in front of screens that ask nothing back. Each cost is small, which is why the group text about getting together so often dies in the chat.
Look at what kind of evening is disappearing, though. Most of it ran on trade: I have you over, and you have me back. That only works when both sides have something to spare, so when everyone is tired it stalls at both ends. Jesus sat at a dinner like that, a Sabbath meal in a leading Pharisee's house where, verse 1 says, "they were watching him." In verse 12 he tells his host to stop inviting friends, brothers, relatives and rich neighbors, because they "might also return the favor, and pay you back." His target is the ledger, and friends are simply the people we keep one with. The guests he names instead have nothing to repay with, and he moves the repayment all the way to the resurrection.
So the decline is a little worse than the chart shows, because even the dinners we miss mostly kept score.
It may also be easier to reverse than it looks. A table that waits for a fair trade closes the moment everyone is worn out. The one Jesus describes needs only a host willing to give an evening away.