Male singleness and our bad ideas

America now has 30 million men under 40 who are unmarried, 47% higher than in 2000. This is bad. It’s an indication that young guys aren’t thriving. They are suffering, and the entire society is weakened.

By saying this, I have already picked a fight. The worthiness of marriage is contested in the West, and the plummeting rates of matrimony prove it. Yet the Scriptures reveal that it is not good for man to be alone. The first poem is Adam’s exclamation of delight at the sight of his beloved Eve: “Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.” While a life of committed Christian celibacy has its merits, it is not for most people. There are plenty of people who should be married who aren’t. Marriage is a noble calling, and a good marriage is one of life’s most profound blessings, revealing the mystery of Christ’s relationship with His Church.

But several generations of cultural iconoclasts and cosmic rebels have committed such beauty to the flames of the sexual revolution. Yes, there are many reasons that young men aren’t getting married, such as economic precarity. But a great deal of the problem is cultural. Our society devalues marriage, proffers addictive counterfeits to the satisfactions of matrimony, and has removed or weakened pathways of male formation. For the latter, we need only look at the corruption, diminution, or demolition of male-only and male-dominated spaces: various trades, the Boys Scouts (now just Scouts BSA), military service (particularly in the bearing of arms), and religion (women’s ordination, anyone?). Our schools do not serve boys well, and don’t even get me started on the fatherhood crisis—a nasty concoction brought to us by fornication, divorce, anemic discipleship (in which fathers in the home are not good at being men), and now surrogacy.

The tragedy of this is how much of this decline and deprivation was chosen. Our society—in following fashions, in countless individual choices, and in far-reaching policies—pried away the cultural scripts oriented around getting young people married. This was marketed as liberation. They argued for throwing off purity before and fidelity within marriage between one man and one woman ’til death do them part and finding the freedom of self-realization. But, as pious voices warned and as time has shown, what was offered in exchange for the supposed shackles of traditional matrimony was captivity and wasted potential.

A case in point is hook-up culture and dating apps. While advertised as fixes to male loneliness and urges, what these really do is favor good-looking, high-earning men in the hedonistic short term, and it leaves men and women alike empty, alienated, and simmering in contempt for each other.

For young men—whether “high value” in worldly terms or not—there is now a minefield of addictions that appeal to their basest desires, all while beckoning them away from productive, happy lives marked by fruitfulness, both bodily and spiritual. Gambling, video games, pornography, weed, medications, online rage, and a heap of other distractions provide dopamine hits and numb the pain such that men will not take the initiative to fight their inner demons and life problems.

Truly, what the state and market have done to the American male should enrage us. But I fear it does not. That’s because we do not see the goodness of being a man—the unique beauty and worth of being a son of Adam. Men are made for something beyond themselves. Unlike women, they cannot bear another person within themselves. Men simply cannot nourish another human being of their own substance. The labor for men is much more external in nature, and involves them spilling their blood, sweat, and tears. In this fallen world, men toil for hopes not guaranteed (and a Hope that is), casting seed on the ground and contesting against the thorns and thistles. What shall grow and be made? Will it be an Ark? A house? Or a Tower of Babel? Such is the drama of history.

If we truly loved this male reality, then we would be incited to fight. But there are not many fighters as yet. This insensibility and lack of concern for right order is ultimately a religious crisis. This is my desire: that there would be a true religious awakening that has social, economic, and political teeth.

If I may channel Allen Carlson, what we need is a new generation of Anthony Comstocks. We need men in particular to collaborate to provide avenues of healthy male formation (like the original YMCA) and crack down on pornography, gambling, drugs, abortion, and (yes, I’ll go there) artificial contraception. Exploitation and unfruitfulness are a package deal. Men must realize that they are made for something more, something higher, and we must form laws, manners, and moral expectations around such higher things.

Otherwise, we are going to endure a social and spiritual collapse.