Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street. Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. For the past few decades now, marriage rates have been plummeting. Those who are getting married are doing so much later in life.
The entire Western world, including the United States, is facing an unprecedented birth dearth. And yet, many Christians and many churches, including those who believe marriage is a created gift of God and a pillar of civilization, are doing nothing different to elevate marriage and family in the hearts and minds of young people. This is an example of what Einstein called insanity. Perhaps we could learn from a group of Chinese retirees who were recently covered in the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, each weekend, in an ongoing effort to play matchmaker for their older children, these parents meet at a park known as the Marriage Market with photos and achievement stats of their kids.
The goal is to help them find a spouse.
Now, the kids do not seem as concerned as their parents do. A 33-year-old single said, quote, my parents are more anxious than I am. But the problem is the parents should be. According to the article, in this country of over 1 billion people, only 6 million couples registered their marriages in 2024. This is a record low number, down 21% from just the previous year.
And it's another consequence of the one-child policy that China enforced for decades.
Now America is likely not ready for arranged marriages. Most people will not find marrying to save the economy a romantic enough notion.
However, our young adults still need help in the relationship department too. First and foremost, they need help understanding what marriage is. The Bible describes it as a cornerstone of adulthood and of society. But many young adults view it as more of a capstone, something personal to be tended to once everything else in life is accomplished. Christ calls the church his bride, portraying marriage as a metaphor of eternal truth.
But Hollywood and lifestyle magazines portray it as a burden, an obstacle to true personal fulfillment. God created us for family. but especially young women have been widely told that unencumbered sexual freedom is the real path to fulfillment. Another challenge is that young adults who are considering marriage often never turn to parents or pastors for guidance, but instead rely on apps. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 30% of adults said they had used a dating app.
53% of those adults were age 18 to 29. 50% of college students said they used an app to find a date. And that's in college, the place in which young adults are face to face. with more like-minded similar age peers than at any other time in their lives. And at least according to one article covering dating trends on campuses, dating apps have ruined romance.
Now there may be hopeful potential for marriage in the much celebrated return of young people to church, but it seems like the guys and girls aren't necessarily returning to the same churches. A user on X recently posted this, quote, one of the toughest things about the Christian dating scene is that the women are all over at the Baptist non-denom megachurch and the men are all at the most traditional place they can find, end quote.
Well, with all of these obstacles in place, can Christians really make dating for marriage great again? I remember at the 2012 Wilberforce weekend that Maggie Gallagher challenged the crowd to take seriously the task of matchmaking. Turning our homes and especially our churches into places where young Christian men and women could meet each other. This could be the church's moment to save marriage, but it will require that we break dramatically from social norms, that we embrace the awkwardness inherent in such things, and reject the narrative of self-centeredness. In short, we're going to have to be, well, weird.
And that's because many young adults simply lack the worldview categories to grasp what it means that marriage is good, inundated at every turn to look inside concepts like sacrificial love or statements like a central purpose of marriage is to have babies simply sound bizarre to them. We have to make them normal again. Guys need to know also, it's okay to romance a girl. Girls need to know they're not a letdown to womankind if they let a man do such a thing. And while young men should be encouraged to go for the girl, they also need to hear, especially from other older men, that this requires being willing to lay down his life for her.
Young women should be challenged to consider just all the ways the sexual revolution has lied to them, and they should be encouraged to say yes to the guy and to do it now, not later. In short, young adults need to hear from someone other than Charlie Kirk that marriage and babies are good gifts of God to us. The church is in the best position to come alongside parents and to make marriage and family plausible again to them.
Now, we might have to figure out just how to get those trad men and the non-denom women in the same place. But if we can do that, we might find young adults are more receptive to being set up with each other than we think. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Haley Wilson. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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