Pop test: Name some pro-faith "rom coms"

Freya India says conservatives tend to forget "feelings." Does that include stories and images?

Raise your hand if you are a male who doesn’t mind watching rom coms.

Yes, this can include pre-rom com era classics such as “The Philadelphia Story,” in which an ex-husband wins his wife back. Trust me, that flick is very, very “yar.” And, all together now, let’s join Jimmy Stewart and shout, “C.K. Dexter Haven!”

My question can even include many big screen and BBC takes on Jane Austen, especially this one and this one.

However, let’s make this pop test considerably tougher by eliminating those options. Then, let’s issue another, more difficult challenge: Name your Top 5 contemporary rom coms that are family friendly or maybe even faith friendly.

I’ll wait.

That’s a tougher challenge, isn’t it?

Now, there are some obvious movies out there — if one is willing to include flicks that simply avoid scenes in which couples head to bed during the falling-in-love process. A quick glance at this IMDb list of “The Best Rom-Com movies all times” will turn up a few, such as “While You Were Sleeping” as well as the “Sleepless in Seattle-You’ve Got Mail” duo.

But note that the No. 1 choice on that IMDb list is “Pretty Woman.”

Long ago, I showed two movies — “Pretty Woman” and “Tender Mercies” — during a single-adults retreat for a Southern Baptist church in the Denver area. Can you guess which one of those two movies ALL of the Baptist singles had already seen? Which movie had only one or two seen?

Yes, the question I asked during that retreat was this: Which of these movies offered the Hollywood approach to love and romance?

Now, frequent Rational Sheep readers already know that I think religious leaders should be concerned about the growing evidence of a marriage-formation crisis in American culture and many other First World nations. For background material, scan this search file focusing on some logical terms — “marriage crisis,” “America,” “divide,” “young men,” “young women.” This Wall Street Journal headline is typical: “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage.”

This leads me to a provocative essay by the always readable Freya India: “The Right Has Forgotten Feeling — Young women need refuge, not ridicule.” Here is the overture:

Most young women I know think of ­Christianity as controlling and patriarchal, if they think of it at all. They see conservatism as outdated and oppressive. For the first time in history, young women are now less religious than young men, and less likely to attend church. Many are moving far to the political left, much more so than previous generations of women.

I think I know why. The right has forgotten feeling.

When I listen to conservative commentators today—columnists, podcasters, media personalities, some older than I am but many my own age—I notice an overreliance on intellect and argument, on numbers and logic. Charts on pornography use; statistics on loneliness; facts about birth rates. But the young women I’m talking about don’t care about your statistics on divorce. I know I wouldn’t have. They don’t feel anything from your graphs on fertility rates. What they care about is the pain of their own families falling apart. They know how they feel, and they are hurting.

Here is another key part of that piece, which is currently located, alas, behind a First Things paywall:

Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of ­Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes that, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike? To try to feel beautiful, even just enough, in a world of endless edited Instagram influencers, where hypersexuality feels like the only way to be seen, where humility feels like invisibility? Where if you aren’t sexual straight away you can’t expect him to stay — why would he, with so many other options? The agony of knowing that pretty much every man you fall for has been raised on and is addicted to online porn and watches it behind your back because you can never be enough? The humiliation? How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment?

Now, it isn’t surprising that my friend Rod “Living in Wonder” has responded to the India essay. He noted:

… Boy, is this essay going to get passed around a lot when it is unpaywalled.

I can’t speak to how it feels to be a woman hearing all this, obviously, but the India essay landed hard with me because it describes how so many (male) conservatives talk about religion. Yes, that’s what she’s saying, but she’s describing it in gendered terms (I’m not complaining; her perspective is important). I want to talk about what this feels like from my perspective. I’m not saying that it’s a “male” perspective, but as a male religious conservative who frequently complains about the omnipresence of the “therapeutic” in contemporary Christianity, I want to give Freya India her due.

Here’s another important point of view that I wish was receiving more attention — the voices of young, conservative men who urgently want to get married and build a family.

Yes, that was a major theme in the second-most popular post during the first year of Rational Sheep. Does anyone remember this double-decker headline?

Young men are flocking into pews

But the New York Times says these marriage-hungry guys are joining "bad" churches

That Times piece, you may recall, noted the obvious:

Among Generation Z Christians … men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip. … Within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

But also remember this trend — that young, single men flocking into culturally conservative churches, “place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew.”

What does this have to do with rom coms?

Freya India notes that conservatives have been forgetting “feelings,” while battering young women with waves of marriage-crisis and fertility statistics.

Trust me, I know that those statistics are there and they are, literally, frightening. Readers may want to check out this pair of “On Religion” columns that focus on that.

* Old enough? Faith, family and America’s falling marriage statistics (Part I)

* Mature enough? Can congregations and clergy help young adults prep for marriage? (Part II)

However, when I hear references to “feelings,” the mass-communications professor in me immediately thinks about “stories” and “images.” In other words, I think about the “signals” that young women (and men) have been receiving — for decades — above love, romance and (maybe even) marriage from the principalities and powers of Hollywood.

This brings me back to the challenge at the start of this post: Name your Top 5 contemporary rom coms that are family friendly or maybe even faith friendly.

Does this issue matter? Let me hear from you in the comments pages.

However, I will ask one final question: Can you name a Hollywood rom com in which the pivotal romantic declaration is a reference to prayer? The key: Look up the the Hebrew term “berakhah” or “bracha.”

My nomination? Watch the YouTube at the top of this post.