Need For Community: What the Church Should Do About Singleness
Books that address the rise of singleness appear to be everywhere these days.
Many of these books are centered around the church, such as “Get Married,” “Solo Planet,” “Singleness is Not a Sin,” “Your Calling is Christ, Not Marriage” and “What the Single in Your Pew Needs from You.” The reason is not mysterious. Singleness is on the rise in our society in a way that is changing the demographic realities of America and Christianity across all denominations.
It is amid this backdrop that Christians are divided on how to address the issue. One camp sees this as a problem that needs to be solved by helping people get married. The other sees the problem as society’s privileging of marriage — and that it’s the church that needs to adapt to reflect these changes.
READ: Despite Opposition From Bishops, EU Deems Abortion A ‘Fundamental Right’
Reading through these different Christian takes on the rise in singleness, it’s striking how wildly different these opinions and potential solutions are. Yet, there are still deep areas of overlap as well that Christians can take heed of to move forward together as a church, experts said.
What is the problem with singleness, anyway?
For many Christians who see the declining number of married people, the problem is fewer and fewer people deciding to get married. For them, marriage is a positive norm in society, and the rising number of people deciding to stay single is seen as bad for society in general.
Americans’ marital and living arrangements have changed considerably over the past 30 years. The share of adults ages 25 to 54 who are currently married fell from 67% in 1990 to 53% in 2019, while the share cohabiting more than doubled over that same period (from 4% in 1990 to 9% in 2019), according to Pew Research Center. At the same time, the share who have never been married has also grown — from 17% to 33% — over the past three decades.
As sociologist Brad Wilcox, author of the book “Get Married,” wrote: “Nothing predicts happiness in America like a good marriage — not education, work, money or even sex. The data tells us that men and women who are in a good marriage are a staggering 545 percent more likely to be very happy with their lives compared to their fellow Americans who are unmarried or in unhappy marriages. Moreover, no group of American men and women (aged 18-55) are happier than married mothers and fathers.”
Not only does marriage make people happier, Wilcox noted, but it’s vital for society, which needs children to take care of people when they age, prevent loneliness with age and further economic growth. And statistically, the traditional two-parent household overwhelmingly creates the best outcomes for children.
“Children raised in single-mother homes are five times more likely to be poor than kids raised in stable married homes,” he added. “That young men raised apart from a stably married home are, according to my recent research, more likely to land in jail or prison than to graduate from college. That the biggest driver of recent declines in happiness is the nation’s retreat from marriage. And that, at the community level, the strongest predictor of economic mobility for poor children is family structure”
Culture critic Aaron Renn adds another reason that falling marriage rates among Christians is a problem in his book “Life in the Negative World,” saying that it makes communities weaker and that, as a result, Christians become more of a cultural minority.
“A community that’s heavily nonfamilial — where its members regularly watch porn, don’t marry, enter into short-term sexual commitments and experience frequent divorce — is a weak community. If the evangelical church wants to survive and thrive in the negative world, it can’t be conformed to the world in this manner.”
Lyman Stone, research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, noted that this is a problem for the growth of the church, given that since the days of the early church, growth has always happened mostly through growing families rather than just evangelism.
He also pointed out a basic reason that the rise in singleness is a problem: “The vast majority of singles want to get married.”
For journalist and author Anna Broadway, a single Christian herself, the problem isn’t the fact that so many people are single, but that the church doesn’t affirm or support singleness. The focus on marriage, she said, is not the church agreeing with singles’ desires but heaping burdens on them.
“Everyone spends at least part of life alone,” she said. “This singleness foreshadows heaven, where Jesus said people won’t marry. … Yet Christians around the world still tend to treat nuclear-family life as the norm. Many factors keep people from marriage, but the church continues to emphasize ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28) more than ‘seek ye first the kingdom and his righteousness.’”
Katelyn Beaty echoed this pressure that is put on Christian women.
“Women are pressured to pair up with unsuitable and/or un-Christian men, which only increases the risk of divorce,” she said. “Far worse, these pressures reduce women’s value to their bodies and their bodies to a religious utility. Needless to say, this approach seems like a bad way to keep single women engaged in the church.”
Broadway spent 17 months interviewing 196 single Christians over six continents to understand their struggles and experiences for her book “Solo Planet.” A consistent thread in those interviews, she discovered, was singles feeling like second-class citizens in church settings and not feeling fully integrated into the church family.
“Even singles who cited Jesus and Paul as examples often said they’d like to marry,” she noted. “Of the 196 never-married people who told me how they felt about their single state, almost two-thirds wanted marriage.”
Gina Dalfonzo, author of the book, “One By One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church,” agreed.
“Those of us who are single often find ourselves “outside the system” of family-focused churches and face the awkward, abashed silence that ensues when we say we don’t have spouses or kids,” she said. “We often end up sitting alone in the service week after week. We sometimes get overlooked when people are getting together socially. As one single man told me, ‘There are no invitations to lunch after church or other social gatherings, mainly because I don’t really ‘fit in.’”
Evangelical Christian writer Ed Shaw, who is openly celibate, pointed out how, even when people get married, they stop having time for their single friends, which means that single friends miss out on stable communities.
“If you have a family, you can reasonably feel like you have no time for anyone else,” he said. “But that can mean that unless you have a family, you have no one at all. And that does not make the single life feel plausible to anyone — most of all the biblically faithful same-sex attracted Christians who don’t even have the hope of having their own families at some stage.”
Delving into the root causes
For advocates of marriage like Wilcox, the source of this problem is that the culture has adopted anti-marriage norms within its institutional policies. For advocates of dignified singleness like Broadway, the problem is that the church idolizes marriage too much and discriminates against singles rather than lend support to this decision.
Wilcox noted: “Our culture is increasingly sending us the message that money, work and freedom from family are the recipe for a prosperous and happy life today. I call this the ‘Midas Mindset.’ Many left-leaning mainstream organs of opinion make this argument with women in mind. One prominent financial outlet ran with this headline: ‘Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids are Getting Richer.’ Another big outlet offered: ‘The Case Against Marriage.’ Meanwhile, on the right, prominent online influencers like Pearl Davis and Andrew Tate are also pushing the ‘Midas Mindset’ — but with a focus on men.”
Wilcox praised churchgoers, and the devoutly religious, for being some of the strongest countercultural forces encouraging marriage. But Renn is less encouraged by what he sees in the American church.
He said he sees the church following the culture’s lead in normalizing a post-familial culture — if perhaps lagging slightly behind it. He cited how easy it is to see references to “the gift of singleness” on Google and from the pulpit on Sundays. Stone, meanwhile, also pointed to how churches follow the culture's lead in encouraging people to put off marriage until they’re established in a career. The problem of singleness in churches, he added, doesn’t exist in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that actually encourage marriage.
For Broadway, it’s just the opposite. The culture idolizes marriage, not singleness, and the problem is that the church has capitulated to this lifestyle choice.
“Cultures around the world struggle with the temptation to seek first our culture’s values,” she said. “Worse yet, we often spiritualize those values! Thus marriage becomes a ‘reward’ from God. Beaty calls this idea a sexual prosperity gospel. Yet while Christians often call singleness a ‘gift’, I’ve never heard it called a reward.”
Shaw bemoans how few Christians — unless they are same-sex attracted — are encouraged to be celibate as a glorious way to serve God’s kingdom. He noted how Paul encouraged people to be single because it made it easier to do mightier things for God without having to divide time between His kingdom and family.
“Many of the most significant and inspiring steps forward in worldwide evangelization were made by single Christians or Christians who wrongly behaved as if they were single, like William Carey,” he said.
He added, “Despite honoring the worldwide impact of the ministry of a single man like John Stott, we still manage to discourage people from copying him.”
Beaty said she believes a big part of the over-focus on marriage by the church has to do with fears over the overall decline in Christianity, with the focus too much on having children and not enough on evangelism.
She said: “In times of church decline, Christians might be tempted to forget this truth and fall back on natural means of spreading religion. If the discourse around singleness in the church is any indication, we might ask: Does evangelism even work anymore? The renewed ire over single women speaks to the anxiety of a secular age when sociologists and pastors alike wonder how long the church will survive if rates of church attendance and Christian family formation are reasonable predictors of the future.”
Possible solutions
Not surprising, those on either side of the issue have wildly different solutions to the drop in marriage rates.
For marriage advocates, the solution is to change the culture to be more pro-marriage and remove sociopolitical barriers to marriage. For those on the other side, the solution is to have a more pro-singleness culture and have the church and married people extend their community to include them more.
Wilcox laid out several things that both the culture and government can do to encourage marriage. They include having schools promote the “success sequence” that shows the data on how marriage and family can be a way to escape poverty. Lawmakers, he added, can get rid of laws and regulations that discourage marriage and replace them with ones that encourage it.
Renn, for his part, called on pastors to continue emphasizing — even more — the importance of marriage and helping people get married. He has particularly encouraged churches to solve the problem of men checking out of church, pointing to how they’re losing them to the Jordan Petersons and Joe Rogans of the world, and what lessons they can learn from that of how to win them back.
Meanwhile, Broadway and Beaty have both highlighted the massive gender ratio split as a reason so many Christian women are single. But they use this as a reason that the church needs to embrace the fact that huge majorities of their congregations will never get married.
Instead, they argue this means that the church needs to focus more on growing the number of believers through evangelism, not the creation of families.
Areas of overlap
Differences aside, there are also significant areas of overlap, particularly on the marriage advocates side.
Wilcox and Renn agree that not everyone can — or should — be single and that married people should integrate singles into their daily lives.
While marriage advocates agree with single people that married couples need to help integrate singles, singleness advocates seem to ignore — or even reject — calls to solve this problem.
They have argued that strategies aimed at helping to fix this rising issue aren’t needed.
“Although most families aren’t in a place to house someone, nonetheless you can invite single people to hang out with you at home, participate in family activities and enjoy the occasional meal,” Dalfonzo said. “All of us, single and married alike, can learn something from putting aside our preconceptions and simply being in community with one another.”
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.