Tracing the history of Christian matchmaking, Paul Putz ponders the popularity of dating sites like Christian Mingle that help evangelicals find each other:
Evangelical marriages provide a conducive setting for children to accept and remain followers of their parents’ faith. It’s a pressing concern: The religious retention rate for evangelicals has been dropping since the 1990s, according to David Campbell and Robert Putnam in American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. They also suggest “the most important factor predicting religious retention” is whether or not a person’s family was religiously homogenous and observant. Meanwhile, the rate of interfaith marriage has more than doubled since the 1950s, accounting today for 45 percent of all marriages. That trend, according to [journalist Naomi Schaeffer] Riley, has had the unintended consequence of eroding the strength of some faith traditions, partly because “interfaith families are less likely to raise their children religiously.”
Given the reality of our increasingly online, increasingly digital world, Christian niche dating sites serve as an easily identifiable online companion to more traditional offline means used by evangelicals to find a spouse. They allow evangelicals to adopt the broader cultural turn towards individualism in the selection of romantic partners while still remaining true to conservative evangelical insistence on intrafaith marriage. “We want Christians to marry Christians,” [Sam] Moorcroft said. “We don’t want Christians to marry nominal Christians or nonbelievers at all.” And once their customers are married, Christian dating sites claim to provide help on another account: they supposedly facilitate more compatible matches, which, according to ChristianCafe.com’s Fred Moesker, will help “to decrease divorce rates.”
Back in March, however, Jonathan Merritt questioned just how well these sites reflect “Christian values”:
Christian dating sites are quick to invoke spiritual and even Biblical references in an effort to capture new users, but these marketing ploys are often taken so far out of their original context that they have been emptied of almost any meaning. ChristianMingle, for example, has been airing an ad during the History Channel mini-series, The Bible. Images of kissing and hand-holding flutter across the screen as a male voice sings, “Someday he’ll call her, and she will come running. And fall in his arms, and the tears will fall down, and she’ll pray: I want to fall in love with you.”
At first viewing, the spot is wildly effective. But those who are familiar with the song will note that the “arms” mentioned are God’s and not Prince Charming’s. Titled “Love Song,” the hit tune by Jars of Clay is about God calling us into loving relationship with Himself. But ChristianMingle has given the tune a different meaning in an effort to co-opt its familiar religious language and attract users. One has to wonder why the band would license their song for this purpose.
Worse still, the site’s header invokes Psalm 37:4 over a picture of a swooning couple: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” The implication is that if you are a good Christian boy or girl, God will give you your dream mate. This transactional view of God is hard to reconcile with a full reading of the Christian scripture, much less personal experience, but it certainly sounds enticing.
The Dish 