This is obviously cumulative and the data on the health of civil society is not a thing, as far as I’m aware. But we have something like 400,000 houses of worship. That includes everything from a giant cathedral or a megachurch with thousands of congregants to a basement congregation of 5 people.
We are the most charitable as a share of GDP and we have the 3rd most volunteers per capita: https://www.forbes.com/2008/12/24/america-philanthropy-income-oped-cx_ee_1226eaves.html#4c9e926c2a2f
We have something like a dozen different sports with at least 500,000 participants. The details are tough to pin down, but if you add up every little league, preparatory, high school, college, professional, and recreational sports organization, there are easily hundreds of thousands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_in_the_United_States
Add in all the chapters and clubhouses of stuff like the Kiwanis, the Freemasons, Rotary clubs, hunting clubs, war re-enactment clubs, etc. etc. and I think you’d be hard pressed to find another country with as many different examples of civil society than the US.
We’re probably not #1 in terms of most of these categories, but we rank high in all of them. Cumulatively, it seems likely that America comes out on top, or very near it.
The tenor of Umair’s piece is that cherishing these types of things isn’t just pointless, it’s stupid. It’s ugly. It’s selfish.
But all of his claims fly in the face of an earlier piece he wrote saying that we need to be cooperative, not competitive. What’s more cooperative than neighbors coming together to form a soccer club for their kids, or to build a community house of worship? Civil society is vital and Umair is wrong for pooping on it from his swanky London digs.
