Key Takeaways
A new op-ed in WORLD Magazine argues that the Christian response to hookup culture – telling young people to “kiss dating goodbye” had an unintended consequence: many stopped dating altogether.
When every coffee invite carries the weight of a marriage proposal, the result is paralysis, not purity. Young adults opt out of dating for years – sometimes permanently.
The fertility crisis, the marriage crisis, and the faith crisis all share the same upstream cause: a generation that was never equipped with a healthy, structured pathway to marriage.
The solution won’t come from Washington or from dating apps. It will come from churches that rebuild a virtuous, low-stakes on-ramp to dating and marriage.
This is a direct ministry opportunity for local churches and Communio’s relational ministry model is built precisely for this moment.
The Research: A Dating Culture That Broke in the Name of Purity
In a pointed op-ed published this week in WORLD Magazine, Katy Faust – founder of Them Before Us and a widely read voice on marriage and family – makes a provocative case: the Church didn’t just fail to protect young adults from a broken dating culture. In some ways, it helped create the problem.
Her argument starts with the 1990s purity movement. Responding to the rise of hookup culture, churches and parents told a generation of young Christians to slow down, guard their hearts, and treat every relationship as a potential path to the altar. The intention was right. But the unintended consequence has played out across the past three decades in ways the Church is only now beginning to reckon with.
Young adults stopped dating. Not because they were uninterested in marriage – but because the framework they inherited made dating feel impossibly high-stakes.
The Core Finding: High Stakes Created Paralysis, Not Purity
Here’s what happened when churches framed dating solely as a prelude to marriage.
Every interaction became loaded. Before a young man could send a message or ask someone to coffee, he first had to answer the question: Could I marry her? A casual invitation carried the weight of a near-proposal. The relational low-stakes environment where previous generations learned to communicate, navigate conflict, and build toward commitment – that environment disappeared.
The result, Faust argues, was paralysis. Instead of gaining relational experience through intentional but lower-stakes dating, many young Christian adults simply opted out. Some for years. Some permanently.
We told them to wait until they were ready for marriage. Many are still waiting.
This matters beyond the personal. Marriage rates have declined sharply. Fertility rates have hit historic lows. And as Communio’s own research makes clear, the downstream effect on the church is measurable – because faith is primarily transmitted through families. Fewer marriages means fewer children raised in faith. Fewer children raised in faith means fewer adults in the pew a generation from now.
The dating crisis isn’t a romantic problem. It’s a ministry crisis.
The Counterintuitive Angle: The Church’s Well-Meaning Advice Made Things Worse
This is the angle most commentators miss – and it’s the most important one.
For years, the cultural critique has focused on the world: dating apps, hookup culture, delayed adulthood, a generation that won’t commit. All real. All worth addressing. But Faust redirects the lens inward.
Christians contributed to the problem too.
By framing every dating relationship as a high-stakes march toward marriage, the Church accidentally created a generation of relationally underdeveloped young adults – people who never built the skills, confidence, or experience that intentional dating is designed to produce. And when dating apps arrived with their swipe-based, commodified, rejection-heavy model, there was no counter-formation in place to resist it.
The answer isn’t to lower the theology of marriage. It’s to rebuild the pathway to marriage – structured, community-supported, low enough in stakes that young adults will actually walk it. Faust calls for churches to stop outsourcing this to apps and algorithms, and start doing what communities of faith have always done: create the conditions where young people can meet, be known, and move toward commitment with guidance and support.
This isn’t a return to arranged marriages. It’s a return to intentional community – and the church is the most natural place for it to happen.
What This Means for Your Church
At Communio, we’ve seen this dynamic play out in congregations across the country. Singles ministry is often the most underfunded, most overlooked corner of church life – even though the relational health of single adults directly shapes the future of every marriage, every family, and every faith community.
Communio’s research, conducted in partnership with Barna, found that 93% of churches offer no ministry for singles. Not a program gap. A near-total absence. Meanwhile, the young adults in those churches are navigating a dating culture that is hostile to commitment, with no structured community to help them do it differently.
Faust is right that the solution won’t come from Washington. But she’s also pointing directly at the local church as the place where it can begin. Think about the single adults in your congregation right now – young professionals, college graduates, people in their 30s who want marriage and don’t know how to get there in a culture that has made it harder than it’s ever been. They don’t need another sermon about waiting well. They need a church that actively creates the relational context where the next step becomes possible.
That’s the work. And the churches that lean into it – that take seriously their role in forming not just married couples, but the singles who are on their way there – are the churches that will build the kind of intergenerational, faith-filled congregations that endure.
The pathway to a thriving marriage culture starts before the wedding. It starts with how a church helps its single members date.
Take the Next Step
Communio partners with churches to build relationship ministry for every stage – from singles and young adults to newly married couples and families under strain. It’s all connected, and it all matters.
► Read Katy Faust’s full op-ed in WORLD Magazine → wng.org
► Explore Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships → communio.org/study
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