Posted on 09/20/2019 7:55:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Despite our ever-greater mobility and even more efficient connectivity, sociologists continue to note that Americans struggle to form lasting, fulfilling relationships of all kinds, but especially marriages. We face a very real epidemic of loneliness, one that is, not coincidentally, accompanied by a steady decline in marriage.
According to Pew Research, marriage rates have fallen to historic lows over the last 30 years, especially among younger people. At the same time, the typical age at first marriage has climbed to a historic high.
Increasingly, Americans who are looking for love can’t find it, at least not in the traditional ways. And so they are turning online. A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University reports that online dating has now replaced the church, family members, and mutual friends as the primary way American couples meet.
Now, in no way do I wish to knock online dating, per se. Many happily married Christian couples began their stories together via an online dating service. I’d suggest online dating is filling a void left as traditional social institutions fail. At the same time, plummeting marriage rates and spiking loneliness rates indicate that even our best technologies will never fill the hole left as families, churches, and communities become less central to our life together.
The loss or decline of core social institutions in recent decades is well-documented. Just in my lifetime, extended family, youth clubs, civic organizations, and the church have all become less important to more people than ever before. This seismic social shift is a problem for many reasons, not least of which because these were places and means by which couples used to meet and connect. It’s simply impossible to replace such timeless, local, and embodied ties with apps!
In fact, it’s not exaggerating that this is even a question of how the next generation will come into being—and what will play the central relational roles in their lives. After all, marriage is not a stand-alone institution. It’s part of a social fabric that’s tearing apart. As fewer couples get together and form strong marriages, the faster the tear grows, and the further apart people drift.
Writing at Quillette recently, Mary Eberstadt describes how the de-centering of marriage and family has resulted in and reinforced the explosion of sexual and gender identities. Increasingly, young people are forced to answer the basic human question “who am I?” without a mother and a father, without siblings, an extended family, a community, or a church body to help. So many are left only with a letter in an acronym or an adopted sense of historical grievance to center their identities.
No wonder, as Eberstadt describes in her new book “Primal Screams,” so many identities today are meager and fragile, and the movements built around them more and more unhinged.
Yet, this culture of identity and family crisis is also a tremendous opportunity for the church, one not without historical precedent. As Rodney Stark observes, one of the reasons early Christianity grew so rapidly in the second century was that Roman young men turned to the church to find eligible young women. The church was full of eligible young women because early Christians had faithfully rescued Roman girls from infanticide and raised them in their communities.
Years ago, I heard Maggie Gallagher suggest that it might be time for churches to get back to this kind of work. While we rescue babies from abortion in word and deed, perhaps we should also get serious about introducing singles to each other. Perhaps married Christian couples should, you know, “meddle” a bit more and host some matchmaking dinners?
While there’s a universally repeated “ring by spring” joke across every Christian college campus, perhaps marriage opportunism is a good reason to encourage your son or daughter to attend one. Where else, other than working summer staff at a Christian camp, will young believers be surrounded by so many like-minded peers of the opposite sex? Having spent years watching this process in action, I promise it works.
The Body of Christ has a unique potential role to play in reversing the decline of marriage and the epidemic of loneliness. If we do, those looking for love may one day open the doors of a church instead of an app.
Yes, at almost 65 myself I find that most of the guys on the dating sites have it blocked so that you can’t even send them a message if you are over 55 -— even the guys that look like they are 70 or older themselves.
Unless one is on the “season citizens” sites or the 50+ sites.
Having served in two churches, including in youth group ministry, I have long had a related opinion:
What the institutionalized church has consistently, historically, failed to do is to honor those who live a chaste, single life.
If a man lives a promiscuous life, fathers children, repents, and seeks to be a good father, his repentance is often actively celebrated.
If a single man whom women do not choose as a husband lives a chaste life, and never fathers a child out of wedlock, he is not celebrated. He is ignored - or mocked. (Yes, I have witnessed it firsthand while serving in the church - including by “ordained ministers” - so do not anyone tell me it does not happen!)
Such men are often ignored as being unworthy, or they are mocked as being undersexed. (The attitude that a “real” man just cannot live without sex is alive and well in Churchianity.)
One of the truest lines I have heard in secular entertainment is: “No one celebrates what didn’t happen.”
A man who never fathers a child illicitly, never exploits a young woman sexually, never practices promiscuity is, at best, taken for granted (it is his Christian duty, blah, blah, blah).
After six years in a Christian school, working in two denominations, and attending many conferences, seminars, retreats, and teaching so many Bible Studies I lost track, yes, this is often true - and not just in one denomination or with one theology.
Celibacy and chastity among male laity - male virgins, in accord with God’s Word - are embarrassing to those who are morally or immorally active sexually.
Whether or not the organized church develops formal matchmaking - about which idea I have an ambivalent attitude - it would improve the situation just by actually, actively respecting the moral behavior it officially, passively endorses.
It is doubly blasphemous: It endorses the perversion of natural sexuality, and violates the Biblical meaning of the Rainbow.
Everything leftists do exchanges truth for lie, evil for good.
I suspect, by the associated tagline, that the person is a laissez-faire libertarian.
While I certainly believe it would be a good thing for churches to be involved more in matchmaking and marriage, the real problem with declining marriage rates in the U.S. is our divorce laws. I’ve been divorced five years and have met some nice ladies that I could potentially see myself with but I’ve shied away from it because I don’t want to run the risk of financial ruin. I dodged financial ruin with my ex-wife when I was forced to divorce her after catching her cheating, I don’t want to tempt fate again.
Men, especially older ones like me, would be much more inclined to marry if the risk of being fleeced by the legal system wasn’t so great.
I met my wife at a Campus Crusade for Christ meeting at college.
When I was single, I was attending a church in an area with a large number of young recent college grads just starting out. I didn’t want to go to the bar scene, so joined my church’s single’s Bible study.
The first night I was handed a list of rules. The first was “NO DATING OF OTHER MEMBERS IN THE SINGLES GROUP!”
I asked the pastor about it, and he told me about a number of churches being sued by women who felt harassed in singles groups, and he felt that to protect the church he would not allow any courting to go on. One couple that did start dating had to leave the Bible study. The pastor repeated the rules every week after that.
Thought it was nuts at the time, but after 20 years of life I have seen more than enough reasons for that rule. A young woman asks a guy out and gets rejected and hurt. A young guy as a woman out and is considered a stalker. And that is the “nice” issues, not counting true harassment issues.
Also saw a lot of what you stated. Chaste singles are viewed with concern first, and then embarrassment. Again, after 20 plus years I realized that most of the scorners were not chaste, and were made to feel “guilty” by that who could resist temptation. And the only real sin in American Churicanity is guilt.
I do wish my church had something like the Orthodox does now, or my parents did as kids. My great aunt caused so many marriages she was the “Godmother” for a couple dozen people. The old Dominic Club that many Catholic churches had were why my in laws met. Today, those groups don’t exist and those reaching out for something like that are viewed as weird as best, and a threat at worst. So my wife and I do try to bring people together, but on a small scale.
Churches have a hard enough time staying biblical.
Further I can see potential liability issues if/when marriages break up.
Chicks can spot a loser.
Such men are often ignored as being unworthy, or they are mocked as being undersexed.
That's what happens to losers.
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