Man’s Search for Marriage
A recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) study indicates that, for the first time on record, more young men than women are attending church. The difference, while unprecedented, is small: 34 percent of Gen Z men are religiously unaffiliated, as opposed to 40 percent of Gen Z women. But commentators are united in befuddlement about why this reversal has taken place. They worry that this could point to—and exacerbate—a growing masculinization of churches, rather than a healthy increase in religious parity between men and women. In the New York Times, Ruth Graham reflected on the impact of education and income disparities on men; her colleague Ross Douthat speculated about the effect of “masculine influencers” or “structural socioeconomic forces like deindustrialization and stagnating male wages”; and others, like Ed Kilgore, think power-hungry young men are seeking “divine sanction.”
This turn toward church may be unexpected, but it is actually rooted in the most natural drive of all: a desire for marriage and family. Young men are looking for truth and responsibility—and, ultimately, meaning. For most men, throughout history, a primary source of meaning has been marriage and children. And as a result, Gen Z is also returning to marriage: Newsweek reported that 93 percent of Gen Z youth are interested in marriage, with only 7 percent uninterested (compared to 21 percent of uninterested Millennials). In another study, almost twice as many Millennials as Zoomers report cohabiting before marriage. Jordan Peterson constantly reminds his audiences of this truth—if you want to find purpose, get married. Marriage provides men with the opportunity to give themselves in love and self-sacrifice to their wives and children. Marriage in its traditional sense—a man and woman committing to each other in mutual love to form a family—can have great appeal to a man in search of a sense of purpose, the lack of which currently plagues our society. And if you’re a man in search of a woman who wants to get married and have a family, your best bet for finding her is in church.
At Catholic and Protestant churches, marriage and children are extolled as a basic human good, a fundamental source of meaning and purpose in our lives. At the church I attend with my wife and children, the pews are packed with young families. Young men and women are eagerly seeking someone to marry, and children are celebrated as a gift from God. And this is true in most religious communities. There is an understanding that God established marriage for our good, to be the image of divine Trinitarian love on earth and to procreate more immortal souls. This is a wonderful and terrifying responsibility, and as a result, it is a fulfilling one. When men go to church, they are not seeking a male-only or male-friendly refuge; they are seeking marriage. They understand that women tend to be more religious than men. As the AEI survey notes, Gen Z is an outlier. In general, women attend church more often and take faith more seriously than men do, and the women in church communities are more likely than their secular peers to value marriage and family.
Many commentators seem to fear men’s return to church. They are concerned that it is partly driven by a desire for male domination and misogyny, a backlash of sorts against female liberation. They speculate that churches will become male-dominated as women flee “traditional values,” that bogeyman of the Left (and even of some on the Right). Yet churches will never become effectively male-only, for the simple fact that men would then leave. Even the male-only groups at church—men’s fellowship, children’s groups separated for boys and girls—are predominantly geared toward instilling the virtues that make good, responsible, and loving husbands and fathers.
Christianity is better suited than most other worldviews to champion the values we want to see in both men and women. This past summer, I attended a male-only silent Catholic retreat, the type of retreat that would raise the blood pressure of pessimists about Gen Z’s newfound religiosity. I sat through many reflections on marriage, about being a father and husband. In silence, we listened to examinations of conscience centered on a simple theme—self-sacrifice. The core virtue in Christianity is love (1 Cor. 13:13), that is, willing the good of the other. In marriage, men and women partake in a divine love of complete self-gift to the other person. Your spouse’s good must be your good, and even more important than your own. And in this love, there can be no domination. In Mulieris Dignitatem (“On the Dignity of Women”), St. John Paul II explains that God’s original design was one of partnership and mutual submission. A husband is called to love his wife completely, self-sacrificially, even to the point of death. Men must honor their wives, treat them with dignity and respect, and put them first in all things. And from the gaze of love between the spouses, ideally, come children.
Marriage is aimed at procreation, and from this, a man receives another set of responsibilities and challenges. But they are purposeful. Fatherhood should humble men—in part because of the countless menial tasks we must perform with patience and love, but also because our children will naturally love and admire us so much more than we deserve. Their first experience of God’s love is through the love of their parents. We are irreplaceable in guiding and teaching them virtue, and our children’s love should also motivate us to become more virtuous.
The appeal of marriage and fatherhood to men cannot be overstated. Almost every young boy wants to be a knight and slay dragons. This basic impulse is given an outlet in Christianity. Men are called to leadership, but of a particular sort. Knights were initially not noble or heroic; they were essentially brigands. Only after the monastery of Cluny was founded did France develop the chivalric code that called knights to embody virtue and self-sacrifice. So, too, today Christianity can channel our natural desire to slay dragons by directing us to the right dragons. In Christianity, young boys and men are called to heroism by speaking truth, serving others, and embodying a spirit of self-sacrifice.
We should embrace, not fear, the trend of Gen Z men attending church. The toxic masculinity that commentators like Douthat and Graham uniformly fear is a feature not primarily of Christianity but of the new liberal orthodoxy. The new leftist orthodoxy has stripped men of purpose and, in turn, made virtue much harder to come by. Men are wary of being leaders and taking responsibility, lest they participate in the patriarchy. They shy away from traditionally masculine roles such as being protectors of their families, lest they be seen as “toxic.” The new orthodoxy instead offers sex severed from the goods of marriage and procreation, reduced from sacrament to transaction. The collapse of traditional institutional values has led to a collapse in meaning, replaced by libertine freedom devoid of purpose.
Of course, Gen Z men are not the only ones suffering the effects of the new orthodoxy. Millennials and others have experienced the opioid epidemic, declining marriage rates, increased suicide rates, soaring anxiety, and a host of other ills that are, at the least, correlated with the breakdown of traditional norms and communities. In its search for a way around the crisis of meaning that plagues its elders, Gen Z is rediscovering the basic human goods of marriage and family.
Churches need to do what they can to continue this trend, and they need to do it by passing along the rich truths that have been transmitted through the Christian tradition for 2,000 years: responsibility and sacrifice give life meaning, and virtue conquers vice. Churches must embrace the role of teaching the truth about virtue, which also means facing our vices head-on. Men also need to hear from their spiritual leaders that they still have an important role to play—that men’s particular type of heroism is still needed.
Churches must embrace and encourage men’s quest for truth. For as many in Gen Z and beyond start to question the new orthodoxy, they are realizing that the most receptive place for these questions—or really, any questions—is not their university classrooms or their local bars, but church. Unlike the new orthodoxy, the church has a place for doubters, and it must remain a refuge for them.
Churches must also continue to emphasize millennia-long teachings on the dignity of women. Women have always had a unique and important role in the life of the church. They stood by Jesus at the Cross when most of his disciples fled; they were the first witnesses to the Resurrection and were early church leaders. And the Blessed Virgin Mary remains the first disciple and believer of Christ, the model for us in the life of Christian faith. The Church offers the deepest and most profound perspective on women, and it needs to stand by that view. For the quest to keep men in church also requires keeping women, and it will be the truth that keeps both of them there.
The Church has become a refuge for me: a place to question and hope, a place to try to better myself with humble submission to God, and a place to learn to become a more loving father and husband. But when I first started attending our church, I was baffled. Perhaps the most baffling part of it was seeing the young altar boys, some around the age of my oldest son, quietly, solemnly, and seriously assisting with the Mass. My son, on the other hand, was sprawled out on the floor. But over time, he watched them. He saw the older altar boys teaching the younger ones the correct gestures of reverence and respect, calmly reminding them to try to sit still. In this mentorship, in this service, I caught a glimpse of the church’s conception of manhood: strength—controlled and aimed at the service of others. In the Mass, the boys were given, and found, meaning in service. That is what the church offers; as crazy as it may seem from the outside, it is that call to serve the higher good that makes the Church, and all churches, attractive. And for most of us, the lifelong boot camp in service to another is marriage.
So this is what churches should offer: the truth. That is, the truth that marriage is a basic human good, that fathers are essential to children, that husbands have a role to lead and love with humility and self-sacrifice, and that we are all called to serve God.
Image by wideonet and licensed via Adobe Stock.