Why believers need to worry about dating tends

In the words of Ryan Burge, "dropping out begets dropping out." What would Jane Austen say?

Back in the fall of 2022, I was working on a pair of “On Religion” columns linked to the emerging “marriage crisis” trends among young adults in America. That is connected, of course, to the fertility crisis around the world.

In the first column — “Old enough? Faith, family and America’s falling marriage statistics” — I talked, logically enough, with sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, leader of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is the author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.”

Hang in there with me.

This post is headed to an amazing, and sobering, blast of new data from chart-master Ryan Burge, as well as a strong (and some may say unusual) book recommendation for pastors, parents, teachers and counselors. Sad to say, but this book has a pink, rather girly cover (but, trust me, the contents are solid). Hold that thought.

Back to Wilcox. Here is a crucial quote:

There's a whole class of young men who are not flourishing personally and professionally. … The systems have broken down that help raise up attractive, successful men. Churches used to be one of those support systems," he said, reached by telephone.

"The future of the church runs through solid marriages and happy families. The churches that find ways to help men and women prepare for marriage and then encourage them to start families are the churches that will have a future."

The crisis is larger than lonely, under-employed and Internet-addicted men. Rising numbers of young women are anxious, depressed and even choosing self-harm and suicide.

Need more? Later in that column, there was this:

Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center study found that most single U.S. adults, even before the coronavirus, were depressed about dating and building relationship. This past February, 70% of those surveyed said "their dating lives are not going well."

The survey summary noted: "A majority of single Americans overall are off the dating market — 56% say they are not currently looking for a relationship or casual dates, up slightly from 50% in 2019.

While doing my research, I heard about some of the work being done on this topic by Brian Willoughby of the Brigham Young University School of Family Life. I ended up talking with him and that material went into the second “On Religion” column, “Mature enough? Can congregations and clergy help young adults prep for marriage?”

Some of you, after reading that reference to BYU, may be thinking what I thought at the time: “Wait a minute. If the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is having trouble encouraging young women and men to date and get married, then …”

Willoughby’s comments were rather complex, and included the mixed signals — on marriage and careers — that young people often receive from the adults around them, in schools and even from parents and faith leaders. Thus, he stressed:

It's urgent … for congregations to "start making a more explicit case for marriage and family. Our young people know that marriage is important, but they don't know specific reasons for WHY it's important."

The result is what some researchers call the "marriage paradox." Young people continue to express a strong desire to "get married at some point," but they place an even higher priority on other "life goals," said Willoughby.

Later in that column, there was some additional material that is crucial to this discussion. To be blunt, the religious young women who are marriage-minded are growing increasingly skeptical about many of the young men they are meeting.

Church leaders need to start — right now — creating ways for young people to have healthy, constructive, encounters in which they learn, well, to separate the true wheat from the chaff. This is long, but essential:

In Latter-day Saint congregations, said Willoughby, young women and men are asked to serve in parallel leadership networks, working side by side, week after week. This offers opportunities to spot potential spouses with shared beliefs and goals.

But there is one big problem: "More single men tend to drop out of the faith. Often, the ratio of women-to-men is way too high when it comes to young adults who are serious about marriage."

Now, consider this additional advice from Wilcox:

… [R]eligious leaders need to understand that many of today's dangerous trends in mental and physical health are linked to the growing cloud of digital screens that dominate modern life, said Wilcox. …

“Churches have to find ways to encourage men — single and married — to turn off the Internet and their video-games and get their acts together. … And let's face it, it's harder to make major course corrections in life when you're in your '30s," he said.

"All of this will require churches to do a better job of encouraging marriage, sanctioning marriage and helping young people prepare for marriage. … This has to go beyond the old games-and-pizza approach to youth work and what usually passes for ministries with single adults."

This brings us to Burge’s new Graphs about Religion essay: “High School Students Are Growing Incredibly Anti-Social — Dating, Hanging Out and Working Are All in Steep Decline.”

To cut to the chase, Burge describes, in great detail, a series of anti-social trends that are undercutting healthy social contacts between young women and men. Note: Burge stresses that many of the poll numbers were skewing in the wrong direction BEFORE SMARTPHONES. The stunning growth of screens culture poured gasoline on fires that were already spreading. COVID-19 didn’t help, either, but the disturbing trends were evident before the pandemic.

Dating numbers are crashing, even as fewer young people have part-time jobs that help them learn to plan their schedules in real life.

Also, dating numbers have fallen at the same time as declines in attendance in religious activities. The numbers are nuanced, but the overarching trends are there for those willing to see them.

Working with numbers from the Monitoring the Future project, Burge draws two crucial conclusions. These passages are long, but essential:

In 1995, just 22% of high school seniors were hanging out with their friends no more than once a week. That figure did creep up just a little bit in the next 15 years, but not by much. In 2010, it was up to 26% — an increase of just four points in fifteen years. Certainly a worrying trajectory but definitely a very slow moving trendline.

By 2012, that figure moved to 30%, and it was up to 35% by 2014 and only continued to climb from there. Even before the pandemic hit, it was just above 40%. In 23 years, the share of teens who barely hung out with their friend nearly doubled. In the data collected during 2020 and 2021, the figure was exactly the same — 46%. Yes, there was a noticeable decrease in socialization due to the pandemic, but it was only five percentage points.

I just don’t know how you can look at this graph and not think that this has a lot to do with the rise of the smartphone. It took 18 years to go from 22% to 32%. Then it took five years to go from 32% to 41%. What else could explain this increase? Anyone who says that social media has connected us more is just not facing the facts. Young people are not using all their messaging apps to arrange opportunities to hang out in real life, they are just seemingly content to digitally communicate.

Also, it may be getting harder and harder for many young people to unplug from the entertainment streaming through the screens in their lives. Of course, they may be on social media at the same time as they are binging popular shows or playing video games.

What does religion have to do with this? Burge adds this:

The one big takeaway for me is that those who never attend religious services are also the least likely to do other types of socializing. That makes sense, logically. One type of socializing is related to another type of socializing. Going to church means you are often given the opportunity to hang out with other kids in the youth group on another day of the week. That happened a lot when I was a teenager. But I do want to highlight the fact that never attenders really became an outlier on this metric around 2014 or so. It seems like there was a clear “socializing gap” that began to emerge about ten years ago. As I’ve written a dozen times — dropping out begets dropping out.

The bottom line: It’s time for adults to start noticing connections between three conditions in the lives of the young people around them (focusing on high-school seniors). Look out for those who:

* Go on a date no more than once a month.

* Socialize with their friends no more than once a week.

* Have no job.

In the end, Burge concludes: “I’ve got to say that this whole life stage is a whole lot scarier to me than the previous ones. … The kids aren’t alright.”

Now, after all of that negativity, I feel the need to point readers to something that is both realistic and positive at the same time.

Believe it or not, I want to recommend that pastors, parents, teachers and counselors — men as well as women — read the following book by Elizabeth Kantor: “The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After.”

Yes, I’m serious. Ignore the title. Ignore the pink book cover.

The basic message in this book is directly linked to the rest of this post. The key is that one of the Big Ideas at the heart of those brilliant Jane Austen novels is that young women must learn to separate the good men from the men who look good, but lack character and, thus, are not trustworthy. The Jane Austen women do this with the help of extended family and the support found in the central institutions in the communities that surround them.

Yes, there was quite a bit of dancing and singing involved. But prayers and the church are in there as well (in subtle ways) along with lots of books and education.

Today, most extended families are spread out — connected by interstate highways, jet airplanes and, yes, the Internet. Many parents are, with good cause, worried about evidence that many school leaders are less than trustworthy. And their churches?

How many religious leaders have noticed that local congregations are one of the last institutions standing, in the lives of families and individuals that enter their doors?

In the end, “dropping out begets dropping out.” Religious congregations need to find ways to do more than serve the occasional pizza. Prayers are important, but so are healthy chances for young people to serve and socialize side by side on a regular basis.

Let us attend.