Devon Eriksen
Christian institutions have always been responsible for sex. I largely agree with Giff that something needs to be done, but Christendom, as a body of people, need to understand this first so they can do it. Sex is not some abandoned portfolio that the church must pick up merely because somebody else dropped it in the gutter. Sex has been the responsibility of the church all along. Because power and responsibility go together. The church, whether it wielded political authority or not, has never presented itself as a mere psychological counselor or life coach, dispensing healthy advice to a voluntary audience. The church has always, instead, claimed to speak the with the authority of the one true god, king of the universe, transmitting his commands to his kingdom. When you claim to speak in the name of god, you surrender all right to make excuses. That's the deal. You cannot say "Christians failed, not Christianity," because Christianity is what Christians do, and if they failed, then so did it. You cannot say "People did not follow us," because if they didn't, that's your fault for not inspiring their trust. You cannot say "we were subverted," because it's your fault you allowed that to happen. If you claim to the humanity sole conduit to infallible moral authority, then you are not merely responsible for a good-faith effort, you are responsible for results. The church has always built fences around the human libido, so it has always been the church's responsibility to make sure there are green pastures inside those fences. This has nothing to do with "teaching young men how to talk to girls". Because if the church, or anyone else, is having to channel a bunch of "pickup artists" to teach "game", then this is an indication that the church is following women's sexual tastes rather than defining, for women, which men are high-status and desirable. Which means the church has already failed. The church isn't supposed to teach you "game". It's supposed to create a society where women's notion of an attractive man is the same as society's notion of a useful citizen. And it is also the church's responsibility is make sure that men have the resources, support, mentors, and opportunities to actually be that useful man. I hear a lot of Christians saying that Christianity created Western civilization, and expecting us all to applaud. What I don't see is a lot of taking responsibility for reversing the decline. Everybody wanna be a pillar of civilization until it's time to do pillar of civilization shit. I saw the church making a lot of noise about abortion, but I didn't see it helping young women not to be afraid of motherhood by making sure they were provided for. I saw the church lecturing a lot of young men about pornography and promiscuity, but I didn't see it taking on Wall Street to make sure the price of labor was high enough so young men could afford to get married instead. In short, throughout my entire life, I have seen the church focus all of its disapprobation on young people who had no power to harm it, and none upon those who were harming those young people. That is how and why Christianity is failing, and not one priest in a hundred has the courage and humility to admit it. They'd rather whine about how people stopped following, about how modernity lured them away, instead of facing up to the cold, hard reality that the church failed of its own accord, and modern secular leftism did nothing but step into the power vacuum that religion left behind. The secular leftism that turned into gay race communism was always just as stupid as it is today. The younger generations would never have turned to it if the Christian faith, personified in its institutions, had not first abandoned them. And I'm not keen on a return to Christianity, myself. Not because I have any particular hatred for it, but because I'm not seeing how there's anything left to save. I've not seen one church, Prod, Catholic, Orthodox, or whatever, that has any answers to problems the West actually has. They just seem to think that if they roll the clock back far enough, they can stick the same fork in the same light socket and get different results. It wasn't feminism or communism or abortions or birth control pills or atheism that made marriage unavailable to young men. It was the economic and technological incentives that Wall Street acted on with utter impunity and not a peep of criticism. And of all the priests I've seen spilling oceans of ink onto the internet, not one of them has even displayed an understanding that this is the real problem, much less an understanding of why it happened, and you can forget about them having any ideas for solving it. So before I listen to any claptrap about a "retvrn" to "traditional Christian values", I want to hear something else first. 1. Young men cannot get married if they cannot earn a stable, reliable income that can support a family, without having to be exceptionally talented, well-connected, or lucky. 2. Young men cannot get married if their entire society is telling young women that men are their equals at best, and probably their inferiors. If you don't have a concrete, realistic, and actionable plan for how to fix these two trends, then as far as I'm concerned, the rest of your religion is just historical baggage.
Giff Lasta
Devon's post about the Church failing young men and women in the face of modernity is largely right. I'm a Christian and Devon isn't, so naturally I'll tell the story through a more sympathetic lens. During the fall of Rome, as the Empire's civic institutions weakened in the West, the Church found itself doing things it had never been designed to do. Bishops weren't ordained because somebody needed to administer food supplies, adjudicate property disputes, ransom captives, negotiate with barbarian rulers, and keep cities functioning. But somebody had to do those things. And increasingly, the Church was one of the only institutions left with the organization, resources, authority, and educated personnel to do them. So the Church stepped up. I think something similar may have to happen today around masculinity, femininity, courtship, and marriage. For most of Christian history, the Church didn't need a sophisticated program for teaching an awkward seventeen-year-old how to become attractive to women, how young men and women should actually pair off, or how a husband develops masculine frame. An enormous network of functioning institutions did much of that work: intact families, extended kin, neighborhood life, dances, schools, courtship customs, male associations, female friendship networks, and a culture with reasonably clear expectations about becoming a man or woman. The Church supplied the guardrails for a highway already built. Now the highway itself is disappearing, and we're standing among the ruins saying, "Well, technically, teaching a twenty-two-year-old man how to talk to a woman isn't the Church's job." Maybe not. Neither was negotiating with the Lombards. Take my wife's hometown in East Tennessee. Forty years ago, a couple could be only marginally connected to church and still be carried along by a culture heavily shaped by Christian assumptions about marriage, family, work, responsibility, and respectability. Today the economic bottom has fallen out of many communities. Meth is everywhere. Extended families and social support networks are fraying. The surrounding culture isn't quietly reinforcing the Church's vision of human flourishing anymore. In many places it's actively dissolving the habits and institutions that made that vision practicable. Back then, you could afford to be outside the Church because you were still living off a lot of its cultural capital. I'm not sure you can anymore. And that gives the Church a much bigger job than telling singles not to fornicate and married people not to divorce. The Church is increasingly being challenged to preserve the memory of—and in some cases rediscover—how to be human in a machine age. Devon is also right that the problem is bigger than teaching men male/female dynamics. Courtship rests on an entire social ecology: economics, status, community, useful work, family formation, and the ability of young men to become men whom women actually want and communities actually need. The Church cannot fix all of that tomorrow. But step one is just making men aware of the nature of the game. The church hasn't done that. It needs to now.