Can Hobbies Bridge Political Divides?

Wood shavings dust every surface, and, occasionally, the fur of one of five dogs that have found a pile for their afternoon nap. Tools with names I do not know line the shelves and tables. Blue-green woodworking power equipment resides in the far corner. On the wall there is an elk head and large flat-screen TV for country music videos and football games. This is my uncle’s woodshop.

A few steps outside the shop, past the horses grazing on a bale of hay, stands my uncle’s mill and the handmade kiln that looks like a greenhouse and dries out the freshly milled wood planks. My uncle is a retired engineer (the train-driving type) for the Montana railway. Even before he retired, his assorted hobbies straddled the line between manual labor and leisure.

I first observed – and sat in awe of – my uncle’s leisure activities as the Covid pandemic descended upon the world. It made me realize I hungered for activities to do with my hands and with other people. I also started to consider the connections between leisure, identity formation, and politically polarized social sorting, realizing a hobby’s value extends beyond how we spend our free time.

Plane with Wood Shavings, 2014. Photograph by Phil Gradwell. Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.

If we could revive a robust hobby culture, I thought, hobbies might help us break through boundaries and make connections with those who hold different views in this politically divisive era. This, I admit, is a touch idealistic. One problem is that hobbies themselves have become another way to express one’s political preferences, and further calcify social barriers. Neither my uncle’s woodworking nor hobbies like pottery or crocheting solves this problem. However, I have caught glimpses over the last few years of the power of shared love – people gathering together to do an activity they love, transcending all sorts of social misunderstandings and boundaries. This piece explores the limits and promises of hobbies to heal our social fabric.

What Are Hobbies For?

Not all free-time activities are hobbies. Expertly quoting lines from “The Office” or stockpiling internet memes to make your friends laugh does not qualify. Technology has wired us to believe leisure is synonymous with distracting and passive activities – watching television or scrolling on a device. However, a true hobby requires both physical and mental effort, as well as time and skill.

A student made similar observations, discovering she didn’t have any hobbies and observing how screens provided her a faint semblance of having a hobby. She wrote how “Sometimes just watching another person engage in a hobby satisfies the creative itch that instigates a desire for hobbies in the first place. Watching someone crochet a hat and shirt entertains me to no end, but doesn’t necessarily encourage me to engage in a similar act myself.” Screen-based ‘hobbies’ have a dystopian murmur, a fleeting illusion of participation without actual participation.

So, what constitutes a hobby? For a definition, consider the prayer “For the Good Use of Leisure” found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer:

O God, in the course of this busy life, give us times of refreshment and peace; and grant that we may so use our leisure to rebuild our bodies and renew our minds, that our spirits may be opened to the goodness of your creation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Leisure – and hobbies – “rebuild our bodies and renew our minds” for the purpose of “refreshment and peace.” It is also one way to show adoration to a loving Creator who gifts a weekly Sabbath for rest (Exod. 16:9). As Joseph Pieper writes in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, true leisure is not done as a means to an end – it is “celebration and festival … And this is worship.”

Within this framework, a range of interests, talents, and curiosities can qualify as a hobby. To take it to the purest expression, children have a knack for creatively trying on hobbies for size. Encyclopedic dinosaur knowledge with extensive figurine collections, chalk-drawn artworks in a cul-de-sac, bike races with neighborhood kids, or elaborate stories crafted for dress-up are all playful experimentation for potential future hobbies. 

Worshipful play is limitless. Hobbies that restore minds and bodies are sundry.

What Happened to Hobbies?

Given the evolving nature of work over the last century, our generation should have more opportunities for leisure than at any point in human history. From tractors to dishwashers to ChatGPT, we keep innovating to make our work more efficient. Economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that we would work 15-hour weeks. Instead, smartphones and computers further enabled workaholism and “leaky” leisure. Play less, work more appears to be the general outcome of the tech revolution.

Along with increasing work hours, several other forces in our culture have led to a decline in hobbies. There are many causes, but here I will focus on just three. First, people chose to stay home alone and turn on the television. Second, politics was made into a quasi-hobby. Finally, hobbies fell prey to the great sorting of political polarization.

In the first case, Robert Putnam’s enduring work Bowling Alone still offers insight into a waning hobby culture. Hobbies are one way people come together and are often a blend of voluntary association and informal gathering. Putnam’s work covers the decline of people joining voluntary associations, such as bowling leagues and Kiwanis Clubs, as well as informal gatherings. Since the 1970s, “virtually all of the informal social activities – going to club meetings, going to church, having dinner parties, having friends over, going out to bars, going on picnics, etc. – show a substantial decline.”

The big question is why. There are many causes for the decline in leisure time spent on activities that rally people together: economic pressure, child rearing, workaholism, and long commutes all put a strain on leaving enough time for activities that “rebuild bodies and renew minds.” But out of all of these potential constraints, Putnam hones in on one particular culprit: television.

Current statistics, reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024, is that people watch on average 2.7 hours of television a day, which accounts for over half of their leisure time. The second most common use of leisure time was playing games and using a computer for “socializing and communicating” at 68 minutes total each day. Out of an average of 5.2 hours of time for leisure a day, way over half of that time is spent on a screen. However, there are some promising changes. The same recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics report found time spent watching TV is decreasing and Gallup found that the number of people citing hobbies as “extremely or very important” increased from 48 percent in 2001 to 61 percent in 2023. Perhaps, over time television has produced a hunger for physical activities. There seems to be a growing appetite to power down screens and discover new activities that require effort and skill.

But even with some optimistic signs, there is the overwhelming fact that people are opting to spend their free time alone. As described in The Atlantic article “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson, it isn’t enough to avoid “sedentary leisure” and spend more time cultivating new skills for “engaged leisure,” we need to spend our leisure time participating in hobbies with other people – even those we might disagree with politically.

In Join or Die, a 2024 documentary about Robert Putnam’s life and research, I find some other glimmers of hope. Toward the end of the film, a bowling alley with a consistent gathering of people is featured. When a few of the bowling participants are interviewed, one says, “You can come together to a place; you don’t always have to come together around beliefs, or values, or interests. You can just be in a place.” Another shared, “I had friends, [but] I wouldn’t have known that I needed friends completely different from me and why that’s good.”

The second force infecting our hobby culture is political hobbyism, which has tainted activities that ought to be nonpolitical. Politics have become “hobbyist” entertainment. Eitan D. Hersh, author of Politics Is for Power, describes the rise of political hobbyism and argues it is not true political engagement. He defines hobbies as “activities one engages in regularly, in free time, for pleasure.” While one can disagree with his definition of “hobby,” Hersch’s depiction of political hobbyism helps explain why even nonpolitical hobbies have turned political.

Drawing on Robert Putnam’s work, Hersch describes a cultural shift in how people participate in politics. Instead of volunteering to canvas for a candidate or advocating for policy changes, political engagement takes place behind a screen for personal entertainment and self-expression. He identifies three dangers caused by political hobbyism: it lowers the likelihood of real political action; it lowers the obligation people feel to opt in to the hard work of politics and incentivizes aspects that are merely enjoyable; and it increases the competitive nature of politics, which encourages partisan behavior.

Political hobbyism is not a “hobby” that rebuilds bodies and renews minds. The cumulative effect is that political preference is “more akin to support for sports teams,” writes Hersh. Like a Sunday afternoon of football jerseys, loud televisions, and chicken buffalo dip, political fans cheer on their team for victories and shout down their opponents for transgressions. The reward is belonging to a group, but the cost is the paradox of a more passive yet more aggressive approach to politics.

Finally, the third affront to hobbies is the politicization of our individual identity and social groupings. Naturally, how we spend our time is an aspect of our identity formation. We identify ourselves by what we do. When meeting a stranger, one of the first questions is inevitably, “What do you do?” with the response often related to our occupation. But further into that same conversation, people with dedicated hobbies might claim their various titles: fisherman, poet, knitter, woodworker, guitarist, tennis player, painter, runner, singer, road biker, hiker, swimmer, crafter, etc. Hobbies are part of who they are and how others identify them.

Both hobbies and partisanship are effective at giving people a sense of identity. One illustrative example I recently saw on social media (I am constantly fighting my own screen demons) was a picture of an REI and a Bass Pro Shop – meccas for sporting and outdoor hobbies. The meme labeled one store for liberals and the other for conservatives.

The downside is that when a hobby becomes politically coded it further entrenches identity politics. People are now able to double down on a political identity that seeps into every facet of their life, creating larger and larger homogenous groups of people that lead to political stereotypes about stores (progressive REI versus conservative Bass Pro Shop), locations (progressive cities versus conservative farmland) and hobbies (progressive yoga versus conservative fishing).

But the beauty of hobbies is that they do not have to be politically charged. My liberal female cousin from Montana loves to hunt and fish. My conservative male friend from New Jersey loves to do yoga and pottery. My friend described to me how his pottery teacher was “very liberal.” But political ideology wasn’t a prerequisite to participate. In fact, during the class, conversations were “much more likely to be about life and work” and my friend learned how to make beautiful cups, bowls, and vases.

Sociologist Lilliana Mason has written about the phenomenon of political social sorting. She writes that, more and more, social identities are lining up with partisan identities, “leaving behind a set of cross-cutting identities that could have encouraged emotional moderation.” Having cross-cutting identities – like in the example of my cousin and friend who belong to assorted groups – can decrease emotional responses to politics. Mason’s research found those with a partisan identity that consistently fits political stereotypes were easily angered by party loss, in contrast to those with a complex identity who belonged to varying groups, who reacted with no anger or little emotion to elections and political discussions.

The sad news is that people with complex identities are becoming rarer as the social sorting pressure grows stronger. People can endure the fear of ostracization for only so long before their need to belong succumbs to that pressure. Fostering hobbies is one way Americans can complexify their identities, build bridges with other tribes, and subvert political differences.

Why does identifying with hobbies matter? One of many reasons is relationships. Hobbies can help us connect with those who share a similar passion, opening a possibility for connections with people from different backgrounds and belief systems.

Shared Loves

We know hobbies’ benefits: they cultivate shared loves and gather people to enjoy whatever activity is at hand. Those at the bowling alley or in a pottery class are rebuilding their minds and bodies, and in the process, they are suspending their judgements about someone who might believe something different about the world. They have just created a moment of shared unity as they do the activity together.

Saint Augustine puts a high emphasis on shared love and its ability to save or break a nation. In City of God (Book 19, Chapter 24), he writes that a “people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” He goes on to say that even if there is a “bloody strife of parties” that leads to “social and civil wars,” it will not be enough to unpeople a people or a state “so long as there remains an association of some kind or other between a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the object of its love.”

Augustine’s warning makes me earnestly ask: Do we have any shared loves remaining in our nation?

My uncle is known first by his hobbies. He is a woodworker, hunter, fisherman, and overall tinkerer. It would require great effort to goad him into a political discussion. His political beliefs are not central to his identity. The outcome is he has an extended network of friends and family members that crisscrosses political and religious beliefs, yet the relationships are tightly unified by many hobbies, shared loves.

I was amazed by the skills my uncle learned from tinkering in his woodshop, acquiring a trained eye and touch to know the pattern and grain in the wood. No amount of YouTube could substitute for the process of learning by trial and error in the hot summer sun or fireplace-heated woodshop in the dead of winter.

But significantly, the woodshop projects don’t stay in the woodshop. My uncle is often called upon to do projects for friends, family, and his broader community. A new table is a gift to friends in Nashville, chairs are fixed for a nearby fishing lodge, and blanket ladders are Christmas presents to family. It has also been a way for me to spend time with my uncle when I visit, taking on small projects to make custom picture frames for a Christmas present to my parents or simply helping put a varnish on a bed frame. Even when projects aren’t being done, the woodshop has become a gathering place for family members, friends, dogs, and the occasional cat.

What happened to that resolve for our nation? How many times has politics disrupted the shared love between friends and family these last few years? It sometimes feels impossible that we will find any shared love in conversations about how to best care for our communities and the future of our nation. But perhaps we can start small – whether it is bowling, pottery, or woodworking – by making sure our own hobbies don’t become one more thing that divides us, but something that bring us together with all sorts of folks.